Tag Archives: CO2

Imagine a Nuclear-Free California (You Don’t Have To, It’s Already Here)

Posted on by

We welcome our salp overlords. (A chain of salp in the Red Sea; photo: Lars Plougman via Wikipedia)

California has two nuclear power plants. San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego, has been offline for months as everyone tries to find an excuse for the alarmingly rapid wear on new reactor tubing. (Being shut down, however, did not prevent a fire from breaking out this week when a pipe ruptured and released radioactive steam.)

But as of Thursday, Diablo Canyon, the nuclear plant to the north, is also offline–thanks to. . . uh, salp?

Yes, salp–those loveable, gelatinous, jellyfish-like, plankton-eating sea creatures that multiply like, well, salp–have swarmed Diablo Canyon’s water intake system. D-Can draws in tens of thousands of gallons of seawater every day to cool its reactors, and with all that salp clogging the intake pipes, the plant could no longer operate safely.

That may sound like a freak event, but it isn’t. San Onofre had to shut down in 2005 to clear out 11,000 pounds of anchovies that had the bad luck of swimming too close to that plant’s intake filters. . . and in 2004, it shut down, too, but that time it was due to 14,000 pounds of sardines.

And just last year, actual jellyfish (sorry, salps) brought down Florida Power & Light’s St. Lucie nuclear power station. Jellyfish have also previously crippled nuclear facilities in the UK, Israel and Japan.

But back to California, where without nuclear power, the state is heading for a disaster of biblical proportions–we’re talking human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

Actually, no. What will happen is that Pacific Gas & Electric, the owner of Diablo Canyon, and Southern California Edison, San Onofre’s operator, will have to buy electricity (or continue to buy electricity) in order to deliver what they are obligated to deliver. That’s no fun for the big utilities, and maybe it looks biblical to the bean counters, but it is not an energy apocalypse.

Of course, instead of throwing millions after billions to buy surplus electricity elsewhere while also paying to staff, examine and repair its dormant, ancient nuclear facilities, power companies could try to invest more in 21st Century renewable alternatives.

And maybe that would happen if the market were actually, you know, a market. But with tax breaks, loan guarantees, and liability caps, the industry has little motivation to make sound financial or environmental decisions.

But there’s no time like the present to start. And right now, in California, that present is nuclear-free.

A little bit pregnant?

On Thursday, NPR’s Richard Harris delivered a report that regurgitated the nuclear industry’s latest message morph–once “clean, safe, and too cheap to meter,” the 21st Century PR spin has nuclear as the climate-friendly energy option.

The radio piece is ostensibly about how the world’s industrialized nations are failing to meet their climate goals–and this is true (and this is a problem). But Harris does the world and the climate cause no favors when he lazily posits: “Nuclear power produces very little carbon dioxide. . . .”

What does Harris mean by “nuclear power produces very little carbon dioxide?” Is that supposed to be a hedge? If you are isolating the atomic pile generating heat to boil water inside a closed system, then you might as well say “no CO2,” but if you are honest and take into account the whole lifecycle of nuclear fuel–from mining and refining through transportation and storage–then nuclear power produces a prodigious amount of greenhouse gases. Which is it Richard?

Probably just an oversight

The Washington Post published self-serving letter to the editor supporting a recent pro-nuclear editorial, but neglected to include that the letter was written by the current vice president and president elect and sitting member of the board of directors of the unabashedly pro-nuclear American Nuclear Society.

If only Nixon had apologized!

Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato apologized Wednesday for prefectural officials who deleted records on the spread of radioactive fallout immediately following the start of the Daiichi nuclear crisis in March of 2011. The data from the country’s System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) could have better informed citizens on when and where to evacuate during the first days after the Tohoku quake and tsunami destroyed safety systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and could have also given those trying to piece together what happened inside the reactors important forensic evidence.

At a news conference, Sato said, “A big problem lies in the fact that we failed to fully share the information soon after the nuclear disaster broke out.”

Well, yeah, that–and that you erased it.

Not to worry though, the government “reprimanded” its supervising officials and also “issued strong warnings” to the two government employees that actually did the deleting. So, citizens of Northern Japan, we’re good?

“Let’s Eat Cesium Beef”

That is (as translated by EXSKF) the name of an event in Iwate, Japan designed to encourage people to eat local beef known to be contaminated with radioactive cesium from Fukushima’s fallout.

No, this did not appear in a Japanese version of The Onion (Tamanegi?), this a real event as reported by Kyodo News in a series called “New Happiness in Japan.” Apparently, happiness is knowing you’re only poisoning your children a little bit. . . because there were kids at this thing.

The event was, uh, cooked up by the head of a meat-packing company to show a group of his regular customers–including young couples with kids–that beef containing radioactive cesium, but at levels lower than the provisional safety limits, still tasted OK.

According to the source of the translation, this story has people all over Japan shaking their heads wondering what this meat packer could have been thinking, but there have been several stories over the past year documenting even more official Japanese government efforts to get citizens to consume agricultural products from Fukushima and surrounding regions.

Imagine a nuclear-free Japan

Soon, you won’t have to imagine that, either. The last of Japan’s 50 commercial reactors still online will soon shut down.

Wait? Fifty? Wasn’t it 54? Well, earlier this month, Japan removed the four damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi from their official list of the country’s commercial reactors.

Probably wise.

Oh, and, notice, also no mass hysteria. The radiation that has contaminated air, water, and land might have many Japanese very worried, but the country has managed to handle the reduced electrical generating capacity remarkably well. They did this thing called “conservation.” Been doing it for over a year now. Think of all the dogs and cats that have been spared. . . not to mention the salp.

Book Salon – Martin Cohen and Andrew McKillop, The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World’s Most Dangerous Fuel

Posted on by

[Note: On Sunday afternoon, I hosted FDL Book Salon, featuring a live Q&A with Martin Cohen and Andrew McKillop, authors of The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World’s Most Dangerous Fuel. This is a repost of that discussion.]

Little more than 13 months after the world’s third major civilian nuclear accident in three decades, it might be surprising to find that one of the words commonly used in context with nuclear power these days is “renaissance.” Though more the product of public relations than real observation, the concept of a “nuclear renaissance” took hold over the last decade purportedly as a response to the rising price of fossil fuels and a growing concern over climate change–and it became so much a part of the lingua franca that even after an earthquake and tsunami triggered the massive crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (a crisis that continues to this day), media reports still try to assess how much of a renaissance we will see post-Fukushima, rather than laugh at the idea that a renaissance ever existed.

The persistence of this current narrative is, of course, not an accident. For while it is debatable how good nuclear power is at meeting the world’s energy needs–the ability of the nuclear industry to gobble public money, peddle influence and reinvent its image, all while still clinging to generations-old technology, is practically the stuff of legend.

Or should we say “the stuff of myth?” In The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World’s Most Dangerous Fuel, environmentalist and social philosopher Martin Cohen, and energy economist Andrew McKillop explain that myths are the one thing the nuclear industrial complex is consistently good at producing. From the early echoes of “Atoms for Peace,” through the spin-tastic triple lie of “clean, safe, and too cheap to meter,” right up to the current green-washed renaissance, The Doomsday Machine describes over 60 years of industry morphing and mythmaking.

Even before the world witnessed the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the splitting of the atom had a certain aura about it (if not a glow), and the idea of harnessing the raw power that had leveled two Japanese cities for something “good” was a seductive one. There was something godlike about manipulating nature’s most basic building blocks, and something oh-so-modern and evolved about doing it with the power of science. Cohen and McKillop discuss how, from its earliest days, the nuclear industry used the contrast of clean-cut men in white lab coats manipulating dials versus filthy miners feeding dirty coal into furnaces belching smoke to brand nuclear power as “the energy of the future.”

This is the first of eight myths that The Doomsday Machine attempts to debunk by citing history, economics, psychology, statistics and, yes, science, too. In addition to the failure of nuclear power to ever realize its future (I am reminded here of the old quote about Brazil–a country, by the way, with nuclear hassles of its own–“Brazil is the country of the future–and always will be”), today’s book takes on the myths of nuclear being clean and green, reliable and safe, cheap and desirable as an investment, and immune to the tug of geopolitics. Some of those ideas are more absurd than others, but, being the myths that they are, as Cohen and McKillop detail, none of them are true.

Interesting, too, beyond the long and sordid list of nuclear accidents and mishaps–and that list is indeed very long–are some of the other forces that have, over the years, meshed conveniently with the nuclear industry’s quest for relevance and cash.

Take, for example, that contrast with coal. It is true that coal is ancient and dirty, but coal is also predominantly turned into its usable form by union workers. Uranium, on the other hand, is mined in many places by a much-less-organized workforce, and nuclear power plants, The Doomsday Machine says, are largely maintained by contract workers. Was it just a coincidence that world leaders hostile to organized labor–Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, for example–were also vocal advocates for the expansion of nuclear power? Cohen and McKillop think not.

Another example, and one perhaps even more controversial, is the alliance of nuclear power proponents with a certain segment of the environmental movement. In what the authors term an alliance of “Baptists and Bootleggers,” strange bedfellows have found common cause to attack fossil fuels, demand that their use be curtailed to lessen carbon emissions, and then declare that nuclear energy is the only alternative poised to fill the gap.

Cohen and McKillop rightly explain that nuclear is far from a carbon-neutral energy source. As my own writing has explored many times, from mining to refining, from transport to waste storage, from energy intensive plant construction to the fact that you need a steady energy supply to run a nuclear plant safely, nuclear energy has a carbon footprint of awesome proportions. But The Doomsday Machine goes a little further, asserting that “climate change was originally, and remains, a rich country’s hobby,” and that the focus on CO2 is more political and less progressive than the IPCC and its defenders would have you believe.

From my perspective, it is a point that gives one pause. There certainly are some advocates of atomic energy–“elite greens” as the authors call them–that have used climate change to cloak their naked infatuation with nuclear power (and Cohen and McKillop name names), but does that mean that climate science itself is suspect? It is a question more complicated than one might think–and certainly one more nuanced than anyone will hear in the election year coverage of President Obama’s “all of the above” energy “strategy.”

But it is a question–one of many I hope Martin Cohen and Andrew McKillop will endeavor to answer as they join us here today.

[Click here to read my two-hour chat with Cohen and McKillop.]