nuclear power

- by Dr. Ian Fairlie, Ecologist

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"435","attributes":{"alt":"safe nuclear power?","class":"media-image","height":"292","style":"width: 333px; height: 203px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Cartoon: cravensworld.wordpress.com","width":"480"}}]]On 23rd August, The Ecologist published very clear evidence of increased cancers among children living near nuclear power stations around the world, including the UK.

The story sparked much interest on social media sites, and perhaps more importantly, the article's scientific basis (published in the academic peer-reviewed scientific journal the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity) was downloaded over 500 times by scientists.

Given this level of interest and the fact that the UK government is still pressing ahead with its bizarre plans for more nuclear stations, we return to this matter - and examine in more detail an important aspect which has hitherto received little attention: massive spikes in radioactive emissions from nuclear reactors.

- by Ann Darling, The Safe and Green Campaign

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"230","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 288px; height: 229px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]The Vermont Yankee nuclear power station in southeastern Vermont will close in December of this year after operating for over 40 years. The owner, Entergy Nuclear, is based in New Orleans and is the second largest nuclear power company in the U.S.

As a member of the Safe and Green Campaign, which is made up of activists who live close to the nuke and whose homeland is the most in harm’s way, I have witnessed some pretty dirty tactics to keep this particular form of dirty energy going. The litany of problems and deceit seemed never to end – a transformer fire, rotted cooling towers flooding the site with water, tritium leaks, lies under oath, multiple lawsuits, regulatory complicity and deafness, the silencing of the Vermont legislature, state inaction on the heating of the Connecticut River, bargaining in back rooms with the Governor to make a deal with an acknowledged devil (Entergy), the challenge to democracy embodied in federal law that says only “experts” can understand or address nuclear safety issues. And that’s not all, by far.

But now Vermont Yankee is closing. Music to my ears? Well, for a few moments we celebrated. We celebrated our role in supporting the State of Vermont to enact legislation to take some control back for the state, and in the ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit between Entergy and Vermont. We celebrated the organizing of many meaningful and fun actions that mobilized thousands. We celebrated not having to go to any more Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearings that just left us angry and incredulous (I have to admit I enjoyed scolding the young NRC staffer about not cleaning up after himself and leaving all the radioactive waste in an incredibly vulnerable pool of water.)

Yankee said it closed because it was no longer profitable to operate due to the cheap cost of natural gas. OK, I can accept that. And I also know that the millions of dollars Entergy had to spend on lawsuits and security, and the bad press they got, also played an important role that we are very proud of.

But now back to reality. Yankee has been a large employer in our rural area, and it has paid very high salaries and supported lots of local non-profits. Its closing will have a major impact on a local economy that is already weak. Entergy has promised $10 million over five years for economic development, and there are a lot of competing ideas for that money. The Safe and Green Campaign, among others, will be here to watchdog the decommissioning process, and two of our members have been nominated to a state panel that will be closely involved in overseeing that.

People are scared. Fear can make it hard to think through things well. They are scared about what’s going to happen with property values and small businesses already hanging on by a very thin thread. They have a fundamental disquiet with developing many small power generating facilities that use solar and wind. They believe they need big facilities to generate enough power. And they don’t seem to really take conservation and efficiency seriously.

Now there’s a proposal to use the VY site for biomass with a tie in to a natural gas pipeline that’s trying to go through just south in Massachusetts. Lots of people are jumping at this like it’s actually the answer to everything. (Remember what I said about what being scared does to us?) After all, there are heavy duty transmission lines there, a railroad running right by the front gates, a well-established lumber industry, a river, an interstate. For four decades we’ve been living with the insanity of boiling water with radioactivity to generate electricity. We don’t think replacing that by burning biomass and emitting particulates and greenhouse gases, pressuring our beautiful forests, and burning more fracked gas makes any more sense than nuclear. As my friend Leslie said, “Bye-bye locally grown, truly green energy development. Hello, huge facility owned by yet another conglomerate of corporate investors.”

The Safe and Green Campaign has always had to emphasize the “safe” part of our work because we have been living under the pall of catastrophe for so long. But our banner doesn’t have a “No Nukes” symbol on it. It has an iconic picture of the sun’s glorious rays, and we need to shift our balance more and more to the “green” part of our work. Now we need to educate ourselves even more about all the ways to produce sustainable energy, and tap into our allies who helped create Vermont’s progressive plan for developing renewable energy. We need to be able to make sense to the people who are scared, with good reason, about our communities’ survival. We have been reaching out to the local 350.org group and others, and that’s good. We need to keep reaching out and take it as far up and across the power “food chain” as we can. This isn’t a “one site at a time” issue. It’s a national and international travesty that will send us to climate catastrophe if we don’t all work together.

- Associated Press, June 21, 2011, CBS

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"209","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 277px; height: 185px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;"}}]]Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.

Tritium, which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at least 48 of 65 sites, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission records reviewed as part of the AP's yearlong examination of safety issues at aging nuclear power plants. Leaks from at least 37 of those facilities contained concentrations exceeding the federal drinking water standard -- sometimes at hundreds of times the limit.

- by Mike Faher, June 3, 2014, Brattleboro Reformer

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"204","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 244px; height: 162px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;"}}]]Selectboard members are touting the potential benefits of new biomass power plant -- with the possibility of a natural-gas component -- that could be built at the Vermont Yankee site after the nuclear facility shuts.

Officials expect to organize a public forum to discuss the deetails of a plant with development costs estimated at $350 million for biomass and upwards of $1 billion for a hybrid facility.

Those involved with the proposal, including a Winhall man who is president of American Generation Partners LLC, acknowledge that the proposal is in its infancy and would have to overcome significant financing and regulatory hurdles -- not to mention acquisition of property from Yankee owner Entergy Corp.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"185","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"120","style":"width: 250px; height: 120px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","width":"250"}}]]Welcome to Energy Justice Now, Energy Justice Network's first monthly newsletter!

Energy Justice Now will provide critical reporting on the entire spectrum of the dirty energy resistance, highlighting the voices of community organizers battling fossil fuels, nuclear power, and biomass and waste incineration from sea to shining sea. We are accepting submissions at niaby [at] energyjustice [dot] net.

Some of you are on our email discussion lists while others may not have heard from us in years. We're happy to now be at a point where we can engage and support more people, and let you all know what we're doing.

Energy Justice Network exists to build, support and network grassroots community organizations fighting dirty and unnecessary energy and waste industry facilities. We've helped communities win victories against coal and gas-fired power plants, incinerators of every sort (trash, 'biomass,' tires, poultry waste, sewage sludge, medical waste...), landfills, fracking, pipelines, refineries, ethanol biorefineries, nuclear facilities and more.

Our approach includes connecting people fighting similar industries so that they're helping one another as a network, rather than our trying to only provide top-down support. Through network-building, we help bring people from a Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) mindset to a Not in Anyone's Backyard (NIABY) approach toward dirty technologies for which clean alternatives exist.

In 2006, we pulled together the nation's first and only grassroots "No New Coal Plants" network, contributing to the defeat of 85% of 200+ coal power plant proposals. We also brought together a national grassroots movement against "biomass" incinerators (burning trees, wood waste, poultry waste and more), and saw 45 proposals for biomass and other waste incinerators defeated within our network just since 2010. We hope to do the same soon for those fighting the hundreds of gas-fired power plants now proposed. Without the big money other groups have to bring people together for national conferences, we've connected people via email discussion lists and conference calls.

Our work focuses on providing tools grassroots community activists need to win. This includes providing strategy and organizing advice, research support, information of many sorts (on problems with technologies and fuels, corporate track records, relevant public policies...), speaking/training, local environmental ordinances, mapping tools, connecting student and community activists, and much more. For more info, see our website for our history, accomplishments and to learn about the services we provide.

- by Josh Schlossberg, Energy Justice Now

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"180","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"234","style":"width: 333px; height: 173px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","width":"450"}}]]Grassroots advocates have done a bang up job alerting the American public to the disturbing health and environmental impacts of the extraction, transportation, and generation of dirty energy (fossil fuels, nuclear power, and biomass/trash incineration). Greenhouse gases, air pollution, and water contamination from energy sources requiring smokestacks or cooling towers have become common knowledge to all but the willfully ignorant.

However, to achieve a critical mass of action that will influence public policy and shift private investment away from energy sources that cause more harm than good, dirty energy opponents must find common threads to weave the fabric of the movement together.

One such thread involves the harmful impacts dirty energy poses to the forests, prairies, and deserts on public lands that belong to every U.S. citizen.

Musical Chairs

All too often activists fighting one sector of the dirty energy industry will ignore — and occasionally advocate for — yet another type of dirty energy, invalidating many of the very concerns they profess, confusing the public, and harming the overall movement.

For instance, when anti-coal campaigners give a pass to biomass energy, the coal industry gets away with toasting trees in their coal-fired power plants. By endorsing (or allowing) biomass incineration, anti-coal activists contradict their own talking points about air pollution from coal, since trees or other forms of “biomass” actually emit higher levels of deadly particulate matter per unit of energy than the dirtiest fossil fuel. Ironically, a coal facility that starts burning biomass may result in the facility operating longer than it would have otherwise —  continuing to burn more coal along with trees.

The same dynamic is at work when biomass energy opponents insist that natural gas would be a better fuel to burn in a power plant. How can the public, policymakers, and the media take biomass busters’ worries about climate and watersheds seriously when they are in favor of an energy source that leaks vast amounts of methane — a greenhouse gas that is eighty-six times more potent than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year period  — and can be responsible for groundwater contamination through hydraulic fracturing?

Or how about organizations that oppose fossil fuels because of threats to health and the environment while turning a blind eye — and in some ways opening the door — to the riskiest method of energy generation in the world: nuclear power?

In the long run, the lack of a unified dirty energy resistance allows industry to keep proposing facilities in towns without organized resistance to a particular fuel source — a kind of musical chairs where, when the music stops, no chairs are missing. 

Common Ground

Despite the valiant efforts of dirty energy opponents, climate change, air pollution, groundwater contamination, and forest destruction keep getting worse while the corporations who perpetrate these environmental crimes upon the American people keep getting stronger. Whatever we’re doing obviously isn’t working; it’s time to circle the wagons.

The key to movement solidarity is finding common ground between anti-fossil fuels, anti-nuclear and anti-incineration efforts. One such strategy — and by no means the only — literally involves finding “common ground”: public lands. While the extraction, transportation, and generation of dirty energy occurs mainly on “private” land, the exploitation of each energy source also impacts National Forests, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) tracts, and other publicly-owned lands.

The nuclear power industry mines uranium on BLM lands while pushing to dump their deadly radioactive waste in places like Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which includes public land.

An increasing percentage of fracking for natural gas takes place on BLM lands, as does some coal mining. Alaska BLM lands are routinely drilled for oil, and despite BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, offshore oil drilling continues. When the energy profiteers aren’t bleeding public lands for fossil fuels, they’re building pipelines through it. 

Meanwhile, more and more acres of National Forests and BLM lands are being logged to fuel polluting biomass incinerators, with the biomass and timber industry exploiting the fear of wildfire and insects to “get out the cut” before and after these naturally occurring events.  

And no matter the energy source, industry wants to hack transmission lines through our public treasures.

Come Together — Right Now

Each separate component of the dirty energy resistance — anti-fossil fuels, anti-nuke, anti-biomass/trash incineration — has tried going it alone with individual campaigns pointing out the ills of one dirty energy source, and pretending the others don't exist. While there’s been some positive traction over the years, the only way we’re going to get up the mountain is through mutual support.  

Extraction-free public lands solidarity is just one of many ways to link the movement together.