The Free Press -- Independent News Media - Harvey Wasserman
Bit by bit, Al Gore seems to be inching toward a Solartopian view of a future that must be completely sustainable in green energy. This week he advocated getting to an electric power system that is "carbon free" within ten years.
Former TVA chairman rips agency's nuclear plans - News Wires - CNBC.com: "'I am appalled at the idea that the Tennessee Valley Authority is going back to nuclear power after the experience we had with it,' Freeman told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday. 'Frankly, of all the places on Earth where nuclear power failed, it was here in the valley.' The federal agency still has more than $20 billion in debt on its books due largely to that previous nuclear push, and Freeman worries ratepayers will be facing billions of dollars more to build Bellefonte."
The Free Press -- Independent News Media - Harvey WassermanKing Fossil Fuel has ruled: there will be no Senate debate on global warming this year. And Joe Lieberman's greenwashed campaign gift for John McCain is a no-go.
The Free Press -- Independent News Media - Harvey Wasserman: "US Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman are linking Internet censorship with atomic power in a way that should terrify us all.
McCain is the real power behind Lieberman-Warner global warming bill on which the Senate could vote as early as Tuesday, June 3. As a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, McCain is pushing hard for massive subsidies to build new atomic reactors. Despite his 'free market' ideology, this bill may hand a half-trillion taxpayer dollars to an industry that cannot get private backing for a failed, terror-target technology."
Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy
WIRED Magazine : ......Look at the environmental protection agency's CO2-per-kilowatt-hour map of the US and two bright patches of low-carbon happiness jump out. One is the hydro-powered Pacific Northwest. The other is Vermont, where a 30-year-old nuclear reactor, Vermont Yankee, keeps the Ben & Jerry's cold...
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Re-energising the nuclear industry: "The 'RadBall' is one innovation to improve nuclear plants' operations"
New Wave of Nuclear Plants Faces High Costs - WSJ.comNuclear power is regaining favor as an alternative to other sources of power generation, such as coal-fired plants, which have fallen out of favor because they are major polluters. But the high cost could lead to sharply higher electricity bills for consumers and inevitably reignite debate about the nuclear industry's suitability to meet growing energy needs.
What Nuclear Renaissance?: "In an effort to jump-start a 'nuclear renaissance,' the Bush Administration has pushed one package of subsidies after another. For the past two years a program of federal loan guarantees has sat waiting for utilities to build nukes. Last year's appropriations bill set the total amount on offer at $18.5 billion. And now the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill is gaining momentum and will likely accrue amendments that will offer yet more money."
British planners feared tea shortage after nuclear attack - Yahoo! News: "Never mind the radiation: British contingency planners worried there would be a dramatic shortage of tea in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, recently declassified documents showed Monday."
Ministerial nuclear council: "France is to create a top-level council on nuclear energy. Consisting of ministers and chaired by the President, it will decide France's nuclear policy.
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Dumb as We Wanna Be - New York Timest is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away.
Harvey Wasserman
Making YOU pay for the next Chernobyls ... in advance!!
April 26, 2008
Are you ready to pay for the next Chernobyls---in advance? Are you willing to have nuclear power PREVENT a solution to the climate crisis?
Twenty-two years ago today, an apocalyptic cloud rose up from Unit Four, in the heart of the Ukraine. For the next few hundred generations, you and your progeny will breathe its radioactive fallout, which was thousands of times worse than that released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Conservative estimates of Chernobyl's financial costs are in the $500 billion range. In downwind regions festering with cancer and birth-defected children, the ultimate death toll is impossible to estimate.
Another Chernobyl could be happening as you read this. And you are already on line to pay for it.
The so-called "reactor renaissance" is built on high-priced lies and public liability.
Not one of the 104 US reactors now licensed to operate, and not one of the new ones being hyped, can get insurance from private sources against another Chernobyl.
For a half-century---since passage of the 1957 Price-Anderson Act---your tax dollars have protected the reactor owners. Now they want you on the hook for another century or so.
Check out your homeowners' insurance policy for its specific exclusions against liability for reactor-related radiation.
With an old reactor or new, a Chernobyl here will bankrupt the government…and YOU.
The first 9/11/2001 jet that flew into the World Trade Center passed, a minute prior, directly over the Indian Point nuke site. Had the terrorists targeted those one dormant and two active reactors, plus the three pools full of spent high-level fuel rods, the loss of life and property would have been beyond comprehension.
Billions of dollars in private money now pour into renewable technologies like wind and solar, which are the real solution to the climate crisis. Every dollar invested in increased efficiency saves seven times the energy a dollar invested in nukes can produce.
Last fall a grassroots movement stopped an attempt to grab $50 billion in federal loan guarantees (see nukefree.org).
Now nuke pushers want to load the Lieberman-Warner "Global Warming" Bill with still more taxpayer subsidies.
But from the start of the fuel cycle to plant decommissioning and waste management, reactor technology is a serious greenhouse gas emitter. The final "bootprint" is unclear because there's no actual solution to the waste problem, and no firm price for final reactor decommissioning.
A French "new generation" project in Finland is already two years and $2 billion over budget. French nukes are gargantuan tax pits, Europe's most notorious radioactive polluter, and an ecological and public health nightmare.
In Florida, ratepayers may be gouged for up to $24 billion for two new reactors that would destroy the Everglades, and still more billions for two more north of Tampa. The utilities involved don't know what kind of reactors they want to build, can't guarantee when they would come on line, or what they'll ultimately cost.
All that money should be going to renewables, which can solve global warming NOW, rather than at some alleged, inscrutable, incalculable distance in the future. Wind, solar, tidal, wave, geothermal and a host of green "Solartopian" technologies are attracting huge quantities of private capital. Based on the natural bounty of our Mother Earth, they promise tangible, immediate economic and employment opportunity, not radioactive catastrophe.
Chernobyl proved that atomic energy's most significant ability---by terror or error---is to spread radiation over large chunks of the Earth. While blocking the real solutions to climate chaos, nukes can bankrupt entire nations in a single moment. They can inflict birth defects and cancer on millions of humans with a single cloud.
Twenty-two years after, it's time to ask the ultimate question about the last reactor catastrophe: In money, body and soul, do you really want to pay for the next ones?
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Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, is available at www.solartopia.org. He is Senior Editor of www.freepress.org, edits the Nukefree.org web site, and is part of a dialog on nuke power at www.motherjones.com/blue_marble_blog/
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Logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), designed by Gerald Holtom in 1958, which became a widespread peace symbol.
ALDERMASTON, UK.-The 50th anniversary of the debut of the peace logo and the first Aldermaston march was marked by the family of designer Gerald Holtom by traveling to Aldermaston. Gerald Holtom died in 1985. He designed the logo in 1958 for a march and based it on the fallen arms of a man in despair, while the semaphore signals for “N” and “D” combine within the circle of life.
Areva Consortium Wins Key U.K. Waste Management Contract
The French nuclear group Areva and two of its partners have won a five-year contract to manage a storage site for low-level radioactive waste in the United Kingdom and to create a national strategy for radioactive waste management.
The contract, worth 160 million euros, is the first that the U.K.'s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has awarded since it was created in 2005.
The Areva consortium is led by U.S. engineering group URS and includes Swedish nuclear waste company Studsvik and the U.K.'s Serco Assurances.
Will Al Gore Help Shut the Nuke Power Loophole? - CommonDreams.org
Published on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Will Al Gore Help Shut the Nuke Power Loophole?
by Harvey Wasserman
Today Al Gore is unveiling a massive campaign to fight climate chaos.
But the hugely funded atomic power industry has jumped on global warming with the Big Lie that its failed reactors can somehow help. It’s a sorry replay of the 1950s promise that atomic power would be “too cheap to meter.”
Picture Gallery: "World Nuclear Association Picture Library"
Say no to nuclear power - Los Angeles Times
In a recent speech in Santa Barbara, Schwarzenegger decried environmentalists who use scare tactics to "frighten everyone that we're going to have another blowup and all of those things." He was referring to the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters, which thoroughly soured Americans on the concept of nuclear power. It's true that Chernobyl was an ill-maintained monstrosity, and nuclear safety has improved since the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown. It's flatly wrong to conclude that this means nuclear plants are safe.
FACTS ON NUCLEAR ENERGY
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