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Fukushima is a mirror to the world of nuclear nightmare:

Deadly Fukushima Crisis Further Corrodes Viability of Nuclear Energy, Tuesday, 11 March 2014   By H Patricia Hynes, Truthout | Op-Ed”……..Fukushima is a mirror to the world of nuclear nightmare: core meltdowns still not understood or under control; precariously perched fuel rods threatening catastrophe throughout Japan and beyond; hundreds of thousands of nuclear refugees and desperate nuclear workers living in anomie; ongoing radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean; and collusive government and industry locked in an entitled estate of denial and secrecy against the will of the country’s citizens.

Promoting nuclear power as a “low-carbon” alternative to fossil fuels – as some prominent climate change scientists are doing – is a myopic bargain with the devil. New generations of safer nuclear power plants that purportedly would reduce the risk of ruinous Fukushima-like accidents are decades away from market readiness, too late for stemming the climate change juggernaut. Much more far-sighted is the charismatic former prime minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, an erstwhile nuclear power promoter. Since Fukushima, he calls for abandoning nuclear power, given its mammoth costs and Japan’s seismically active coast, and for his country to unite in creating a renewable society unparalleled in the world. Such a social movement, he foresees, would lift the country’s public spirit and recharge its economy.

Scrapping nuclear power has palpably sped the transition to efficiency and renewable energy. In 2012, Fukushima prefecture signed an agreement to build the country’s largest solar park, and in 2013 Fukushima announced plans to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm – both part of the prefecture’s plan to generate 100 percent of its electricity using renewable sources by 2040. Countries in Europe with the most ambitious solar and wind goals are phasing out nuclear power (Germany) or have adopted a no-nuclear power policy (Denmark and Portugal).

As for the United States, we have enough resource capacity to power the United States with solar and wind. Wind energy in the Great Plains and solar energy in the Southwest could meet current electrical energy needs more than a dozen times over, and this estimate does not include the capacity of offshore wind. Critically acclaimed studies, among them one conducted by researchers Jacobson of Stanford and Delucchi of the University of California-Davis, have laid out a roadmap for energy policy in the next two to four decades, using solely a mix of energy efficiency, wind, water and solar technologies.

In July 2012, an under-the-radar research laboratory within the US Department of Energy (DOE) – the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) – released an initial investigatory report on the potential for renewable energy. The report is, in DOE’s words, “the most comprehensive analysis of high-penetration renewable electricity of the continental United States to date.” The major finding of the Renewable Electricity Futures Study supports a nuclear-free, zero-carbon renewable energy future:

Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.

The age of renewables will arrive when fossil fuels and nuclear power decline irreversibly, predicted German economist and renewable energy pioneer Hermann Scheer, stimulating renewables to increase irreversibly. The path to this age of renewables is political will forged by the will of the people – a struggle reinforced by Fukushima that ensues today in Japan and worldwide. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21551-deadly-fukushima-crisis-further-corrodes-viability-of-nuclear-energy

March 12, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized