nuclear-news

ROBERT PRICE: Kern isn’t any more welcoming of nuclear power than it was a half-century ago

Bakersfield.com, By ROBERT PRICE For The Californian, 9 July 22 Ask most any Californian to describe nuclear energy and you’ll hear adjectives like “unreliable,” “dangerous” and “volatile……….

Nuclear (and even more unlikely, natural gas) could one day receive the same energy designation as wind farms and solar fields.

……………………… Although the EU’s tentative embrace of nuclear energy might turn some heads in the U.S., however, it’s not going to change minds in Kern County.

………………………..  Kern County was one of the first places in the U.S. to unite disparate political factions and rise up against the proliferation of nuclear power.

…………………………….. Opposition to the project coalesced into an unlikely alliance of farmers, doctors and environmentalists, the likes of which the power utilities had never before seen. Could conservatives and liberals get along? In Kern County, at the height of the 1976-78 battle against the DWP, they did.

……………………… It was the first time anywhere in America that citizens had voted down a nuclear power plant. Opposition to nuclear power had moved, as Wellock noted, from the movement’s typical base — “elements of the left wing of the Democratic Party” — to “traditionally pro-nuclear blue-collar constituencies.”

………………… If and when nuclear power ever does make a comeback in California, however, Kern County will not be the place for it. Nuclear plants need water and plenty of it, and Kern County has even less of it than it did in the mid-’70s, when opponents were citing water shortages among their list of concerns…….  https://www.bakersfield.com/columnists/robert-price/robert-price-kern-isn-t-any-more-welcoming-of-nuclear-power-than-it-was-a/article_f5b32c48-ffd5-11ec-a605-172bf1ccbf72.html

July 10, 2022 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, politics, USA