With ‘fire and fury,’ Trump revives fears about his possession of nuclear codes, SF Gate, Marc Fisher and Jenna Johnson, The Washington Post, August 9, 2017
As with most things Trump, the furor over the “fire and fury” has divided the nation in two – those who believe the president is a loose launchpad, impulsively blurting whatever flits through his mind, and those who believe his inflammatory talk is a wily combination of politically savvy instincts and a gut-driven populism that simply aims to please.
When President Donald Trump went off script Tuesday to deliver a startling threat to North Korea – “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen” – it was as if the nation relived the most lurid themes of the 2016 campaign in one chilling moment.
Last fall, Hillary Clinton’s campaign used as one of its final weapons a TV ad featuring a longtime nuclear missile launch officer who warned against voting for Trump: “I prayed that call would never come. Self-control may be all that keeps these missiles from firing.”
Then, quick-fire, a series of clips of Trump on the stump: “I would bomb the s— out of them.” “I want to be unpredictable.” “I love war.” The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death,” Bruce Blair, the retired launch officer, says in the ad. “It should scare everyone.”
It very nearly did: Voters made clear last fall that they trusted Clinton vastly more than Trump on the use of nuclear weapons – by 57 percent to 31 percent in a Fox News poll in October, for example.
But Trump voters often said that their reasons for supporting him outweighed their sense that he could be dangerously impulsive – and they repeatedly expressed confidence that the national security apparatus would keep him in check…….
August 10, 2017 (Mainichi Japan) MITO, Japan (Kyodo)— Ibaraki Gov. Masaru Hashimoto said Thursday he will not consent to restarting the sole reactor at the Tokai No. 2 nuclear power plant in Tokaimura, which went offline in March 2011 just as a nuclear disaster unfolded in neighboring Fukushima Prefecture.
Hashimoto’s pledge, coming on the day his campaigning for a seventh term as governor officially got under way, goes further than his previous stance on the issue, in which he had set conditions for a restart.
“I will not approve a restart,” Hashimoto said at an event marking the start of his official campaign for the Aug. 27 gubernatorial election. “I will steer in the direction of not accepting nuclear power,” he told his supporters….. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170810/p2g/00m/0dm/075000c
Donald Trump’s nuclear fixation – from the 1980s to now, BBC, Anthony ZurcherNorth America reporter 10 August 2017 “…….The president’s recent nuclear sabre-rattling shouldn’t be viewed as an isolated incident, however. Mr Trump has displayed a keen interest in the utility of atomic weapons for decades…..
his thoughts on atomic weaponry reflect a certain strain of Cold War arms-race enthusiasm and diplomatic brinkmanship.
Last December President-elect Trump emphasised that the US had to “greatly strengthen and expand” its nuclear weaponry and would “outmatch” any adversaries.In August MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough reported that candidate Trump had asked his foreign policy advisors several times why the US couldn’t use its nuclear weapons – a claim the Trump campaign denied.
The report, however, followed on the heels of an April 2016 town hall forum exchange between Mr Trump and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who asked him why he had refused to categorically rule out the use of nuclear weapons.
“Would there be a time when it could be used?” Trump replied. “Possibly. Possibly.”
When pressed on the risks of openly talking of using nuclear weapons, Mr Trump said: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”(The US no longer makes new nuclear warheads. It maintains its current arsenal.)
He repeated that he is not going to take any of his “cards off the table”.
Digging back further, in 1990 Mr Trump gave an interview with Playboy Magazine in which the topic of atomic weaponry came up.
“I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process,” Mr Trump said. He called it the “ultimate catastrophe” and compared it to an illness no one wants to talk about it.
“I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen,” he continued, “because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What [expletive].”
In 1984 – at the height of the Cold War – Mr Trump even told a Washington Post interviewer he wanted to be put in charge of US-Russia nuclear arms negotiations.”It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Mr Trump said. “I think I know most of it anyway.”
Around the time of this interview a computer game called Balance of Power, which simulated the Cold War struggle between the US and Soviet Unions, became a surprise hit.
Players could sabotage, scheme and sabre-rattle up to the brink of nuclear war. The trick was you were never quite sure how close you could get before the missiles started flying. Escalation could lead to inadvertent annihilation.
And if it did, this was the message, displayed in white letters on a black screen: “You have ignited an accidental nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure.”
If Mr Trump’s past comments are any guide, he appears to be making the calculus that the US nuclear arsenal is ineffective if adversaries don’t believe the nation is willing to pull the trigger. It’s all part of the “unpredictability” strategy he repeatedly touted during his presidential campaign (and plugged again in a recent tweet).Mr Trump – and his Defence Secretary Jim Mattis – have spoken of how the US will prevail in any military confrontation with North Korea. Largely left unmentioned amid the bluster, however, is the danger that an extended standoff could spin out of control and the high cost in human lives – in civilian lives on both sides of the Korean demilitarised zone and for US military personnel – that any such conflict would entail.
How Congress Is Cementing Trump’s Anti-Climate Orders into Law These efforts are mostly flying under the radar, but they could short-circuit lawsuits and make it harder to restore environmental protections. Inside Climate News, Marianne Lavelle 31 JULY 17,
How NRDC will fight Trump’s attack on our environment.
President Donald Trump marvels at his own velocity when he boasts about dismantling the Obama climate legacy. “I have been moving at record pace to cancel these regulations and to eliminate the barriers to domestic energy production, like never before,” he said at a recent White House event.
But while Trump focuses on speed, his allies in Congress appear increasingly concerned about the durability of the president’s fossil fuel directives.
In recent weeks, they have advanced a handful of legislative measures that echo and extend various presidential orders meant to boost coal, oil and gas production and set aside consideration of climate change.
These moves may seem redundant, but they could provide bulletproof armor during future challenges to Trump’s agenda.
“They are … covering their bases by trying to legislate the rolling back of these safeguards because the process to repeal, undo or rewrite a regulation is as lengthy as the public process that helped establish the standard in the first place,” explained Melinda Pierce, chief lobbyist for the Sierra Club. “And, of course, any attempt to roll back environmental or public health standards can and will be challenged in court.”
“The Trump administration is attacking every environmental and health protection we have,” said Sara Jordan, legislative representative for the League of Conservation Voters. “If these legislative proposals get passed, it will make it that much harder for the next administration to restore environmental protections.”
That’s why Congressional Republicans are racing to write his instructions into law.
“We need to put the legislative stamp of approval on what the Trump administration is doing,” said Rep. Evan Jenkins (R-W.Va.) during a recent debate on the House floor.
The House already has voted to fast-track Trump’s withdrawal of a clean water rule and to streamline future environmental reviews over cross-border pipelines like Keystone XL. Now, GOP members are pushing forward legislation to bolster Trump’s revival of federal coal leasing, and to bar government regulatory agencies from considering the future damages caused by greenhouse gas pollution.
‘A Very Slippery Slope to Government by Fiat’
The courts have already started chipping away at the Trump administration’s edicts. A federal appeals court ruled July 3 that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot simply suspend an Obama-era rule on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. And a federal judge ruled last month that the Army Corps of Engineers had moved too hastily to permit the Dakota Access pipeline project, without considering environmental justice impacts on the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
Environmental groups, states, and tribes have planned or filed lawsuits over virtually every aspect of the Trump energy agenda. “We’re going to meet them in court, we’re going to sue them, and we’re going to prevail,” Mitchell Bernard, chief counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said in a video the environmental group produced.
But Congress could short-circuit that litigation strategy with measures like the provision passed by the House last week allowing withdrawal of Obama’s “Waters of the U.S.” rule without public notice, comment or any of the other requirements that apply to federal departments and agencies. The Trump administration already has begun rescinding the rule, which was written to protect wetlands from dredge and fill material and created new permitting and reporting requirements that the oil, gas and coal industry abhor. The rider that the GOP tucked into an $800 billion budget bill would hurry the repeal and reduce possibilities for legal challenge……….
These Efforts Are Flying Under the Public Radar
Most of the legislative proposals shoring up the Trump energy agenda originate in the House, and their fate is unclear in the Senate, which already has rejected an effort to undo Obama-era methane regulations by legislative fiat, and where appropriators are less tolerant of budget riders.
Still, Senate negotiators may feel pressured to go along with some provisions to pass budget legislation that would keep the government up and running after the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
Senate supporters of the Trump energy agenda already have introduced their own version of the “Ozone Standards Implementation Act” that the House passed on July 18. That bill would help EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt delay implementation of the Obama administration’s standards regulating smog emissions for a year. The House-passed legislation would give states until 2025 to comply with the revised standards and would change long-standing law to allow the EPA to revise the standards every 10 years instead of every five.
Both the NRDC and a coalition of environmental, health and labor groups have published online running tallies of budget provisions that affect regulations, but they lament that the Congressional efforts to cement the Trump agenda have not received attention while the health care repeal effort and Russia investigations crowd out media coverage.
Trump files notice to withdraw from Paris deal, plans instead to promote fossil fuels, REneweconomy, By Mark Hand on 7 August 2017 ThinkProgress The Trump administration formally notified the United Nations of its plans to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement on Friday, explaining that the United States instead plans to work with countries to help them gain access to fossil fuels……..
The goal of expanding access to fossil fuels is part of Trump’s new “energy dominance” agenda where his administration will work with fossil fuel companies to turn the United States into an oil, natural gas, and coal exporting powerhouse.
The administration also wants to continue to export fracking technology developed in the United States to other countries.
The letter sent to the United Nations has no legal weight nor does it begin the process of withdrawing the United States from the pact of nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Rather, it is a political document that affirms Trump’s proclamation in June that the Paris agreement is a bad deal for the nation, the New York Times reported Friday.
According to the terms of the Paris agreement, no country can begin the withdrawal process until three years after the agreement enters into force and the withdrawal would not take effect for one year after that date.
The Paris agreement entered into force on November 4, 2016. Therefore, the United States cannot fully withdraw until November 4, 2020, one day after the next presidential election.
The next president could decide to rejoin the agreement if Trump does not win a second term………
Since June, the California legislature voted to extend the state’s cap-and-trade program until 2030. The U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted several climate and energy resolutions advancing renewable energy, committing to sustainable infrastructure development, and standing by the Paris agreement.
A network of cities, states, businesses, and colleges have united to declare “We Are Still In,” and provide a platform for local leaders to support the commitments of the Paris agreement.
IF SCE&G AND Santee Cooper were free-market businesses, they’d probably be out of business in the wake of South Carolina’s nuclear meltdown. Or they’d have new management. Or they would have abandoned their nuclear reactors years ago — if they had ever started building them.
If SCE&G were even just a regular regulated monopoly — one that didn’t have the Legislature’s blessing to charge ratepayers $1.4 billion, and keep charging us even more, for electricity we will never receive — it probably would have walked away from the project much sooner. Or, like every other regulated monopoly in the nation without such legislative protection, never started it.
But state law reduced SCE&G’s risk and made it financially and psychologically easier for the company to pursue a high-risk plan to build the nation’s first new nuclear reactors in decades. And state law allowed Santee Cooper to join the venture without even the modicum of oversight that SCE&G had.
Santee Cooper is not regulated by the Public Service Commission, and its management answers to a politically appointed board whose members cannot be removed unless they break the law. Both conditions need to change. The governor should be able to remove his appointees for any or no reason, and the utility should be subject to the same regulation as privately owned utilities. And serious questions need to be asked about whether President Lonnie Carter deserves to be the highest-paid person in state government — or even remain employed.
What to do about the laws that govern SCE&G is less clear — and figuring that out needs to be the focus of legislators when they begin hearings later this month on how a $14 billion nuclear-construction project fell apart after both companies’ ratepayers sank more than $2 billion into it.
Was the whole concept of that law flawed? Are we guaranteeing irresponsible decision-making when we allow a regulated monopoly to charge customers up front for nuclear and coal-fired production facilities, and keep charging them even after the project is abandoned? Or would that mechanism, which is intended to reduce interest costs, make sense if the utility had to put more of its investors’ money at risk?
What about the Public Service Commission? Did commissioners have enough room to turn down any of the nine rate increases they approved for SCE&G? The law allows them to reject increases if there has been “a material and adverse deviation from the approved schedules, estimates, and projections” — which certainly happened here — but only if the utility was “imprudent” in failing to anticipate or avoid the changes.
If the commission didn’t have enough authority to reject rate increases, that needs changing. If there was enough authority but commissioners failed to use it, then perhaps it’s the commissioners who need changing.
Or did legislators — who elect commissioners to the well-paid political posts — make it too clear that they were not to reject rate increases? If so, we need to change how commissioners are selected. (Yes, legislators would need to change as well, but that’s up to voters.)
The Office of Regulatory Staff is supposed to conduct “on-going monitoring” of nuclear construction projects and “review and audit” rate requests, hiring outside experts as needed. Did it have the authority it needed to protect the public? If not, that needs changing. (The law that created that office, by the way, requires it to protect the “public interest,” which includes “preservation of the financial integrity of the state’s public utilities and continued investment in and maintenance of utility facilities.”)
If the office has sufficient authority, did it do its job but get overruled by the PSC? If not, then perhaps that staff needs changing, and perhaps the way it’s selected. The executive director is nominated by a legislative committee and technically appointed by the governor, sort of like magistrates.
What happens when SCE&G builds the new capacity that nuclear reactors will not provide? If it builds a natural gas plant, it won’t be allowed to charge ratepayers for construction unless or until the plant produces electricity. But should SCE&G ever be allowed to charge us for a facility that replaces an abandoned facility we’ve already paid $1.4 billion toward?
And what about the whole idea of monopolies? I doubt we’ve reached the point where small carbon-based or alternative-energy plants can provide everyone in the state access to electricity, which we’d need before we could switch to a free-market system. But a lot of people believe that time is coming. If lawmakers are going to spend a lot of mental energy on our state’s energy future, they ought to start thinking about how we get to that place, and what we do once we’re there.
Finally, a question legislators will avoid if we let them: Should a monopoly be allowed to make campaign donations to the legislators who have the power not only to revoke its monopoly status but also to shield it even more from the consequences of its decisions? And if so, how on earth do you justify that?
Ms. Scoppe writes editorials and columns for The State. Reach her at cscoppe@thestate.com or (803) 771-8571 or follow her on Twitter or like her on Facebook @CindiScoppe.
Legislators call for refunds from nuke projecthttp://counton2.com/2017/08/03/legislators-call-for-refunds-from-nuke-project/ By Associated Press, August 3, 2017, COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina legislators want to bar SCE&G from continuing to collect money for a now-scuttled multibillion-dollar nuclear power project customers have been paying for since 2009.
A bipartisan group of legislators announced Wednesday the creation of an Energy Caucus that will work to overhaul how utility requests are reviewed.
South Carolina Electric & Gas and state-owned Santee Cooper decided Monday to abandon construction of two nuclear reactors. A project accounts for 18 percent of SCE&G’s residential electric bills. Utility executives said Tuesday none will get refunded. They are seeking permission from state regulators to recoup an additional $5 billion over 60 years.
Legislators created the system allowing that to happen in 2007.
But Energy Caucus members say the utility’s request should be rejected, and customers should be refunded.
Guardian 2nd Aug 2017, Until recently, few of us were familiar with the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), the international organisation that governs many aspects of nuclear energy activity in member states. Brexit, and the rapidly retracted “leak” that Britain may seek “associate membership” of Euratomhas suddenly brought Euratom to the fore.
The precise legal situation regarding the UK’s continued membership of Euratom is contested, but there is much to learn from the history of this relationship: over the past six decades the UK has attempted to become an associate member or full member of Euratom five times.
Since joining in 1973, any nuclear treaties with other nations (including any signed before that date) were placed under the aegis of Euratom. This means that if Britain leaves Euratom, all its complex nuclear treaties with the United
States, the rest of Europe and many other nations across the world will need to be re-ratified in national legislatures before Britain is no longer a member.
This is a large international legislative task, and requires quick action before the Article 50 process ends in just over a year. If the treaties are not re-ratified by national parliaments, then, depending on the treaty, the UK could be in breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and a worst-case scenario could have a variety of very serious consequences
including: stopping work on Hinkley C, halting the movement of nuclear fuel, and even ending the import of medical isotopes for cancer treatments. https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2017/aug/02/our-60-year-relationship-with-euratom-offers-hard-lessons-for-brexit-negotiators
According to state law, governors have five business days upon receiving a ratified bill from the S.C. General Assembly to either sign or veto the measure in question. If they do nothing, the bill becomes law at the end of the fifth business day.
when a governor chooses this option, they are effectively signing the bill. Which is exactly what Sanford did back in 2007.
SC #NukeGate: Mark Sanford Has A Problemhttps://www.fitsnews.com/2017/08/02/sc-nukegate-mark-sanford-has-a-problem/By FITS , 3 Aug 17, You would think the failure of a multi-billion nuclear power project in the Midlands region of South Carolina (a.k.a. #NukeGate) wouldn’t be a problem for a politician hailing from the Palmetto State’s coastal regions.
But in this case you’d be wrong …
For those of you just waking up from a 72-hour nap, South Carolina was rocked by the news that a proposed nuclear power facility in Jenkinsville, S.C. would no longer be built. The decision to kill the V.C. Summer nuclear project – which wiped out 5,000 jobs and threw the state’s energy future into turmoil – was made by the Palmetto State’s government-run utility, Santee Cooper.
That decision has created a nightmare for SCANA – a private sector utility that was partnering with Santee Cooper on the project.
SCANA had raised rates on consumers to help subsidize the construction of these reactors – while Santee Cooper was in the process of raising rates to support its obligations related to the project. Just a week before deciding to walk away from the V.C. Summer project, in fact, Santee Cooper specifically cited “costs associated with nuclear construction and other system improvements” as one of the stated rationales for its proposed rate increases.
Talk about sandbagging …
Anyway, as we’ve noted previously people are pissed. They want answers. They want to see their bills lowered. And they want their money back.
They also want to know how on earth their government allowed this to happen …
All of which brings us to congressman Mark Sanford and a little piece of state law known as Act 16 of 2007, a.k.a. the so-called “Base Load Review Act.”
Passed during Sanford’s second term as governor of South Carolina, this legislation permitted utilities in the Palmetto State to raise rates on consumers for the purpose of financing the construction of – among other things – nuclear facilities.
Basically, this law was the gateway through which hundreds of millions of dollars of ratepayer money flowed toward the V.C. Summer project.
So did Sanford sign this law? No, he did not. Did he veto it? No, he did not.
Hold up … are we messing around with our readers here?
Because this hardly seems the time for that …
What’s the joke? Where’s the punch line?
There is no joke – nor is there a punch line. In the Palmetto State, there is a third option. According to state law, governors have five business days upon receiving a ratified bill from the S.C. General Assembly to either sign or veto the measure in question. If they do nothing, the bill becomes law at the end of the fifth business day.
For those of you who’ve forgotten, this was the “out” taken by former S.C. governor Nikki Haley back in 2011 when she got crossed up on an “economic development” deal involving online distributor Amazon.
As we noted then – and will remind our readers now – when a governor chooses this option, they are effectively signing the bill. Which is exactly what Sanford did back in 2007. This particular piece of legislation hit his desk in the S.C. State House on April 26 of that year – a Thursday. Sanford did nothing with the bill, and so on the following Thursday – May 3, 2007 – it became law without his signature.
Could a decision made a decade ago cost him his congressional seat?
State representative Katie Arrington – who is considering running against Sanford for South Carolina’s first congressional district (map) next spring – took note of the former governor’s decision on her Twitter page.
In responding to the outrage against Santee Cooper and SCANA, Arrington tweeted “you should also be just as upset with Mark Sanford for allowing a law that put ratepayers on the hook.”
Is she correct? Yes …
As the fallout from this failed nuclear project continues cascading across the Palmetto political landscape, expect to see Sanford face his fair share of criticism related to this deal (and justifiably so).
Tillerson says he and Trump disagree over Iran nuclear deal, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-retaliation-economy-idUSKBN1AH4S1 Yeganeh Torbati, 2 Aug 17, WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged on Tuesday that he and President Donald Trump disagree over the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and said the two men discuss how to use the international agreement to advance administration policies.
Trump at times vowed during the 2016 presidential election campaign to withdraw from the agreement, which was signed by the United States, Russia, China and three European powers to curb Iran’s nuclear program in return for lifting most Western sanctions.
Trump has preserved the deal for now, although he has made clear he did so reluctantly after being advised to do so by Tillerson.
“He and I have differences of views on things like JCPOA, and how we should use it,” Tillerson said at a State Department briefing, using the acronym for the deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Tillerson said that Washington could “tear it up and walk away” or stay in the deal and hold Iran accountable to its terms, which he said would require Iran to act as a “good neighbor.”
Critics say the deal falls short in addressing Iran’s support for foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria, arms shipments around the Middle East and ballistic missile tests.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tillerson’s remarks.
Trump said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last month that he predicts Iran will be judged “noncompliant” with the Iran deal at the next deadline in October, and that he would have preferred to do so months ago.
Tillerson expressed a more nuanced view of the deal’s potential benefits on Tuesday.
“There are a lot of alternative means with which we use the agreement to advance our policies and the relationship with Iran, and that’s what the conversation generally is around with the president as well,” Tillerson said.
European officials would likely be reluctant to re-impose sanctions, especially the broader measures that helped drive Iran to negotiate over its nuclear program in the first place, he said.
New U.S. sanctions on Iran in July were a breach of the nuclear deal and Tehran had lodged a complaint with the body that oversees the pact’s implementation, a senior Iranian politician said.
Tillerson acknowledged that the United States is limited in how much it can pressure Iran on its own and said it was important to coordinate with the other parties to the agreement.
“The greatest pressure we can put to bear on Iran to change the behavior is a collective pressure,” he said. Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; editing by Grant McCool
Dahr Jamail | Scientists Warn of “Biological Annihilation” as Warming Reaches Levels Unseen for 115,000 Years, July 31, 2017 By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report“…..Denial and Reality
There’s never a dull moment in the denial world these days.
In Florida, that state’s extremist ACD-denying Gov. Rick Scott signed legislation making it easier for Florida residents to challenge science that is taught in public schools, so if an ACD-denying parent doesn’t like a science textbook that teaches the basic physics of how greenhouse gases work, the book could end up being banned.
Trump-appointed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, an ACD denier and pink slipped 38 members of the EPA’s Board of Scientific advisors, which is merely a drop in the bucket compared to dozens of other major environmental roll-backs the Trump administration has pulled off thus far, including forcing NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] to erase human activity references to greenhouse gases in its Annual Greenhouse Gas Index.
Energy Minister Alvaro Nadal said Tuesday the license for the Santa Maria de Garona plant in northern Spain would not be renewed as there was too much uncertainty surrounding the plant’s viability.
Production at the 46-year-old Garona was halted in 2012 when its operator, Nuclenor, objected to a new tax. Its board recently failed to reach agreement on keeping the plant open.
Environmentalists have long claimed that the plant is outdated, although Spain’s Nuclear Security Council this year said it could continue operating.
Spain has seven other nuclear reactors that produce some 20 percent of the country’s electricity.
http://www.powermag.com/south-korean-president-details-phase-out-of-coal-nuclear-power/08/01/2017 | Darrell Proctor, During his electoral campaign, South Korean President Moon Jae-in vowed to end the country’s reliance on coal and also said the nation would move away from nuclear energy. He took a major step in that direction in June, saying his country would not try to extend the life of its nuclear plants, would close 10 existing coal-fired plants, and would not build any new coal plants.
The president, who took office in May 2017, has made energy policy a cornerstone of his administration and has moved quickly to implement his policies (see “A Mixed Bag of Nuclear Developments in UAE, S. Korea, Switzerland and S. Africa” in the July 2017 issue). South Korea has been among the world’s largest producers of nuclear energy and one of the few nations to export its nuclear technology. Former President Lee Myung-bak, who served from 2008 to 2013, supported nuclear energy as part of his clean energy policy that called for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In 2016, a third of the country’s electricity came from nuclear plants, and the World Nuclear Association said South Korea’s nuclear production from its 25 operating plants ranked No. 5 in the world.
Moon announced his initiatives at a June 19 ceremony in Busan to mark the closure of the Kori 1 reactor (Figure 1), the country’s oldest power plant. Kori came online in 1978. Busan, at the southeastern tip of South Korea, is home to many of the country’s nuclear facilities, in part due to its distance from North Korea.
“So far South Korea’s energy policy pursued cheap prices and efficiency. Cheap production [costs] were considered the priority while the public’s life and safety took a back seat. But it’s time for a change,” Moon said. “We will abolish our nuclear-centered energy policy and move toward a nuclear-free era.”
The country’s energy ministry said it will take 15 years or more to decommission the Kori 1 reactor, at a cost of 643.7 billion won ($569 million). South Korea took a hard look at nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in neighboring Japan. A 2012 scandal in which plants were shut down after it was discovered parts were being supplied with fake certificates (see “Documentation Scandal Strains South Korea’s Power Supplies” in the August 2013 issue), along with a recent spate of earthquakes in southeastern South Korea, also have brought concern. Seismologists said four of the nine most-powerful quakes in the country’s history have occurred in the past three years, including a 5.8-magnitude quake—the largest since seismic activity began being recorded in 1978—in September 2016.
PIRA Energy Group, part of S&P Global Platts, earlier this year said South Korea had planned to add 20.17 GW of new coal-fired electricity generation from 2017 to 2022, including 5 GW this year. The group reported that private-sector companies already had invested $1 billion toward construction of new coal plants. South Korea at present has 59 operating coal-fired power plants, supplying about 40% of the country’s electricity. The 10 plants that would be closed under Moon’s plan represent about 3.3 GW of the country’s generation, or about 10.6% of the nation’s total coal-fired capacity, according to the energy ministry.
The 10 plants cited for permanent closure all were temporarily closed in June 2017, and will be closed again from March to June next year to limit emissions. Moon has pledged to permanently close all coal plants aged 30 years or more during his presidential term (2017–2022). He has said the country would spend $12.2 billion this year to develop alternative energy sources, and pursue a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 37% by 2030.
,Japan Times, 1 Aug 17 KYODO KYODO AUG 1, 2017 HIROSHIMA/NAGASAKI – The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will call on the government to help realize a treaty banning nuclear weapons at upcoming anniversaries marking the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings in their cities.
This year’s declarations follow the adoption in New York last month by 122 U.N. members of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. As a country under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, Japan did not participate, nor did any of the nuclear weapon states.
Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui announced an outline of his declaration at a news conference on Tuesday, to be read out at a commemoration ceremony on the anniversary of the bombing on Aug. 6.
According to the outline, he will stress that the “hell” Hiroshima saw 72 years ago is not a thing of the past, saying, “As long as nuclear weapons exist and policymakers threaten their use, their horror could leap into our present at any moment.”…..
Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue is to read his declaration at the city’s ceremony three days later on Aug. 9. In Nagasaki, an estimated 74,000 people died from the bombing by the end of 1945.
“Action by civil society will be crucial in making the nuclear prohibition treaty an international norm,” Taue said at a news conference on Monday announcing the outline of his declaration. “I would like to call for coordination.”
Taue said he will call on the government to change its mind and join the treaty, while Matsui will urge the government to “manifest the pacifism in our Constitution” by “doing everything in its power to bridge the gap between the nuclear weapon and non-nuclear weapon states.”…..
Public deserves truth about nuclear bailout http://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Commentary-Public-deserves-truth-about-nuclear-11717763.php, By Blair Horner, July 29, 2017
It’s been one year since Gov. Andrew Cuomo quietly foisted an estimated $7.6 billion electric utility rate hike on the people of New York to bail out three aging, upstate nuclear power plants. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about how bad that deal was, but we still don’t know much about how the administration cooked it up.
Here’s what we know: The deal is the result of an astonishingly secretive process. True, some hearings were held, but on a proposed bailout ranging from $59 million to $660 million. After the process wrapped up, the administration jacked up the price into the billions, without any meaningful public process to debate its merits.
The Cuomo administration didn’t release an estimate for the entire cost of the 12-year plan, so the independent Public Utility Law Project crunched the numbers and found it could be as much as $7.6 billion. That stunning transfer of wealth to the single corporation owning the plants may well be the largest in New York’s history.
The first two years of the bailout are estimated to cost ratepayers $964,900,000, an average of more than $1.3 million per day.
Since the bailout hit utility bills on April 1, New Yorkers have paid nearly $163 million extra to prop up these plants. That’s a huge amount of money in a state like New York, already burdened with some of the highest utility rates in the country, and where 800,000 ratepayers are behind on their utility bills.
Included in that $163 million is close to $10 million in extra charges being footed by Niagara Mohawk residential ratepayers, based on the PULP analysis.
No one with a utility bill is immune. School districts, hospitals, businesses and municipalities are now grappling with higher utility rates because of a deal that was hammered out with virtually no public input.
Albany County, for example, is slated to pay up to $225,543 more per year for the bailout. Albany’s school district may pay up to $87,552 more per year and Albany Medical Center up to $537,843 per year.
Despite the massive scale of the bailout, New Yorkers still don’t know what alternatives the Cuomo administration considered to meet our energy needs. But there are clearly other paths to study. For example, the analysis released this month by energy expert Amory Lovins, which criticizes the growing trend toward subsidizing costly, uneconomical nuclear power plants.
Lovins, once named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, found that bailouts like the kind New York just implemented could be avoided by closing unprofitable nuclear plants and reinvesting their operating costs into energy efficiency, such as better insulation, windows, and appliances.
Because energy efficiency reduces demand and is so much cheaper per kWh than the energy produced by a nuclear plant, it could replace the power generated by the nuclear plant and replace some of the power generated by coal or gas, all for the same price as one kWh of nuclear energy.
Lovins’ independent analysis contradicts the Cuomo administration’s assertions that the bailout is the only way New York can reduce carbon emissions and meet its energy needs.
To “celebrate” the one-year anniversary of the bailout, let’s hope the administration finally conducts a comprehensive public review of all the alternatives to spending billions to keep old, unprofitable nuclear power plants running.
It’s not too late to reverse course and invest in 21st-century, clean, efficient power sources. New York ratepayers deserve to have their money bankroll job-creating technologies that help attack the problem of energy pollution, not kick the can 12 years down the road.
Blair Horner is executive director the New York Public Interest Research Group.
