Unfortunately, the case for nuclear as a green technology is not so simple—the technology faces a spate of environmental and economic challenges, while its track record as a bridge fuel shows it may be more rivalrous than concomitant with renewables. In fact, it may be the nuclear industry that needs the Green New Deal, not the other way around.
For as long as it’s existed, nuclear has been an aspirational technology as much as an extant one
the magical thinking of the nuclear industry has taken different forms. Over decades, breeder reactors, salt reactors, large-scale fusion have all been the nuclear future just over the horizon. “The industry that people talk about is a theoretical industry,” says Jaczko. “The actual industry is not that.”
So the enthusiasm for the public investment of the Green New Deal is primarily a tactical one, with the promise of a massive outlay of public funds enticing an industry in need of a lifeline.
The Tantalizing Nuclear Mirage, Many see nuclear power as a necessary part of any carbon-neutral mix. The reality isn’t so simple. The American 
Prospect, BY ALEXANDER SAMMON DECEMBER 5, 2019
It took seven months on the campaign trail for Cory Booker to emerge as the Democratic Party’s foremost champion of nuclear power. In September, after he unveiled a signature climate plan replete with “$20 billion dedicated to research, development and demonstration of next-generation advanced nuclear energy,” he embraced the technology with unprecedented ardor. “I didn’t come to the United States Senate as a big nuclear guy,” Booker told Grist in an interview. “But when I started looking at the urgency of climate change … nuclear has to be a part of the blend.”
To hear Booker tell it, his evolution on the subject was the product of scientific rigor and anti-ideological clarity on decarbonization. He related this narrative during a media blitz, comparing anti-nuclear Democrats to Republican climate deniers over their rejection of an incontrovertible science, while pledging to usher in a nuclear future that no right-minded person could deny. “Where the science is going, to me, at first sounded like science fiction … new nuclear actually portends of exciting things where you have no risk of the kinds of meltdowns we’re seeing,” he proclaimed at CNN’s climate town hall.
Grandiosity aside, Booker isn’t alone in his nuclear embrace. He’s part of an unlikely pro-nuclear political alliance, an emergent accord that spans the centrist think tank Third Way, Andrew Yang, Jay Inslee, environmental activists, and progressive commentators alike. “The left should stop worrying and learn to love existing nuclear power plants,” wrote New York’s Eric Levitz in a subsequent send-up of Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s twin commitments to phase out the technology.
In a world where the rapid deployment of zero-carbon energy production is urgent, nuclear power, the argument goes, represents the only proven bet.
……..With 11 years, per the U.N.’s 2018 IPCC report, to overhaul our energy system, to be serious about decarbonization is to find a place at the table for nuclear.
It’s an alluring idea. Already, this logic has been embraced in states like Ohio and Booker’s New Jersey, which have been allocating green tax subsidies to nuclear projects. And while it’s largely played out in the background, the question of what to do about nuclear has vexed Green New Dealers since the rollout of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s framework in February. While plane travel and hamburgers raised hackles in the press, one of the first clauses to be deleted from the initial proposal pledged to phase out the technology altogether.
So does the Green New Deal need nuclear to achieve its lofty goals? Does zero-carbon energy infrastructure necessitate a nuclear buildout, or at least an embrace of already-existing nuclear as a bridge fuel, as countries like Sweden have done? Unfortunately, the case for nuclear as a green technology is not so simple—the technology faces a spate of environmental and economic challenges, while its track record as a bridge fuel shows it may be more rivalrous than concomitant with renewables. In fact, it may be the nuclear industry that needs the Green New Deal, not the other way around.
DESPITE THE NEWFOUND exigency of overhauling the country’s energy mix, this is not the first time America’s energy system has arrived at a crossroads in the last ten years, nor is it the first time nuclear has been trotted out as its last, best hope. In the late aughts, with oil prices soaring and production stagnant, policymakers made a commitment to expanding American nuclear generation. An era of so-called “nuclear renaissance” began, with four next-generation reactors commissioned at two plants, one in Georgia and the other in South Carolina.
Now, over a decade later, that project managed to bankrupt its construction company, Westinghouse, nearly taking down the entire Toshiba conglomerate, Westinghouse’s parent company, with it. The two reactors in South Carolina were abandoned, while the Southern Nuclear and Georgia Power utility companies assumed control of the remaining two reactors in Georgia, the Vogtle 3 and 4. But even a cash infusion from Georgia ratepayers, who began subsidizing the completion of the project in 2011, was not enough to keep the project close to its budget or timeline. Initially expected to come online in 2016-2017, the Vogtle plant has run some $14 billion over budget. Its completion dates have been deferred to 2021-2022. There’s currently no other active nuclear development in the United States.
That timeline should be particularly alarming for nuclear enthusiasts………
WHEN DID NUCLEAR get this environmental rebrand? Until very recently, the industry hadn’t led with its environmental chops. In fact, for years, nuclear buddied up with the coal industry, courting the Trump administration for subsidies, while the Nuclear Energy Institute supported the Department of Energy’s failed coal and nuclear bailout, and lauded Ohio’s controversial coal and nuclear subsidy package earlier this year.
For as long as it’s existed, nuclear has been an aspirational technology as much as an extant one. Since Eisenhower first announced nuclear energy generation as a civilian project in 1953, its promises of worldwide abundance have far outpaced its production. Twenty years later, in 1973, Richard Nixon pledged to have 1,000 nuclear plants online by 1980, a goal that never approached realization. Since then, the magical thinking of the nuclear industry has taken different forms. Over decades, breeder reactors, salt reactors, large-scale fusion have all been the nuclear future just over the horizon. “The industry that people talk about is a theoretical industry,” says Jaczko. “The actual industry is not that.” Since the development of nuclear weapons, the non-military nuclear energy program has always been a PR charge as much as it was a serious proposal. “Historians have determined that the rollout of civilian nuclear power in the 1960s had as much to do with Cold War PR as the need for electricity,” says Brown.
Nuclear’s pivot to unlikely environmental champion and running mate of the Green New Deal is far from a happy accident. It’s a deliberate posture, informed as much by shrewd marketing as Booker’s data-driven rationale. With the rapid development of solar and wind, nuclear is now far more expensive to produce in terms of dollars per kilowatt hour. With the rapid growth of renewables, nuclear now finds itself on the wrong side of free-market forces, in dire need of public subsidy to stay afloat.
So the enthusiasm for the public investment of the Green New Deal is primarily a tactical one, with the promise of a massive outlay of public funds enticing an industry in need of a lifeline. “Of course the nuclear industry is trying new alliances; they are desperate.” says Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. Cutting them in would be an unforced error for GND legislation—the money that would be spent making nuclear viable, shielding it from an array of climate disasters, and figuring out what to do with its waste would be much better spent figuring out battery storage or something else to stitch in the gaps in renewable generation.
Looking closer at Booker’s proposal, it’s not clear even he believes the sales pitch he’s making. Despite his lofty pronouncements, the climate plan, which sums to $3 trillion, allocates just two-thirds of 1 percent to nuclear development. The $20 billion is barely enough to cover the cost overruns of the two reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle plant. The notion that such a paltry sum would finally put the industry over the top after decades of malaise, indeed, sounds like science fiction. https://prospect.org/greennewdeal/the-tantalizing-nuclear-mirage/
December 7, 2019
Posted by Christina MacPherson |
election USA 2020 |
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Candidates should state position on nuclear weapons, https://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20191014/column-candidates-should-state-position-on-nuclear-weapons David Wright, The upcoming Democratic Party presidential debate in Ohio provides an opportunity for candidates to address an issue that a majority of Ohio voters want to hear about: their plans for U.S. nuclear weapons policy.
A recent Zogby Analytics poll found that more than 80% of Ohio residents believe it is critical that the candidates state their positions on this issue.
They are right to want to hear the candidates’ views. Ohioans understand that the risk of nuclear war remains one of the greatest threats to civilization, and security experts warn that the potential for a nuclear war is greater than it has been in decades.
The good news is that the next president could make America safer by changing U.S. nuclear policy.
Under current policies, the United States could start a nuclear war by mistake. How? Let me explain the chain of events.
The Pentagon keeps its 400 land-based missiles on hair-trigger alert so they can be launched quickly upon warning of a Russian missile attack before they could be destroyed by incoming Russian missiles. If the military received such a warning, the president would have less than 10 minutes to decide whether to launch U.S. missiles. But that warning is generated by computers based on radar and satellite data, all of which are fallible. Indeed, there have been false alarms over the years due to a range of technical and human errors. This tight time span in which to make a decision increases the risk of starting a nuclear war based on a false warning. U.S. missiles cannot be recalled or destroyed in flight, even if the Pentagon belatedly realized that the warning had been false.
Keeping missiles on hair-trigger alert is not only dangerous, it is also unnecessary. Most U.S. nuclear weapons are hidden at sea on submarines where they are safe from attack, so the United States can wait to see if a nuclear attack is actually happening before it retaliates. Debate moderators should ask the candidates if they would remove U.S. missiles from hair-trigger alert and eliminate the possibility of starting a nuclear war by mistake.
The next president also could reduce the chance that the United States would deliberately start a nuclear war. Current policy permits the United States to use nuclear weapons first in a non-nuclear conflict with Russia, China or North Korea — all of which are nuclear-armed. Doing so would almost certainly provoke a devastating nuclear response against the United States.
Moderators should tackle that topic as well. They should ask the candidates whether, if elected, they would clearly state that the only purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack and establish a policy that the United States will never use nuclear weapons first. Such a policy also would make America safer by making it less likely that our adversaries would attack us with nuclear weapons first out of fear that a U.S. nuclear strike was imminent.
The Zogby survey polled Ohioans about this “first use” issue, too. When asked if there were any acceptable circumstances for the United States to use nuclear weapons first, nearly two-thirds said no.
Finally, the United States has long relied on verifiable international agreements to constrain its adversaries’ nuclear forces. Today the United States and Russia still possess 92% of all nuclear weapons, yet the United States recently pulled out of a longstanding nuclear arms treaty with Russia and has threatened to walk away from the landmark treaty that limits long-range nuclear weapons. Debate moderators should ask the candidates if they are committed to maintaining such agreements, how they would reinvigorate U.S.-Russian negotiations and how they would address North Korea and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Voters want to know, but they will only if debate moderators ask the right questions. The presidential candidates must clarify what they would do, if elected, to reduce the nuclear threat and guarantee national — and international — security.
David Wright, co-director and senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, grew up in Lima and attended Miami University and Ohio State University.
October 15, 2019
Posted by Christina MacPherson |
election USA 2020 |
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Harvey Wassermann, 21 Sept 19, Senator Cory Booker has become a Pro-Nuke Holocaust Denier and must not be president or vice.
As desperate mostly-young millions march worldwide for the survival of our Earth, Booker embraces explosive atomic 500-F climate killing machines that are roasting Her.
Any of our 96 badly run, rarely inspected US nukes could explode into a nuclear holocaust at any time.
In Booker’s New Jersey, three dying public-subsidized nukes spew heat, radiation and carbon. Their safety is “guaranteed” by Trump’s fake Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They’re dangerously decrepit, but what’s he done to to guarantee their safety? (Hint: they can’t get private insurance).
Now he’s Trump-style slandering the global grassroots safe energy movement for demanding nuke accountability.
Nuke reactors spew gargantuan quantities of waste heat and deadly radiation. That includes Carbon 14, a global warming agent.
Carbon-emitting reactor fuel production demands carbon-emitting mining, milling, transport and enrichment. So does fuel to run pools for spent rods that will explode if not forever cooled (see WIPP, New Mexico).
40 years ago this month 90,000 eco-fans heard the Musicians United for Safe Energy Concerts over 5 nights in Madison Square Garden. Some 200,000 rocked our rally at Battery Park City.
Three Mile Island had earlier poured radiation into central Pennsylvania. TMI’s owner denied the melt-down, the emissions, the health impacts.
But after the concerts I visited local farms, met the families, consulted their doctors.…and veterinarians… The feds had long since predicted a reactor accident could wipe out an area the size of Pennsylvania and kill thousands.
At kitchen tables I heard awful tales of death and disease, of stillborn infants, dying children, Down’s Syndrome, dead animals and orchards. I held a dog born with no eyes, saw a cat that couldn’t stand, horses that couldn’t breed, a pile of dead wild birds. The Baltimore News-American confirmed the stories, as did Dell/Delta’s Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation (now free on line), and others.
In 1996, in Kiev and Russia, I heard far more/worse stories from Chernobyl survivors. I will not return to Japan, where I’d joined giant marches demanding Fukushima not be built on seismic faults washed by tsunamis.
Over nearly a half-century of activism I’ve never met a No Nuker who denies climate change. Saving our eco-balance remains everywhere a major motivation to shut all nuke reactors before the next one blows up.
But now the come-lately genius Corey Booker tells us we’re all Climate Deniers.
He might’ve joined the debate with dignity and respect. But since any of the three falling-down Trump-run nukes in his own state (where I have children and grandchldren) could at any time render the entire east coast a radioactive ruin, filled with human agony and ecological horror, let’s just call him what he is: a Holocaust Denier.
Harvey Wasserman coined the phrase “Solartopia” and helped with “No Nukes.” His The People’s Spiral of US History will soon be at www.solartopia.org. He hosts California Solartopia at KPFK-FM in Los Angeles and Green Power & Wellness at www.prn.fm.
September 20, 2019
Posted by Christina MacPherson |
election USA 2020 |
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