Amazing that they can pretend that this thing is “non profit”. Backed by nuclear lobbyists like Rod Adams, and with board members like Lenka Kollar (Director of Business Strategy at NuScale Power where she is working to bring NuScale’s small modular reactor to market through business plan development)
Generation Atomic asks the public for donations, and if you donate, they’ll supply a shirt for you to publicise the nuclear industry, on the March For Science on 22 April.
Advocating For Nuclear Energy — There’s An App For That, Forbes, James Conca, 6 Apr 17 There’s a new App that helps you advocate for nuclear energy. Named Atomic Action, it’s from a non-profit grassroots start-up, called Generation Atomic, that specializes in door-to-door canvassing operations and gamifying nuclear advocacy……
The developer, uCampaign, is a pioneer in gamifying advocacy, successfully creating and deploying similar tools for issues and political campaigns in the 2016 elections. Gen A’s team is taking Atomic Action public tomorrow, April 5th. Those interested will be able to download the app beginning tomorrow in Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store, free of charge…….
When a Gen A volunteer knocks on a door, they present potential supporters with an entirely digital experience on a handheld or mobile device. On the screen are facts about three main benefits of nuclear energy:
– Jobs & Economy
– Affordable Energy
– Environment
Volunteers allow potential supporters to self-select issues through Gen A’s tailored digital platform. Following the conversation, canvassers send the new supporters a text message invitation to download the Atomic Action app.
Supporters even earn points by sharing content, contacting legislators, attending meetings, and recruiting new supporters. The engine for this campaign was rooted at the campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University. Gen A has established two officially-recognized student chapters at each university. Thus far, of the thousands of people Gen A has had a conversation with, 53% sign up to support nuclear…….
The nuclear industry is vilified in the press, scorned by green activists, and ignored by politicians…..But it cannot seem to pierce the unfair image that has been painted by irrational – and baseless – fear……..Above all, the industry must wrest control of the green message.
It has already been a tough year for those who want bipartisan leadership on climate change.
President Trump’s recent executive order is intended to unwind much of the Obama administration’s work on climate change. Trump wants to cut funding by a third for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has a major role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and he appointed Scott Pruitt, who has openly questioned the reality of climate change, to lead EPA.
But even in the face of hostility for climate action from the Republican leadership in Washington, there are signs of positive change within the party.
Seventeen Republican lawmakers – including Pennsylvania Congressmen Ryan Costello, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Patrick Meehan – just introduced the Republican Climate Resolution. It states that it is “a conservative principle to protect, conserve, and be good stewards of our environment.” It also calls for Congress to commit to economically viable solutions to climate change………
This House resolution on climate change is the latest sign that more Republicans are changing their tune on this and other environmental protection issues. Earlier this year, nine Republicans broke with their party on a vote to repeal an Obama-era rule to protect waterways from coal mining runoff. And 11 Republicans voted against a repeal of a rule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas industry.
It is little wonder that Republicans are increasingly willing to buck special interests on the issue. Lawmakers are seeing more and more climate change-related impacts in their home districts. The economic opportunities provided by climate action are enormous. And their constituents are calling for solutions.
That is certainly the case in Pennsylvania……….
It was a Republican state senator from Delaware County, Ted Erickson, who sponsored the Climate Change Act of 2008, which calls for state impact assessments and a climate change action plan. A Republican chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Ronald Castille, wrote the 2013 opinion upholding the Environmental Rights Amendment of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
The House resolution does not make specific policy recommendations for preventing future climate disruptions. And more signers are needed before the caucus will have the votes necessary to command the respect it needs. But this is real progress.
Costello, Fitzpatrick, and Meehan recognize that everyone has much to gain if we act on climate change, regardless of political affiliation. Let’s hope they convince more of their GOP colleagues to join them. And those of us who live in other districts represented by Republicans can do our part by asking them to join this resolution.
The U.S. Energy Department says the pond is a few years away from the end of its life span, and pumping will have to stop since the pond has almost reached its capacity.
The federal government monitors and pumps groundwater from beneath the Shiprock uranium mill tailings site in northwestern New Mexico as part of a long-term project aimed at cleaning up the area.
Mark Kautsky with the DOE’s Office of Legacy Management recently toured the site near the Arizona-New Mexico state line with a group of students from Arizona.
“The water level has come up the point where that pond is just about full,” he told the students from Shonto Preparatory School.
Over the next couple of years, the pond will be evaporated and its liner will be replaced, the Gallup Independent reported (http://bit.ly/1jl8YBA).
Kautsky said the community of Shiprock should not be affected since its drinking water is piped from miles away and farmers in the area get their irrigation water diverted from the San Juan River about 10 miles (16 kilometers) upstream.
The mill tailings disposal site is located behind a locked fence on a ridge behind the Shiprock Fairgrounds and past the Navajo Engineering Construction Authority.
Families live in mobile homes within several hundred yards (meters) of the site, and yellow signs attached to the fencing display warnings in Navajo not to drink the pond’s water.
The disposal site sits on top of a former mill that processed more than 200 tons of uranium ore a day from mines in Cove, Arizona, and other nearby locations.
The mill operated from 1954 through 1968. The buildings and equipment were torn down in the years immediately after the operation ceased and initial cleanup of the site took place from 1975 throughout 1980.
The massive rock covering of the uranium tailings was built in 1986 to prevent the escape of radon gas.
Kautsky said it was safer to leave the tailings in place than to move them.
“If you start picking up all of this material and hauling it out of here through the community there would be a lot of potential for accidents to happen,” he told the students.
The Energy Department began long-term oversight of the disposal site in 1991. Federal officials have said there are over 500 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the country. Navajo territory spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
The Energy Department has four legacy management locations on the Navajo Nation: the Shiprock site; disposal sites in Mexican Hat, Utah, and Tuba City, Arizona; and a former processing site in Monument Valley, Arizona.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working with responsible parties and implementing settlements that provide funding to assess and clean up about 40 percent of abandoned uranium mines on Navajo land. Linda Reeves, a regional project manager with the agency, said the EPA is in the early stages of its work.
Workers incorrectly opened and shut certain valves, causing water to flood from a massive storage tank to an area of the reactor known as the torus. The torus plays a role in depressurizing and cooling down the reactor in case of a serious accident.
“This was a breakdown in the process that shows lack of adherence to procedure,” according to a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He said there were no immediate safety concerns.
At noon on Friday, Pilgrim operators were flushing pipes in the reactor’s cooling system in preparation for an upcoming refueling. They opened a valve on the torus without first closing the valve on the water storage tank. Water being drained into the torus, setting off an alarm in the control room.
“This volume of water placed the torus level above the administrative limit for readiness should an unplanned event occur,” a spokesman for plant owner Entergy Corp. told the Cape Cod newspaper. “Station personnel appropriately responded to close the valves and processed and filtered the water from the torus back to the condensate storage tanks.”
Friday’s flood was the second recent serious incident involving operator error. On March 27, workers triggered the wrong switch, causing the temporary shutdown of a coolant injection system that is essential to cool the plant in a severe emergency.
Federal regulators in 2015 labeled Pilgrim as one of the three worst performers in the country and placed under increased oversight for safety violations and unplanned shutdowns.
Soon thereafter, Entergy announced it would close Pilgrim permanently in mid-2019 due to poor market conditions and increased operational costs. The closure will remove 680 megawatts of capacity from the New England power grid.
There have been a number of problems and violations at the aging nuclear power plant in recent years. Pilgrim has reportedly logged $40 million in annual losses.
Since Trump came to power, the American supreme court has now ruled that a government employee does NOT have protection of the first amendment (freedom of speech). Jeff Ruch executive director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) who describes PEER as a “shelter for battered staff” said government workers have fewer rights with freedom of speech than a incarcerated person in a penitentiary.
If you are wondering what the big picture is in this story, it stifles a whistle blower’s resolve to engender the hidden facts in the safety of nuclear, medicine, air travel or any other industry where the government has their foot in the door. Some people may not give a damn what happens in America but this impacts on every man, woman and child on this planet. https://www.facebook.com/groups/344452605899556/
By THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARDAPRIL 2, 2017 It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”
Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.
Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.
In a matter of weeks, President Trump has taken dozens of real-life steps that, if they are not reversed, will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.
His attempt to de-insure millions of people who had finally received healthcare coverage and, along the way, enact a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been put on hold for the moment. But he is proceeding with his efforts to defang the government’s regulatory agencies and bloat the Pentagon’s budget even as he supposedly retreats from the global stage.
These are immensely dangerous developments which threaten to weaken this country’s moral standing in the world, imperil the planet and reverse years of slow but steady gains by marginalized or impoverished Americans. But, chilling as they are, these radically wrongheaded policy choices are not, in fact, the most frightening aspect of the Trump presidency.
What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. …….
In the days ahead, The Times editorial board will look more closely at the new president, with a special attention to three troubling traits:
1 Trump’s shocking lack of respect for those fundamental rules and institutions on which our government is based……
Study claims cancer deaths up since startup of Salem nuclear plants, By Bill Gallo Jr. | For NJ.com 1 Apr 17, LOWER ALLOWAYS CREEK TWP. — A new study claims cancer death rates in Salem County have risen higher than the state average since the startup of three nuclear power plants there.
“Something like this that affects so many people is worth further study,” said Joseph J. Mangano, executive director of the Ocean City-based Radiation and Public Health Project.
“Current death rates in Salem County exceed the state rates for both genders, all age groups, all races and ethnic groups and all major types of cancer,” the study says.
Mangano, in the self-authored study, says that cancer death rates in Salem County have risen from about 5 percent below the state average in the 1983-1986 period to 20 percent above the average in the 2011-2014 period. He also says that non-cancer death rates have risen from about 2 percent above the state average in 1983-1986 to more than 23 percent above in the 2011-2004 period.
According to Mangano’s research, the incidences of cancer went from 1 percent below the state average in 1998-2001 to more an 9 percent above the average in 2011-2014.
The three nuclear reactors operated by PSEG Nuclear at Artificial Island in Lower Alloways Creek Township — Salem 1, Salem and Hope Creek — comprise the second-largest nuclear generating station in the U.S. in terms of power output.
Salem 1 began producing electricity in 1976, Salem 2 in 1980 and Hope Creek in 1986.
“We are not advocating for the shutdown of nuclear power plants,” Mangano said. “There well may be other factors that account for this cancer rise … a combination of factors.”
The region is also home to refineries, chemical plants and Superfund sites……..
Mangano says one of his major concerns are what he says are releases from nuclear plants.
“We are concerned that nuclear plant emissions may be contributing to the increase (on the cancer and death rates),” Mangano said. “We believe strongly that the focus should be placed on the new cancer risk factors and one of them that should be studies is the emissions from the Salem/Hope Creek plants.”……http://www.nj.com/salem/index.ssf/2017/04/study_says_cancer_deaths_up_since_salem_nuclear_pl.html
Monsanto’s Superfund Secret https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/monsanto-roundup-production-superfund-sites-radioactiveBart Elmore April 1, 2017 The world’s most widely used herbicide, Roundup, has faced intense scrutiny in recent weeks, since documents surfaced revealing a close relationship between Monsanto, the creator of Roundup, and EPA officials tasked with regulating herbicide use in the United States. One email exchange included a Monsanto executive boasting that an EPA official had told him he “should get a medal” if he could “kill” an agency investigation into the herbicide.
This news was troubling, considering the fact that the World Health Organization recently declared Roundup’s active ingredient “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The 2015 WHO announcement raised major alarms because roughly 89 percent of American corn and over 90 percent of all soybeans produced in the United States—millions of tons of which are exported every year to dozens of countries around the world—are genetically engineered to be herbicide resistant, Roundup Ready being a preferred variety. These findings gave new scientific fodder to many GMO opponents who have long alleged that the world’s food supply is awash in dangerous chemicals.
But while new emails raise serious questions about the safety of consuming food contaminated with Roundup, historical documents reveal troubling issues further upstream. I obtained files from the EPA via a Freedom of Information Act request that tell the story of Roundup’s origins at a Superfund hazardous waste site. These documents show that there are disturbing environmental and human health concerns at the beginning, not just at the end, of Roundup’s lifecycle.
Monsanto’s weedkiller comes from beneath the soil. The active ingredient in Roundup is glyphosate, which is ultimately derived from elemental phosphorous extracted from phosphate rock buried below ground. Monsanto gets its phosphate from mines in Southeast Idaho near the town of Soda Springs, a small community of about 3,000 people. The company has been operating there since the 1950s.
I went to visit last summer, and what I found was startling. I stood just beyond a barbed-wire fence at about nine o’clock at night and watched as trucks dumped molten red heaps of radioactive refuse over the edge of what is fast becoming a mountain of waste. This dumping happened about every fifteen minutes, lighting up the night sky. Horses grazed in a field just a few dozen yards away, glowing in the radiating rays coming from the lava-like sludge. Rows of barley, for Budweiser beer, waved in the distance.
When phosphate ore is refined into elemental phosphorous, it leaves a radioactive by-product known as slag. Monsanto’s elemental phosphorous facility, situated just a few miles from its phosphate mines, produces prodigious quantities of slag that contains elevated concentrations of radioactive material. For years, this slag was actually sold to the town of Soda Springs and nearby Pocatello, and people built their homes and roadways out it. In the 1980s, however, the EPA conducted a radiological survey of the community and warned that citizens might be at risk from elevated gamma ray exposure. The study concluded that if business continued as usual in Soda Springs, within four decades “the probability of contracting cancer due to exposure from elemental phosphorous slag” would “be about one chance in 2,500 in Pocatello and one chance in 700 in Soda Springs.”
The EPA, facing serious pressure from Monsanto and community members who feared what this study might mean for property values, later agreed to submit the report for review, and ultimately recommended the initiation of new studies. In the meantime, the mayor of Soda Springs worked with the city council to ban the further sale of slag in the community.
I spoke with a radiological scientist who studied the slag issue in the area for many years, and he assured me that homeowners in Southeast Idaho are exposed to only small levels of gamma radiation that should not be harmful—currently the EPA’s official position.
Nevertheless, a website created by the Phosphorous Slag Technical Work Group—a coalition that includes Monsanto, EPA officials, local public health agents, and other mining concerns—offers advice to Idahoans, including the helpful tip that if dangerous contamination is found, homeowners might consider “spending less time in the basement.”
Monsanto’s Soda Springs plant is currently an active Superfund site, having achieved that toxic waste site designation in 1990. Harmful onsite pollutants include cadmium, selenium, and radioactive radium all of which can cause serious health problems in humans in high concentrations.
In 2013, over two decades after EPA declared Monsanto’s Soda Springs plant a Superfund site, the EPA explained that pollution problems continued to plague the facility: “The remedy for the Monsanto site is currently not protective because concentrations” of “contaminants of concern” continued to leach into groundwater. In a five-year review of the site, the EPA found that some harmful chemicals were increasing in plumes migrating from the plant. The agency offered a disheartening conclusion: “Monitoring trends indicate that the groundwater performance standards will not be met in the foreseeable future.” This was the last five-year review of the site to date. Currently, the EPA’s website for the facility reports that groundwater contamination is “not under control” even as elemental phosphorous production continues.
In the past, Monsanto has also had elevated levels of mercury emissions at the plant. Citing an EPA study, Keith Riddler of the Associated Press reported that in 2006 “about 684 pounds of mercury was emitted in [Idaho], 659 of that from Monsanto Co.’s Soda Springs phosphate processing plant in eastern Idaho.” In 2015, the company reported mercury compound emissions topping 875 pounds. For context, the third- and fourth-largest emitters of mercury compounds among power plants in the United States—which the Obama administration targeted for serious mercury emissions reductions under the Clean Power Plan—put out 823 pounds and 782 pounds respectively in 2013.
Toxic chemicals are not confined to Monsanto’s processing facility. In 2003, the EPA began Superfund remediation assessments at three closed Monsanto mine sites nearby—Ballard, Henry, and Enoch Valley—due in large part to selenium contamination in mining debris.
According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, since 1996, “an estimated 600 head of livestock (including horses, cattle, and sheep) have died after ingesting plants or surface water containing high concentrations of selenium.” Some of these incidents took place at mine sites owned by other phosphate companies in the area, such as FMC, but Monsanto mines have contributed to this casualty count over the years.
Radioactive waste piles, groundwater pollution, mercury emissions, and poisoned livestock: these are just some of the supply-side costs of producing Roundup, an herbicide that Monsanto dubs the lynchpin of its “environmentally responsible weed control program.”
The prospects for resolution of these problems are bleak. President Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, is an avowed adversary of the agency he now heads, and he has given clear signs that he intends to annul regulations designed to curb polluting practices. If the EPA’s relationship with corporations like Monsanto was already cozy, it is likely only to become more so. In other words, Monsanto is not likely to face renewed federal pressure to clean up its act anytime soon.
As Monsanto looks to seal a multibillion-dollar merger with German rival Bayer, its power to spread Roundup around the world is due to expand in the years ahead. And if the past is any indication, Monsanto’s message to the world will be one of agricultural salvation through biotechnology. But communities that are the target of these corporate promises should take heed. The sustainable future Monsanto hawks remains tied to a toxic Superfund past that is not even past.
Bart Elmore is an assistant professor of environmental history at the Ohio State University and a Carnegie Fellow at New America.
If Congress sends Trump this legislation, our new president will be granted the tools and the greenlight from Congress to unravel the Iran deal and put us back on the path to a war with Iran. Unless Democratic senators stand up against this bill soon, opponents of the Iran nuclear deal may wipe away Obama’s diplomatic legacy with Iran faster than even they thought was possible.
Why Give Trump The Keys To War With Iran?https://www.niacouncil.org/give-trump- keys-war-iran/When Trump won the elections, many worried that it could lead to war between the United States and Iran, due to his desire to kill the Iran nuclear deal. Now, thanks to the U.S. Senate, we may be one step closer to this nightmare scenario: The Senate is poised to pass legislation that will place President Trump’s trigger-happy finger on the ignition switch of a deadly conflict with Iran.
Introduced to coincide with the annual American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC) conference that concludes today, the Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017 (S. 722) would give Trump new tools to violate the Iran nuclear deal. Perhaps most shockingly, a small group of Senate Democrats have joined Republicans to grant Trump some of the most dangerous authorities that would put the U.S. and Iran back on the path to war. The list of sponsors includes many of the usual suspects ― the consummate Iran hawks who worked to block Obama’s diplomacy with Iran and many of whom have sworn to “rip up” the nuclear deal: Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Bob Corker (R-TN), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Ted Cruz (R-TX). But the list of sponsors also includes Ben Cardin (D-MD) ― who opposed the nuclear deal but has said the U.S. should still abide by it ― as well as Bob Casey (D-PA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Chris Coons (D-DE), and Joe Donnelly (D-IN) who supported the deal.
Yet now these senators are signed onto legislation that requires non-nuclear certifications that would block the president from removing sanctions that are set to expire in later stages of the nuclear agreement. Why would Democratic senators who support the nuclear deal sign on to a measure that would violate the agreement? Because, they have argued, the bill gives the president a case-by-case waiver for the deal-killing provisions. That means that these senators are trusting Donald Trump with new deal-killing authorities and abdicating to him whether the U.S. honors the nuclear deal or “rips it to shreds.”
The bill also enables Trump to re-impose sanctions on Iranian entities that were de-listed pursuant to the accord. And it mandates sanctions that would broadly target any person or entity that ― knowingly or unknowingly ― contributes to Iran’s ballistic missile program, including universities that conduct research and banks that process payments for the government. This would amount to a trickle-down reimplementation of sanctions on much of Iran ― and a violation of the nuclear accord. Finally, the bill would designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an elite branch of the Iranian military, as a terrorist group ― a major escalation. The IRGC is a highly problematic organization that has benefitted from years of a sanctions economy at the expense of Iran’s people. It is not unusual for individuals within the IRGC to be sanctioned if they are believed to have connections to Iran’s ballistic missile program. However, designating a foreign military branch as a terrorist organization is an extremely dangerous provocation that Pentagon leaders in multiple administrations have advised against. AIPAC has urged for the IRGC designation for the past decade, yet Barack Obama and even George W. Bush resisted. But now, with Donald Trump in the White House, AIPAC is pressing ahead with its proposal.
If this legislation is passed the U.S. can expect a negative response from Tehran that will undermine moderates in Iran’s upcoming May elections and empower anti-U.S. hardliners. The ranking member of Iran’s Parliament, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, has already signaled that Iranian lawmakers will consider designating the U.S. Army as a terrorist organization in retaliation. It is naïve to assume this exchange will be limited to words. U.S. special forces and IRGC units are currently fighting ISIS on the same front in Mosul. Despite some evidence that IRGC units targeted U.S. troops with IEDs during the height of the Iraq War, there have been no such incidents since U.S. soldiers reentered Iraq in the summer of 2014. In effect, the IRGC and the U.S.-backed coalition have agreed to stay out of each other’s way as they fight a mutual enemy in ISIS. This bill could change that reality by removing any incentive for Iran not to attack U.S. troops in Iraq, forbidding any cooperation with IRGC-backed militias against ISIS, and placing our Iraqi allies in a diplomatic catch-22. It is for this very reason that back in 2007, President Bush’s Pentagon opposed an SDGT designation for the IRGC.
With thousands of AIPAC supporters on Capitol Hill to lobby senators on behalf of the bill, there is a strong chance that this bill could obtain filibuster-proof levels of support. If every Republican supports the bill, and just one more Democrat signs on, AIPAC’s bill will hit 60 votes. If that happens, and Congress sends Trump this legislation, our new president will be granted the tools and the greenlight from Congress to unravel the Iran deal and put us back on the path to a war with Iran. Unless Democratic senators stand up against this bill soon, opponents of the Iran nuclear deal may wipe away Obama’s diplomatic legacy with Iran faster than even they thought was possible. This piece originally appeared in The Huffington Post.
When the President Is Ignorant of His Own Ignorance, NYT Thomas B. Edsall MARCH 30, 2017 How prepared is our president for the next great foreign, economic or terrorist crisis?
Westinghouse bankruptcy leaves costly nuclear mess for Southern utility customers https://www.facingsouth.org/2017/03/westinghouse-bankruptcy-leaves-costly-nuclear-mess-southern-utility-customersBy Sue SturgisMarch 31, 2017Federal and state officials who oversee nuclear power can’t say they weren’t warned that financial disaster was a very real possibility should they approve plans for new nuclear reactor construction projects at Southern Company/Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Georgia, and SCANA/SCE&G’s Summer Plant near Jenkinsville, South Carolina.
Clean energy and consumer watchdog groups were outspoken in opposition to the projects, which involved a new type of reactor known as the AP1000. The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) testified extensively with expert witnesses before the Georgia Public Service Commission to warn about the high risks of investing in expensive new nuclear power and to encourage turning instead to clean, affordable alternatives like energy efficiency, and SCE&G ratepayers intervened to try to block construction in South Carolina.
But in 2009, federal and state regulators approved two AP1000 reactors for each of the sites. While the Obama administration offered $8.3 billion in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees to help finance the construction of the Vogtle reactors, the Georgia legislature passed a law allowing Southern Company to finance them through a scheme called “construction work in progress” that forces ratepayers to pay in advance, with a charge of about $10 on the average customer’s monthly bill. South Carolina also has a law in place allowing prepayment; as a consequence SCE&G customers have faced nine rate hikes since 2009 driven in large part by the project.
Construction got underway at the two sites — but then came the predicted delays and cost overruns. With the first new reactors initially set to come online this year, the Vogtle project is only about 36 percent complete, and construction at Summer is only about one-third complete. And while state regulators have approved costs of around $14 billion for each project, Morgan Stanley has estimated the final bill at about $19 billion for the Georgia reactors and $22 billion for the South Carolina project. Ratepayers in Georgia have already forked over about $3.9 billion for the reactors, while those in South Carolina have paid about $4.5 billion. Meanwhile, the utilities are guaranteed a 10 percent return in profits, even in the case of cost overruns.
Now this week Westinghouse — the Pittsburgh-based division of Japanese tech conglomerate Toshiba and the reactors’ main contractor — cited those massive cost overruns in declaring bankruptcy. The move leaves the projects in limbo and utility customers in Georgia and South Carolina facing one of two unpleasant scenarios: paying billions for nothing, or continuing to pay even more for reactors whose completion remains uncertain.
Critics are reminding regulators that they should have seen this coming. “Time and time again, our legitimate concerns and consumer-protecting recommendations were ignored,” said SACE Director Dr. Stephen Smith. “Now there is a lot of wringing of hands and surprise by those with the power to protect utility customers claiming that no one could have predicted this. The reality is, they shouldn’t have ignored the predictions they were presented over and over again, and they should not ignore the predictions now.”
‘No option that doesn’t affect rates’
At the time the projects were first proposed, worried consumer advocates pointed to the nuclear power debacle of the 1970s and 1980s, when utilities nationwide canceled about 100 planned reactors due to cost overruns. In the end, ratepayers and taxpayers shelled out about $40 billion for those abandoned projects — over $200 billion in today’s dollars. Forbes magazine called it “the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.”
What will happen next in Georgia and South Carolina remains uncertain.. On a conference call this week, SCANA told investors that 5,000 workers would continue working on the Summer site for 30 days while the company considered its options. SCANA CEO Kevin Marsh said the company’s “preferred option” is to finish the reactors while its “least preferred option is abandonment.” Meanwhile, Georgia Power said it is looking at “every option.”
During a SACE conference call this week about the implications of the Westinghouse bankruptcy, Peter Bradford, a former member of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and adjunct professor at Vermont Law School, said Georgia and South Carolina utility customers should expect another rate hike if the reactors eventually go into service — or if they are abandoned.
Liz Coyle, executive director of the consumer advocacy group Georgia Watch, pointed out on the call that the costs ratepayers are being forced to bear for the unfinished reactors present a “tremendous burden” for low-income households — one that is unlikely to ease any time soon.
“We see no option ahead that doesn’t affect rates customers will be paying,” she said.
Smith, Coyle and others are calling on utility regulators in Georgia and South Carolina to conduct a careful, transparent analysis of what’s in the best interest of ratepayers and proceed accordingly — and to remain unswayed by corporate interests that want to press ahead at any cost. If the companies and regulators do decide to proceed with construction, Smith said, ratepayers’ financial exposure should be capped.
Smith is also urging regulators to ground all future decisions in a basic concept of fairness: that no utility customer should be forced to pay for any facility for which a company cannot offer a reliable price estimate and timetable.
“If companies choose to build electric generation facilities with unknown costs and schedules, they should have shareholders carry the risk,” Smith said. “We must call on regulators to do their job and look out for customers’ interests.”
Groups Make Last Ditch Effort To Stop NY Nuclear Plant Bailout, WAMC 1 Apr 17Midnight Friday is not just the deadline for the New York state budget to be finished. It’s also the date for an $8 billion state bailout of some upstate nuclear power plants to begin. More than 80 local government leaders are making a last ditch effort to stop a plan that they say will cost electric utility ratepayers billions of dollars.
In the summer of 2016, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Public Service Commission announced that they’d reached a deal to provide nearly $8 billion to help Exelon, which owns two upstate nuclear power plants, buy a third one and keep them all running for another twelve years.
Cuomo announced the deal to cheering plant workers in Oswego, who would all be able to keep their relatively high-paying jobs for another dozen years.
“And keep it producing nuclear power for years and years to come,” Cuomo said, in August of 2016…….
The downside of the deal, say opponents, is that electric rates will go up for many rate payers in vast regions of New York.
More than 80 local government leaders, mainly from municipalities who would also have to pay the higher electric rates, came to the Capitol to ask for a moratorium on the deal, until there’s more time to study the consequences. Carl Chipman, supervisor of the town of Rochester, in Ulster County in the Hudson Valley, says the plan was enacted in a hasty and secretive manner, with no chance for the public to weigh in.
“We urge Governor Cuomo to halt the planned Public Service Commission mandate,” said Chipman, “Until a comprehensive and transparent evaluation of the available alternatives is conducted and made available for public comment.”
Jean Kessner, Syracuse City Councilor At-Large, says her city will be paying part of the estimated $2 billion in additional electric fees to help finance the bail out.
“It is not fair,” Kessner said. “If somebody sent you a bill for something you didn’t buy, you wouldn’t pay it.”
The plan has also angered some environmentalists. The New York Public Interest Research Group is one of the organizations opposed to the bailout. NYPIRG’s Blair Horner says nuclear power is not the best bridge fuel to use in achieving greener energy sources.
“It’s multi billions of dollars the state is going to spend to give to one company to keep Vietnam War-era power plants open for twelve years, and then close them down,” Horner said. “We think the money is better invested in 21st century, renewable and safe technology.”
Climate Converts: The Conservatives Who Are Switching Sides on Warming
It’s hardly being noticed, given the current political atmosphere in Washington. But a small yet growing number of Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians are starting to push for action on climate. Yale Environment 360 BY MARC GUNTHER• MARCH 30, 2017 As liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans pull farther apart in the long-running, increasingly polarized debate over climate change, Jerry Taylor is a rare bird — an advocate who has switched sides.
For two decades, as an energy and environment expert with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council and the libertarian Cato Institute, Taylor challenged the scientific consensus on climate change and argued that decarbonizing the energy sector would impose intolerable costs on the U.S. economy. “I was an enthusiastic and convinced champion of the idea that climate change is an overblown problem,” he says.
Today, as the founder and president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, Taylor embraces the scientific consensus on climate change and argues that a carbon tax is “the most efficient and least costly means of achieving greenhouse gas emissions reductions and hedging against climate risk.” He makes the conservative case for carbon pricing in footnoted position papers, on Capitol Hill, and to the media, with unbridled passion. “If you believe in free markets, how are those ends advanced by burning the planet?” he asks.
Taylor has joined a small but growing cohort of Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians who are bucking Republican Party orthodoxy on climate — even as President Trump has moved briskly to roll back the Obama administration’s major climate initiatives. Loosely organized and sometimes called the eco-right, they include GOP stalwarts James Baker and George Shultz and the former treasury secretary Hank Paulson; Ted Halstead of the Climate Leadership Council, a newly formed research and advocacy group that supports a revenue-neutral carbon tax; Eli Lehrer of the R Street Institute, a right-leaning Washington think tank that supports carbon taxes; and Lynn Scarlett, a former Bush administration official and director of the libertarian Reason Foundation who now directs global public policy at The Nature Conservancy. ……..http://e360.yale.edu/features/climate-converts-the-conservatives-who-are-switching-sides-on-climate-change
From the mining of uranium, nuclear testing, production and the disposal of Cold War weapons, Colorado had its hand in the nuclear defense of our country.
Here are some of Colorado’s nuclear secrets:
Uranium mining
The radioactive metal is used in the production of nuclear weapons, and Colorado had plenty to offer.
Uravan in western Montrose County was a mining town turned Superfund site. The Uravan mill was once part of the Manhattan project that produced uranium for the first atomic bomb.
The town once boasted a population of 800 (in the 1950s and 60s) and offered several amenities that any small towns of the era would have, including a swimming pool. But what many in the town didn’t know at the time, was that the uranium they were pulling out of the nearby hills was slowly killing them.
The town was abandoned in the 1980s and turned into a Superfund site. All of the former buildings were destroyed or moved out of the area.
Was there ever a nuclear detonation in Colorado?
Yes, there was.
Project Rullison was an underground 40-kiloton nuclear test near the Garfield County town of Parchute (then called Grand Velley).
The 1969 blast was part of a series of “peaceful” engineering tests to see how atomic weapons could be used to liberate natural gas from underground regions.
Rocky Flats
Perhaps one of the most well-known relics (and most contaminated sites) of the Cold War, Rocky Flats was a former nuclear weapons production facility near Denver.
The site operated from 1952 to 1992 and was the source of contamination issues throughout the decades. Cleanup began in the 90s and now nearly 4,000 acres of the site is set aside as a wildlife refuge. All of the former buildings from the time it was in operation have been destroyed.
Sold! FitzPatrick acquisiton complete, WRVO, 1 Apr 17, ByPAYNE HORNINGThe transfer of the FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant to its new owner is officially complete. Exelon, which owns and operates the nearby Nine Mile Point Nuclear Facility Exelon, announced Friday that its negotiations with Entergy are done. The company bought the Oswego County plant last summer for $110 million.
FitzPatrick had been hemorrhaging money because of competition from natural gas. Entergy said the plant was losing the company about $60 million annually, so they moved to decommission it. But New York regulators stepped in to prevent its closure, passing a comprehensive clean energy plan that will the state’s financially struggling nuclear plants, including FitzPatrick, with subsidies that are scheduled to kick in tomorrow. …….
the subsidy program supporting the deal may be in jeopardy. The New York State Assembly has proposed a one-house budget that would halt the program until they can hold a hearing with state officials. And several pending lawsuits also threaten the plan.http://wrvo.org/post/sold-fitzpatrick-acquisiton-complete
7pm Central Time (8pm ET, 6pm MT, 5pm PT) UTC – 5 From NRC & DOE Deregulation to Techno-Fascist Billionaires Going Nuclear, Plus a Few Songs from Atomic Cabaret REGISTER
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