US to build $1.6B Idaho facility for warships’ nuclear waste,WNTV.com 6 Dec 16 By KEITH RIDLER Associated Press BOISE, Idaho (AP) – A $1.65 billion facility will be built at a nuclear site in eastern Idaho to handle fuel waste from the nation’s fleet of nuclear-powered warships, the Navy and U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday.
Officials said the new facility is needed to keep nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines deployed.
The new construction will be at the Naval Reactors facility on the Energy Department’s southeastern Idaho site that covers about 890-square-miles of high-desert sagebrush steppe. The area also includes the Idaho National Laboratory, considered the nation’s primary lab for nuclear research.
“This action will provide the infrastructure necessary to support the naval nuclear reactor defueling and refueling schedules to meet the operational needs of the U.S. Navy,” the Department of Energy said in a statement.
Officials said site preparation is expected to begin in 2017 with construction of the facility likely to start in 2019, creating 360 on-site jobs. The facility is expected to start operating in late 2024. The Department of Energy formally announced the plan with publication of what’s called a record of decision in the Federal Register. The record of decision made public Tuesday was signed last month by Admiral James F. Caldwell Jr., director of the U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.
The record of decision concludes a lengthy and public environmental process that also looked at continuing using outdated facilities at the eastern Idaho site or overhauling them…..
The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, a joint Navy and Energy Department organization, has been sending spent Navy fuel to the Idaho site since 1957. It’s transported by rail from shipyards. Dahl declined to describe security at Navy site.
“Appropriate security will be provided for the new facility,” he said.
Officials also declined on Tuesday to describe security measures at the rest of site, but access roads have armed checkpoints and visitors must leave passenger vehicles far from facilities and ride buses into secured areas.
Nuclear waste coming into Idaho prompted lawsuits when state leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s thought the site was becoming a permanent nuclear waste repository. The lawsuits culminated in a 1995 agreement, then a 2008 addendum, limiting such shipments and requiring most nuclear waste to be removed from the federal site by 2035. The deal applies to the Navy’s spent nuclear fuel.
Under the agreement, fuel waste coming to the new facility after 2035 will only remain for the six years it takes to cool in pools. After that, it’s required to be put in dry storage and taken out of Idaho. However, the nation has no repository for spent nuclear fuel at this time, so where it will go is not clear…..http://www.wbtv.com/story/33941726/us-to-build-16b-idaho-facility-for-warships-nuclear-waste
How far will Trump go to gut U.S. climate policies? http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060046632Evan Lehmann, E&E News reporter ClimateWire: Monday, December 5, 2016 President-elect Donald Trump would have to undertake a herculean political effort to reverse his administration’s responsibility to reduce greenhouse gases, and he might not be able to count on Republicans in Congress for help.
In promising to rescind the Clean Power Plan, Trump is clipping a regulation off at the stem, but the roots would survive to pester his administration with the threat of lawsuits and the likelihood of future rules governing the release of carbon dioxide at U.S. firms, according to experts.
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases are an “air pollutant,” it set in motion a series of actions that could now require Trump to convince the courts that global warming is not adversely affecting humans and the Earth — after the same court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, came to the opposite conclusion in 2012.
That effort would occur if Trump’s U.S. EPA tried to reverse the so-called endangerment finding of 2009, a tick-tock in the bureaucratic record that gave rise to a cascade of regulations on greenhouse gases over cars, power plants, natural gas wells and more in the future. The finding is EPA’s trigger to regulate. Continue reading →
As nuclear plants age, risks rise,telegram.com Christine Legere, Dec 4, 2016 Dec 4, 2016“………COLLAPSING COMMUNITIES
Fifty years after the U.S. launched a bold plan to invest in nuclear power, most of the promises of clean, inexpensive energy have failed to materialize. Plants often cost far more than projected and took years longer to build — driving up rates for consumers. Many plants were never completed, instead becoming a debt utility companies passed on to ratepayers.
Meanwhile, the direst fears of anti-nuclear activists also have not played out. Although there are rashes of safety incidents, the most serious U.S. incident being the 1979 partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island, there has never been the kind of catastrophe seen at the Chernobyl plant or, more recently, at the Fukushima reactor.
But skeptics such as Gunter say risks are still with us. As reactors age, they are more prone to accidents caused by worn-out parts. In some cases, operating licenses are being renewed far beyond a plant’s planned shelf life, meaning expensive upgrades and extra-vigilant maintenance — things not always tended to by strapped utilities.
Of even greater concern to the nuclear watchdogs: the vast and growing piles of spent nuclear fuel. There is still no known way to store used fuel long-term that guarantees it won’t leak during the tens of thousands of years some components remain radioactive. The 76,000 metric tons of dangerous nuclear waste that already have been generated now sit on plant sites across the country. To give that number perspective, if existing radioactive fuel assemblies were stacked end-to-end and side-by-side, they would stand more than two stories high and cover a football field.
And there is another impact — one that perhaps even the most ardent of anti-nuclear activists did not envision. Across the country, communities expanded and grew dependent on the nuclear plant in their backyards. Now, as many of those plants cut back or are decommissioned, economic vitality is gutted. Jobs and middle-class lifestyles disappear. Housing prices collapse. Tax bases dwindle, undermining everything from school budgets to road repairs……
IN THE RED
Across the country, other communities also have found it hard to recover from the loss of revenue when their nuclear plants close…….
PENT-FUEL FEARS
Plymouth may be able to mitigate the financial loss of Pilgrim, but, like other sites of shuttered plants across the country, the town will be left with several hundred tons of nuclear waste in the form of highly radioactive spent fuel.
Spent fuel is nuclear fuel that has been used and removed from the reactor core. The Government Accountability Office calls the hot and highly radioactive stuff one of the most hazardous substances created by humans. Some components stay radioactive for tens of thousands of years
The country’s nuclear plants are adding about 2,000 metric tons of waste each year to the 76,000 metric tons already sitting at 72 plants across the country.
“If not properly contained or shielded, the intense radioactivity of spent fuel can cause immediate deaths and environmental contamination, and in lower doses can cause long-term health hazards such as cancer,” the accountability office said in a study of spent fuel done in 2012 at the request of Congress.
Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, Congress mandated that the federal government open a permanent geological storage facility for nuclear waste from civilian facilities and begin accepting waste by 1998. Plans for such a repository at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, ran into heavy opposition and were halted in 2010. To date no alternative has been found.
More than 70 percent of the spent fuel in the U.S. currently remains at reactor sites, squeezed into tightly racked storage pools that were designed for much smaller loads.
Boron panels, which prevent fission from occurring in the fuel pool, are deteriorating at many sites, including at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station. To address the problem, operators shift the hottest fuel in the pools away from the degraded panels. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission currently views the issue as one it will monitor.
Although it does not solve the problem of waste storage in communities across the country, the only way to reduce the danger from spent fuel is to move it to dry casks, mammoth steel-lined concrete structures, says David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
LEFT WITH A ‘NUCLEAR DUMP’
Mayor Al Hill says Zion knew what it was signing up for in 1973, when it agreed to host a nuclear power plant: The trade was 267 acres of lakefront property for $18 million in annual revenue. The city did not agree to storing nuclear waste indefinitely
We have environmental concerns and everybody in the U.S. should have environmental concerns about these rods being so close to Lake Michigan,” Hill says. “We’re stuck with a nuclear dump.”
In July, U.S. Rep. Robert Dold, an Illinois Republican, filed a bill at the urging of Hill and other regional leaders to pay communities storing the nuclear waste. Under the Stranded Nuclear Waste Accountability Act, Zion, which stores more than 1,000 metric tons of spent fuel, would get about $15 million annually. Congressmen from other host communities have signed on to the bill.
The Department of Energy is working on a plan for consent-based interim storage. Andrews County in West Texas, with a total population of under 15,000, has endorsed a proposal submitted by Waste Control Specialists. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing the company’s application for a facility that would be ready by 2021 to store 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel from closed commercial reactors.
Holtec International is working on an application for a storage site in southeastern New Mexico and expects to submit its proposal to federal regulators by year’s end.
DEMANDING ANSWERS
Populations near U.S. reactors, meanwhile, want to know if their proximity poses a health threat. The NRC hired the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study in 2010 but halted the work last year because of costs, expected to be about $8 million.
U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has long fought for tighter industry controls, said the agency gambles with the public’s health.
“The NRC blames budgetary constraints for ending the study, but what price do residents pay for living near operating nuclear facilities?” he wrote in a statement. “We should know that answer.”
Plant owners, however, hope to keep lucrative reactors online despite their age. Most already have extended their reactor licenses for another 20 years beyond the initial 40 they were allowed to operate. And at least two already have indicated their intent to go for another extension, which would allow the plants to continue until they are 80 years old. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes the decision on those extension requests.
In a recent study on extending nuclear plant licenses, the Office of Nuclear Energy said the question that must first be answered for the public is “How safe is safe enough?
“Even with continuous improvements in safety and performance, nuclear power is still perceived by the public as not safe enough,” the report noted. “Nuclear power does involve high-consequence events like those at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima that are rare but can be catastrophic.”
Gunter says further license renewals should not even be considered. He calls the current plants “antiquated” and no longer economically viable without government subsidy.
James Mattis warned that land-based nuclear missiles pose false alarm danger
Trump’s pick for next US defence secretary has questioned need for US’s ICBMs, which are ready to launch within minutes in event of an attack, Guardian, Julian Borger, 4 Dec 16, James Mattis, the retired general Donald Trump has chosen to be the next US defence secretary, has questioned the need for land-based nuclear missiles on the grounds they represent a higher risk than other weapons of being launched on a false alarm.
Mattis raised doubts about US nuclear orthodoxy in a statement to Congress in 2015, raising the issue over whether nuclear deterrence should continue to rest on a “triad” of weapon types: land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles and warheads carried by air force bombers. During the campaign, Trump vowed to proceed with current plans to modernise all three legs of the triad, with an estimated price tag of half a trillion dollars over 20 years.
In his remarks to the Senate about US national security priorities, Mattis struck a more sceptical tone. He asked whether the US should declare that the sole purpose of its nuclear arsenal was to deter nuclear attack, a statement that would narrow its purpose and potentially lower the number of warheads required. The present US nuclear posture states that, in some circumstances, the current, 4,500-warhead arsenal has a role in deterring conventional or chemical weapon attack.
“The nuclear stockpile must be tended to and fundamental questions must be asked and answered,” Mattis told the Senate armed services committee. “We must clearly establish the role of our nuclear weapons: do they serve solely to deter nuclear war? If so we should say so, and the resulting clarity will help to determine the number we need.”
“Is it time to reduce the triad to a diad, removing the land‐based missiles? This would reduce the false alarm danger,” Mattis said.
The US has about 400 ICBMs on a “hair-trigger alert”, ready to launch within minutes if early warning systems show an incoming attack. Several former defence secretaries and generals have argued that they should be taken off this state of readiness because of the danger of false alarms, especially in the age of cyber warfare. Some former officials, including William Perry, defence secretary in the Clinton administration, have argued ICBMs should be scrapped altogether.
Perry said he knew Mattis well, having worked for the marine, then a colonel, for three years during Perry’s time at the Pentagon. The two have since taken part in conferences and panel discussions on nuclear weapons and defence.
“He’s very intelligent, a very serious thinker, nothing frivolous at all about him,” Perry told the Guardian. “My view of him is that he will be a solid addition to Trump’s team. He brings an experience in defence and national security that is lacking.”
“More importantly,” Perry said, “he is a man who says what he thinks. He’s not easily intimidated. He is known for speaking truth to power and that will be a great asset in this administration.”
More terrifying than Trump? The booming conspiracy culture of climate science denial,Guardian, Graham Readfearn, 6 Dec 16,
Conspiracy websites and hyperpartisan media outlets are building huge online audiences who want to hear climate change is a hoax “…….
Climate change is an issue he [Alex Jones]covers regularly on his shows, where he has interviewed climate science deniers such as Christopher Monckton (a familiar name to Australians given his multiple speaking tours here), Marc Morano and James Delingpole.
While it’s easy to dismiss the conspiracy culture pushed by Jones as pseudoscientific rubbish, it is not so easy to dismiss the size of the audience he has been building. Jones’s website gets 57m page views per month – double where it was six months ago.
According to analytics site Social Blade, the Alex Jones YouTube channel has 1.8m subscribers and just racked up its one billionth (that’s not a typo) video view. (For comparison, the BBC News YouTube channel has 992,000 subscribers.)
Jones’s Infowars site is part of an ecosystem of hyperpartisan media outlets that insist climate change is a hoax. Like Jones, that ecosystem is rapidly building a receptive online audience.
Those sites can now reach hundreds of millions of people with headlines insisting that human-caused climate change is a hoax, that global warming has stopped or that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is good.
Rather, the story claimed that thousands of scientists had come forward to declare that climate change was a hoax. The writer was a guy running a website in Los Angeles who worked for eight years for the UK conspiracy theorist David Icke.
Icke thinks the moon might be some sort of spaceship, that the world is controlled by a globalist illuminati and, yes, that climate change is a hoax. Icke is a regular guest on Infowars.
Infowars will often source material from Breitbart – the website that used to be run by Trump’s campaign chairman and soon-to-be chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
Many of Breitbart’s most popular climate change items are written by Delingpole, a British polemicist. Guess what he thinks of climate change?…..
Breitbart is also building its audience. According to data from SimilarWeb, the site now gets 168m page views per month, doubling its reach in the past six months……
I’m happy to admit the online growth and reach of climate science denialists and conspiracy theorists terrifies me. Why?
The problem is not that these sites exist but that not enough people seem to know the difference between actual news, fake news, partisan opinion and conspiratorial bullshit. One of those people is the president-elect of the United States.
Either that, or people don’t even care to differentiate between fake and real, especially if what they read taps into their own prejudices.
There is a concerted attempt to cut sensible climate policy off at the knees by building a popular online movement against the science itself.
For decades, the fossil fuel industry and so-called “free market” ideologues at conservative thinktanks have misled the public on the science and the risks of climate change.
Now, the decades of material produced by that climate science denial machineryis finding a new audience. Those talking points are being reheated and screamed, in FULL CAPS.
So what’s the answer? No one seems to know but much appears to be in the hands of Google and Facebook.
Global Warming Research in Danger as Trump Appoints Climate Skeptic to NASA Team, The Intercept, Alleen BrownDecember 2 2016, ONE OF NASA’S most high-profile projects has been to track historical average global temperature. In January 2016, the agency released data that showed 2015 had been the hottest year on record. “Today’s announcement not only underscores how critical NASA’s Earth observation program is, it is a key data point that should make policy makers stand up and take notice — now is the time to act on climate,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a statement at the time. Since then, NASA’s monthly updates on temperature delivered a steady dose of dread as month after month was declared the hottest recorded.
Now Donald Trump’s first NASA transition team pick is Christopher Shank, a Hill staffer who has said he is unconvinced of a reality that is accepted by the vast majority of climate scientists: that humans are the primary driver of climate change. Shank previously worked for Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman who played a key role in dragging out debates on the basic nature of climate change at a time when the science is settled and action is urgent.
Shank has criticized the type of scientific data NASA regularly releases. As part of a panel in September 2015 at Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes, he said, “The rhetoric that’s coming out, the hottest year in history, actually is not backed up by the science — or that the droughts, the fires, the hurricanes, etc., are caused by climate change, but it’s just weather.”…..
Shank’s appointment dovetails with threats from Trump’s advisors to scrap NASA’s research on climate change. In an October op-ed for Space News, Trump campaign advisors Robert Walker and Peter Navarro stated, “NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies.”…….
Shank’s longtime boss Smith, the Republican head of the House Science, Space, and Technology committee, led an effort to slash NASA’s earth science budget this year and in 2011 requested an investigation into the “politicization of NASA.”
Standing Rock: US military veterans back North Dakota pipeline protests, ABC News 3 Dec 16, US military veterans plan to build a barracks at a protest camp in North Dakota to support thousands of activists in frigid conditions opposing a multi-billion-dollar pipeline project near the Standing Rock Native American reservation.
Key points:
Veterans have started arriving at Oceti Sakowin camp, aim to form a wall in front of police to protect the protesters
Native Americans and protesters say pipeline threatens water resources and sacred sites
Number of protesters in recent weeks has topped 1,000
Veterans volunteering to be human shields have been arriving at the Oceti Sakowin camp near the small town of Cannon Ball, where they will work with protesters who have spent months demonstrating against plans to route the Dakota Access Pipeline beneath a lake near the Sioux reservation, organisers said.
The Native Americans and protesters said the $US3.8 billion pipeline threatened water resources and sacred sites.
Some of the more than 2,100 veterans who signed up on the Veterans Stand for Standing Rock group’s Facebook page are at the camp, with hundreds more expected during the weekend.
Tribal leaders asked the veterans, who aim to form a wall in front of police to protect the protesters, to avoid confrontation with authorities and not get arrested.
The plan was for veterans to gather in Eagle Butte, a few hours away, and then travel by bus to the main protest camp, organisers said, adding that a big procession was planned for Monday.
Protesters began setting up tents, tepees and other structures in April and the numbers swelled in August at the main camp.
Joshua Tree, 42, from Los Angeles, who has been visiting the camp for weeks at a time since September, said he felt pulled to the protest.
“Destiny called me here,” he said at the main camp.
Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Pussy Riot petition Obama
Adding to the momentum of the protests, more than 150 musicians including members of Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Moby and Tegan & Sara have signed an open letter calling on President Barack Obama to “revoke the permits” for the pipeline construction.
British recording artist Kate Nash organised the petition in order to take a stand against what she describes as the “extremely aggressive tactics” used by police against the activists.
The letter, addressed to “President Obama, Army Corps of Engineers, and Department of Justice”, compared the treatment of activists by police to “inhumane methods used during WWII”.
“We call on the White House to deny the easement now, revoke the permits, remove the DAPL construction workers, and order a full environmental impact statement,” the letter said.
“Know that the world’s eyes and the eyes of the music community are on you now as you continue to disregard the treaties you have with the Native American people and act barbarically towards them.”
Nash told Vice News’ Noisey wesbite that now more than ever it is important for musicians to be using their influence for political ends.
“Donald Trump is to become president, people connected to Trump are heiling in meetings, there’s a normalisation of white supremacists. It’s a very important time for us to be holding America to account,” she said.
Former nuclear site in Washington state is ‘causing workers to develop terminal illnesses’ – and it won’t be cleaned up for another 50 more years (photos)
The Hanford Site in Washington state was used to produce plutonium from 1943 through the end of the Cold War
Washington River Protection Solutions is now cleaning up the site
Workers at the site say they are being exposed to radioactive fumes
A watchdog group says that three workers have died as a result of exposure to nuclear waste on the job
Just this year, 61 workers have allegedly been exposed to toxic materials
But the government contractor says that everyone who has been checked out for possible exposure has been cleared to return to work
A former nuclear site in Washington state is poisoning workers and threatening the health of those who live around it, according to a new investigation.
Some experts have called the former Hanford nuclear plant ‘the most toxic place in America’ and ‘an underground Chernobyl waiting to happen’.
The site, located in a rural area along the Columbia River, was commissioned by the Manhattan Project to produce plutonium for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
It remained an active nuclear site until the end of the Cold War, when it was decommissioned and the Department of Energy subcontracted Washington River Protection Solutions to start the clean-up.
But current and former workers at the site have told NBC that the underground containers holding the site’s nuclear waste are leaking, and that they have been exposed to the toxic fumes because the company has not given them the right safety equipment.
Their health issues include dementia, nerve damage, memory loss and respiratory problems.
Watchdog group Hanford Challenge says that at least three workers’ deaths have been linked to exposure at the site, but officials with Washington River Protection Solutions have refused to admit they are putting their workers in danger. Those workers are Gary Sall, Deb Fish and Dan Golden.
But several studies show that’s not the case and just this year, 61 workers have allegedly been exposed to toxic materials.
No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons Chicago Tribune, Alex WellersteinSpecial to The Washington Post, 1 Dec 16,
Sometime in the next few weeks, Donald Trump will be briefed on the procedures for how to activate the U.S. nuclear arsenal, if he hasn’t already learned about them.
All year, the prospect of giving the real estate and reality TV mogul the power to launch attacks that would kill millions of people was one of the main reasons his opponents argued against electing him. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” Hillary Clinton said in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. Republicans who didn’t support Trump — and even some who did, such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — also said they didn’t think Trump could be trusted with the launch codes.
Now they’re his. When Trump takes office in January, he will have sole authority over more than 7,000 warheads. There is no failsafe. The whole point of U.S. nuclear weapons control is to make sure that the president — and only the president — can use them whenever he decides to do so. The only sure way to keep President Trump from launching a nuclear attack, under the system we’ve had in place since the early Cold War, would have been to elect someone else.
When the legal framework for nuclear weapons was developed, the fear was about not irrational presidents but trigger-happy generals. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, passed with President Harry Truman’s signature after nine months of acrimonious congressional hearings, firmly put the power of the atomic bomb in the hands of the president and the civilian components of the executive branch. It was a momentous and controversial law, crafted in the months following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with an eye toward future standoffs with the Soviet Union…….
Eventually, the brass adopted the idea that, when it came to nuclear matters, they were at the president’s beck and call. It was not generals’ responsibility to make the order; it was their responsibility to carry it out.
That the president would be the only person competent to use nuclear weapons was never challenged. Even asking the question would throw the entire system into disarray, as Maj. Harold Hering learned in 1973. Hering was a 21-year Air Force veteran who was decorated for his flying in Vietnam before being sent for training as a nuclear missile squadron commander. He had been taught that officers had an obligation to disobey illegal orders. So when he was told how to launch a nuclear attack, he asked what seemed like a simple question: How could he be sure that an order to launch his missiles was lawful? How could he be sure, for example, that the president wasn’t insane? Instead of an answer, he got the boot: an aborted promotion and an administrative discharge for “failure to demonstrate acceptable qualities of leadership” and for indicating “a defective mental attitude towards his duties.”
The Air Force’s problem, in short, is that once a serviceman starts down the rabbit hole of doubt, he becomes an unreliable second-guesser — and suddenly he is one of the few people who can decide whether nuclear weapons are used.
The procedure for ordering a nuclear attack involves more than one person: The president cannot literally press a button on his desk and start World War III. There is no “nuclear button” at all. Instead, the U.S. nuclear command-and-control system is bureaucratically and technically complex, stretching out to encompass land-based missile silos, submarine-based ballistic and cruise missiles, and weapons capable of being dropped from bombers. The chain of command requires that the president order the secretary of defense to carry out a launch; the secretary serves as the conduit for implementation by the military. There are succession policies in place so that the procedure can be continued in the event of the death or incapacitation of either the president or the secretary of defense — or their designated successors.
Most details of how a nuclear war would be started are classified, because an enemy who knew enough about the system could come up with ways to complicate or defeat it. What is known is that an aide is always following the president, carrying at least one large satchel (often two) known as the “nuclear football,” reportedly containing information about nuclear attack possibilities and how the president could verify his identity, authenticate orders and communicate with the military about implementing them……..
It might be worth resurrecting this debate , if we take seriously the idea that presidents — any of them, much less Trump — should not have the legal authority to conduct arbitrary and unilateral nuclear war. Perhaps now, decades after the end of the Cold War, we are past the moment when we need to entrust that power in a single person. One can imagine a law that would allow the president to use nuclear weapons in the face of imminent danger, the sort of situation in which a matter of minutes or even seconds could make a difference, but would enact formal requirements for outside consensus when more options were on the table. It would not require a full renunciation of the possibility of a first-strike nuclear attack (something the United States has never been willing to make) but might add some reassurances that such decisions would not be made unilaterally.
I could fill this newspaper with the names of Trump staffers who have emerged from such groups:
Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it,Guardian, George Monbiot, 1 Dec 16 Many of his staffers are from an opaque corporate misinformation network. We must understand this if we are to have any hope of fighting back against them. Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them.
Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.
I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.
For years, Ebell and the CEI have attacked efforts to limit climate change, through lobbying, lawsuits and campaigns. An advertisement released by the institute had the punchline “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution. We call it life.”
Charles and David Koch – who for years have funded extreme pro-corporate politics – might not have been enthusiasts for Trump’s candidacy, but their people were all over his campaign. Until June, Trump’s campaign manager was Corey Lewandowski, who like other members of Trump’s team came from a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP).
This purports to be a grassroots campaign, but it was founded and funded by the Koch brothers. It set up the first Tea Party Facebook page and organised the first Tea Party events. With a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, AFP has campaigned ferociously on issues that coincide with the Koch brothers’ commercial interests in oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals.
Clearwater sues NY over nuclear bailout, Ploughkeepsie Journal Jon Campbell , Albany Bureau1 December 1, 2016 ALBANY – A multi-billion-dollar, ratepayer-backed bailout for three upstate nuclear power plants is facing another challenge in the courts.
Hudson River Sloop Clearwater filed a lawsuit Wednesday in state Supreme Court in Albany seeking to overturn or significantly scale back the state-approved subsidy, which is meant to keep the three plants — including the R.E. Ginna Nuclear Generating Station in Wayne County — up and running.
The lawsuit, which also lists Rockland County organic farm Goshen Green Farms as a plaintiff, claims the bailout will create “unreasonable and unjust” electricity rates. It also accuses regulators of not providing enough time for public comment.
Opposing this subsidy will demonstrate to the country that nuclear power is not where our dollars need to be spent,” Manna Jo Greene, Clearwater’s environmental action director, said in a statement. “Many of these nuclear plants are aging, leaky and dangerous.”
Clearwater, a Beacon-based group, was co-founded by the late folk musician and activist Pete Seeger.
New trouble for Exelon nuke bailout as Rauner balks, Chicago Business, By STEVE DANIELS , 1 Dec 16, The calendar has turned to December, and a sudden wind has chilled the prospects for Exelon’s nuclear bailout.
The deal Exelon announced yesterday with Gov. Bruce Rauner appears to be teetering today. Rauner’s staff has found problems it didn’t anticipate now that the bill language purporting to carry out the governor’s agreement with the Chicago-based energy company is out.
Among the issues “not agreed to” are “loose cap language” that doesn’t appear to protect business ratepayers the way Rauner envisioned when Exelon announced that businesses would pay no more than 1.3 percent more than the rates they pay today to finance an annual $200 million-plus subsidy to keep open two money-losing nuclear plants Exelon has moved to close, according to a source close to the negotiations.
Rauner also discovered a provision on prevailing wages that he accused archrival House Speaker Michael Madigan of inserting into the bill, this source said.
Madigan’s spokesman, Steve Brown, said the prevailing wage language has been in the legislation for months. “Once again, they’re grasping at straws and they’re not quite getting the grip,” he said.
Rauner’s camp is characterizing the provisions as “poison pills.” But the source said the governor still is committed to the “framework” he negotiated with Exelon.
How this will impact floor votes scheduled for today on what was before now a rapidly moving compromise is unclear.
ByBRIAN MACKEY Exelon says it finally has a deal to subsidize nuclear power plants in Clinton and the Quad Cities.
On Wednesday afternoon, after weeks of intense negotiating, ComEd and Exelon put out a news release saying they had a deal thanks to Gov. Bruce Rauner. But the administration didn’t publicly support the bill at a House hearing. And it hasn’t responded to repeated media inquiries about the governor’s stance.
That has some state lawmakers on edge. Linda Chapa LaVia is a Democrat from Aurora and heads the House Energy Committee.
“It has happened in the past where we get to a point where it gets to the governor’s desk, and then we take a wrong direction,” she says. Consumer groups also have reservations about the measure. Susan Satter is with the Illinois Attorney General’s office. Her boss opposed previous versions of the Exelon deal, and Satter says she isn’t ready to weigh in on the latest proposal.
“This is a wildly complicated effort, and we just simply have not had the time to understand how it’s going to work,” Satter said.
Over the decade the plan would be in effect, ComEd says its average residential customers would pay no more than 25 cents a month related to the subsidy.
December 1 is the final day the General Assembly meets this year. Exelon also claims it’s the last chance to keep the Clinton and Quad Cites plants open.
30 November 2016 The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has been given 30 days to pay a $140,000 civil penalty proposed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for fire watch violations at the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama. The violations relate to “numerous” occasions in May 2015 when five workers contracted to provide fire watch services failed to conduct roving fire watch patrols as required under NRC regulations. The patrols were required to compensate for fire protection equipment that was out of service at the time……..http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-NRC-fines-TVA-for-Browns-Ferry-violations-301
The reports are rolling in: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead. If you read the obituaries, most news outlets seem to agree that the cause of death was simple: the election of Donald Trump, who railed against the deal during his campaign. But the pundits have the story wrong.
The real story is that an unprecedented, international uprising of people from across the political spectrum took on some of the most powerful institutions in the world, and won.
Sure, Donald Trump – and Bernie Sanders’ – campaign focus on the TPP elevated US awareness about the pact, a wide-reaching international agreement negotiated by the Obama administration. But no single politician killed this deal.
If not for the constant pressure from activists and civil society groups, the TPP would have become law long before the recent US election. But thanks to intense, creative and strategic organizing from the day the text was finalized in 2015, there was never a majority of support for the pact in Congress. That’s why it was never implemented.
The TPP is a massive global deal that was negotiated in secret with hundreds of corporate advisers given special access while the public was locked out. It would have handed multinational corporations like Walmart, AT&T and Monsanto extraordinary new powers over everything from the wages we earn, to the way we use the internet, to the safety of the food we feed our children.
Perhaps most shockingly, the TPP would have allowed corporations to sue governments before tribunals of three corporate lawyers, essentially creating an unaccountable, shadow legal system outside of our traditional courts to punish governments that pass laws that corporations don’t like.
A simple agreement to lower tariffs and other anticompetitive barriers to trade wouldn’t have been so controversial. But big business couldn’t resist the urge to abuse the extreme secrecy surrounding the TPP negotiations to stuff the pact with a wishlist for policies they knew they could never pass through traditional means.
That unchecked greed was the TPP’s demise. What emerged from the closed-door negotiations was more than 5,000 pages of policy so clearly against the public interest that it awakened a firestorm of opposition that swept the globe, and in the end, sent the TPP to its grave.
While negotiations were still under way, tens of thousands of people joined mass protests in Japan, Peru, Australia, New Zealand and other Pacific Rim nations. They pushed back on the TPP’s worst provisions, held their leaders’ feet to the fire and dragged the talks out for years. This early wave of international resistance changed the game: it bought time for activists to organize an effective opposition in the US, which was seen as all-important in the global calculus of the Washington-led deal. If Congress did not ratify the TPP, it would die.
In the meantime, an unlikely alliance was forming. Activists, farmers, labor unions, tech companies, environmentalists, economists, nurses, LGBTQadvocates, libertarians and librarians mounted an intense opposition to the “fast track” legislation that the White House needed to rush the final agreement through Congress. The coalition that formed grew from dozens, to hundreds, to literally thousands of organizations, many working together for the first time, ranging from Black Lives Matter to Doctors Without Borders to the Tea Party.
We marched in the streets. We rallied outside the hotels and resorts that hosted the secret negotiations. Cancer patients protesting about the TPP’s impact on healthcare access engaged in civil disobedience and were arrested. Internet freedom activists mobilized thousands of websites for online protests that bombarded lawmakers with emails and phone calls. Academics picked apart leaked versions of the deal, and coordinated with advocates to launch a campaign to educate the public on its flaws.
Hard-hitting activism and public outcry slowed the TPP down, and as a result, dragged it fully into the spotlight just as the US headed into a contentious election season.
It wasn’t a coincidence that Donald Trump saw the TPP as a useful stump speech talking point. Widespread suffering caused by previous trade deals laid a strong foundation for skepticism, making President Obama’s devotion to the Wall Street-friendly deal, and Hillary Clinton’s previous support for it, a huge liability for the Democratic party. As more and more people learned about what the TPP really meant for them and their families, it became politically toxic, to the point that no major party candidate for president could openly support it.
This was a sign that the TPP was on its deathbed, but with the threat of a last-minute push during the “lame duck” session after the election, we needed to be sure. So we targeted undecided lawmakers with protests and flew inflatable blimps outside their offices. We harnessed the power of music to draw huge crowds across the country to “Rock Against the TPP” concerts and teach-ins, taking our opposition to the TPP into the cultural mainstream. We tuned out the chorus of voices that told us that corporate power would always prevail in the end. And finally, we claimed our victory.
Now more than ever, it’s crucial that Americans understand how the TPP was really defeated. An organized and educated public can take on concentrated wealth and power and win. With four years of new battles ahead of us, this is a story we must commit to memory, and a lesson we must take to heart.
NRC Begins “Wide-Ranging” Inspection of Pilgrim Nuclear Plant http://www.powermag.com/nrc-begins-wide-ranging-inspection-of-pilgrim-nuclear-plant/ 11/28/2016 | Thomas Overton The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is beginning a comprehensive three-week inspection of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, Mass., as a result of the plant’s repeated performance deficiencies, the agency said in a November 28 statement.
The inspection, planned for more than a year, is part of the NRC’s heightened oversight process, begun in September 2015 after the agency moved Pilgrim into the Multiple/Repetitive Degraded Cornerstone Column of its oversight Action Matrix. That action was the result of repeated problems with unplanned shutdowns and owner Entergy’s “continuing weaknesses” in addressing the underlying issues, the NRC said at the time.
This is the third and largest inspection that is taking place as part of the greater oversight of Pilgrim. According to the statement, the inspectors will look particularly at the plant’s human performance and safety culture, “which enables employees to freely and openly raise safety concerns.” They will also look at the plant’s procedures and its corrective action program. Plans call for the inspectors to be on site for three weeks in December and January.
“This inspection represents the most comprehensive element of our increased scrutiny at the Pilgrim nuclear power plant,” said NRC Region I Administrator Dan Dorman. “Our team will work hard to closely examine the adequacy of the plant’s recovery plans, as well as actions that Entergy has taken to address safety performance issues at the facility. Just as importantly, the inspectors will assess whether those activities have yielded tangible and lasting improvements.”
The NRC said it will issue a report on the inspection within 45 days after it concludes early next year, as well as a formal list of corrective actions Entergy will need to take to transition Pilgrim back to normal oversight levels. That list may be long, given that the plant has continued to experience unplanned shutdowns well into 2016 and that the two previous inspections both identified additional green findings (indicating very low safety significance).
