DW: Germany to Become World’s Most Energy-Efficient Country

Germany to Become World’s Most Energy-Efficient Country | Germany | Deutsche Welle | 29.04.2007

Germany to Become World’s Most Energy-Efficient Country
Gabriel
Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel tackles the “inconvenient truth” of pollutionThe German Environment Ministry this week unveiled a set of highly ambitious proposals that would lead Germany to become the world’s most energy-efficient country in the coming years.

Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel told the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, that the time had come to act. “We have all witnessed the dangers of climate change in the last few months. We only saw winter in the calendar in Germany,” he said, alluding to last year’s unusually mild winter.

Gabriel reminded the MPs that Germany needs to improve its energy efficiency by three percent per year in order to meet the EU target of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 20 percent below 1990-levels by 2020.

But the Environment Minister went further, proposing an eight-point plan that includes cutting Germany’s CO2 emissions by 40 percent within 13 years. Gabriel said he wanted to enlist industry’s help in pursuing this ambitious goal.

“We should set ourselves the goal of making Germany the most energy-efficient country in the world,” Gabriel told the MPs in Berlin.

Efficiency from the bottom up

DBBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: German railways: the better way to travel, says Gabriel

The action plan also calls on ordinary citizens to contribute to the fight against global warming, and envisions an 11-percent reduction in electricity use by 2020. This alone would save 40 million tons of CO2, Gabriel said.

The Social Democrat minister also encouraged Germans to take the train more often as part of the effort. Gabriel told the German tabloid Bild Zeitung on Thursday that he plans to further subsidize Germany’s extensive railway system to lure travellers away from inexpensive short-haul flights with airlines such as Germanwings or Ryanair.

“We must ensure that train services are able to compete with air travel,” Gabriel said, and suggested that train tickets should qualify for a sales tax break that would allow the Deutsche Bahn AG to reduce ticket prices for consumers.

“There is no tax on airline fuel, but the rail operator must pay the full value-added tax on the sale of long-distance tickets,” Gabriel complained to the Bundestag. “That is unfair and cannot remain that way.”

Green Power

coal powerBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Despite the green talk, Germany plans to build more coal power plants

Gabriel also unveiled plans to modernize power stations across Germany. He said he wants to double the number of combined heat and power plants that trap and reuse heat generated in power production instead of releasing it.

The German government under Chancellor Angela Merkel has agreed to generate over a quarter of its power from environmentally friendly sources by 2020, according to Gabriel. Wind turbines, photovoltaic (solar) panels and biofuels are some of the most common forms of green energy, and they have become a formidable market force in Germany.

But Gabriel criticized the government’s tacit approval of plans to build almost 30 new coal power plants on German soil, and he further attacked the conservative camp for advocating nuclear power as a “green” alternative. Nuclear power plants emit near-zero greenhouse gases, but nuclear waste and the possibility of a meltdown pose a different kind of environmental threat.

Investing in efficiency

drynessBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Three billion euros is a lot, but still better than constant droughts

Gabriel’s program would cost the German government three billion euros ($4.1 billion) over the next three years, according to the Environment Ministry’s own estimates. The program aims to slash 270 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Despite the country’s long tradition of progressive green policies, Germany currently emits more than one billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, making it the world’s sixth-largest polluter.

A German economic think-tank recently calculated that the consequences of unfettered cliamte change would cost Germany more than 130 billion euros by the middle of the century. Compared to this sum, Gabriel’s request for an additional three billion euros seems like a negligable investment in the future.

Global deadlock

Environmental protection groups welcomed Gabriel’s plans, which they described as ambitious, but cautioned that words had to be followed by action.

But Gabriel warned that Germany’s best efforts would be useless if the world did not follow suit. Chancellor Merkel has made climate change a high priority at the June G8 summit in Germany, but US President Bush, leader of the world’s heaviest-polluting nation, has been reluctant to sign on to greenhouse gas regulations.

“If we succeed in breaking the deadlock between the United States and some industrial countries on the one hand and developing countries on the other, the chances don’t look bad,” Gabriel said. “I am quite optimistic.”

Budget woes plague heart of U.S. wind-research effort

KnoxNews:

Budget woes plague heart of U.S. wind-research effortBy TODD NEFF
April 28, 2007

Solar is sexier. Hydrogen gets the hype, and it’s not even a renewable energy.

But energy experts know only wind – a power source so old and familiar the Phoenicians had it licked – can satisfy 20 percent of U.S. electricity needs in the foreseeable future.
President Bush’s 2006 Advanced Energy Initiative cited the 20 percent figure as a goal, saying the country should “dramatically increase the use of wind energy.” Without major advances in wind and related technology to boost output, reliability and transmission while cutting costs, experts say such a leap may never happen.

The heart of America’s wind-research effort lies just south of the Boulder County, Colo., at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s National Wind Technology Center. A walk around the facility gives reason to fret.

Years of flat or declining budgets and congressional earmarking for such projects as community wind turbines in Michigan, Massachusetts and other states have left the center with outdated equipment and staffing at roughly half that of historical highs.

The wind center’s blade-testing facility is too small for modern blades, its gear-testing machine is too small for modern gears and its researchers are mainly focused on near-term problems to support an industry struggling to keep up with demand.

Yet, on one hand, the slow flow of past research dollars to NREL has been a blessing. It spared researchers the public scrutiny inherent in a big-budget, Apollo-style program, and gave them time to work out kinks in one turbine before moving on to the next, said Robert Thresher, the National Wind Technology Center’s director.

On the other hand, Thresher said, “I guess I feel a little bit constrained to hit all the issues at the level we’re at.”

Sandy Butterfield, the Technology Center’s chief engineer and a longtime Boulder resident, was more blunt.

“We could double our budget and still not do it justice,” Butterfield said.

Wind amounts to about 0.5 percent of all U.S. electricity generation – compared to about 50 percent for coal, 18 percent for natural gas and 19 percent for nuclear, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says.

Getting to 20 percent, analysts estimate, would cost about $500 billion and require technological advances on several fronts, from blade technology to gearboxes to deepwater offshore turbines and new electrical-transmission systems.

For their investment, Americans would get a source of electricity that, once manufactured and installed, emits none of coal’s neurotoxic mercury, acid-rain-causing sulfur dioxides or ecosystem-altering nitrogen oxides. It could cut U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions on the order of 5 percent.

There’s broad consensus that aggressively developing non-fossil energy is vital to energy security and the planet’s health. Al Gore and others advocate a federal investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency and other efforts rivaling the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project to drastically cut carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

But federal research is subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns, Thresher said, such that one can throw only so much money at a problem.

Plus, he noted, “There’s a war on.”

Even without a war on, the federal wind-research budget has been flat for a decade. In 2007, it’s $44 million, about 70 percent of which ends up at NREL. For 2008, the Bush administration has proposed about $40 million.

Wind technology has come a long way since 200 B.C., when the Persians were grinding grain using windmills with woven-reed sails.

GE Wind’s 3.6-megawatt offshore turbine blades sweep a diameter of 104 meters, or about the length of a football field including the end zones. In a good breeze, one such machine generates enough power to supply more than 3,000 homes.

Still, wind lacks the panache of solar panels, which, without a single moving part, seem to magically produce electrons. Wind’s lesser status in the public imagination is particularly curious given that wind is solar energy: air stampeding at the whip of the sun’s heat.

The money reflects that. The Bush administration’s 2008 budget request for solar-energy research is $148 million, nearly four times that of wind.

Solar needs money, too, particularly if the quantum breakthroughs required to slash photovoltaic electricity’s cost of 25 cents per kilowatt-hour are to happen. For comparison, electricity from a new coal plant costs 5 cents to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, said John Nielsen, energy program director for Boulder’s Western Resource Advocates. Electricity from old coal plants runs 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, and natural-gas generation is 6 cents to 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, Nielsen said.

Despite solar’s glitter, wind is being installed 20 times faster.

The American Wind Energy Association, in testimony submitted last week to a U.S. Senate appropriations subcommittee, said the 2008 wind-research budget should be $110 million. The biggest chunk, $50 million, would aim to cut costs and boost reliability of rotor blades, sensors, towers and drive trains.

To make wind competitive with coal-fired generation without federal tax subsidies, existing wind turbines must cost 20 percent less than the current 6 cents to 8 cents per kilowatt-hour while delivering 20 percent more energy, Thresher said. That’s been his center’s main focus, he said, to the detriment of longer-term research, particularly in offshore wind, which holds the greatest long-term promise.

More than three-quarters of the U.S. population lives near coasts, where wind could serve local needs. In contrast, the best U.S. land for wind tends to be the emptiest, requiring major investments in the electricity grid.

(Contact Todd Neff at nefft(AT)dailycamera.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)

(Contact Todd Neff of the Daily Camera in Boulder, Co., at www.dailycamera.com.)

Chernobyl reminds us that nukes are NOT green

The Free Press — Independent News Media – Harvey Wasserman

Harvey Wasserman

Chernobyl reminds us that nukes are NOT green
April 28, 2007

Twenty-one years ago this week, lethal radiation poured into the breezes over Europe and into the jet stream above, carrying death and disease around the planet.

It could be happening again as you read this: either by error, as at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, or by terror, as could have happened on September 11, 2001.

Those who now advocate a “rebirth” of this failed technology forget what happened during these “impossible” catastrophes, or refuse to face their apocalyptic reality, both ecological and financial.

Radiation monitors in Sweden, hundreds of miles away, first detected the fallout from the blast at Chernobyl Unit 4. The reactor complex had just been extolled in the Soviet press as the ultimate triumph of a “new generation” in atomic technology.

The Gorbachev government hushed up the accident, then reaped a whirlwind of public fury that helped bring down the Soviet Union. The initial silence in fact killed people who might otherwise have taken protective measures. In downtown Kiev, just 80 kilometers away, a parade of uninformed citizens—many of them very young—celebrated May Day amidst a hard rain of lethal fallout. It should never have happened.

Ten days after the explosion, radiation monitors at Point Reyes Station, on the California coast, detected that fallout. A sixty percent drop in bird births soon followed. (The researcher who made that public was fired).

Before they happened, reactor pushers said accidents like those at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were “impossible.” But…

To this day, no one knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it harmed. But 2400 central Pennsylvanians who have sued to find out have been denied their day in court for nearly thirty years. The epithet “no one died at Three Mile Island” is baseless wishful thinking.

To this day also, no one knows how much radiation escaped from Chernobyl, where it went and who was harmed. Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the late President Boris Yeltsin, and president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, estimates the death toll at 300,000. The infant death and childhood cancer rates in the downwind areas have been horrific. Visual images of the innumerable deformed offspring make the most ghastly science fiction movies seem tame.

Industry apologists have stretched the limits of common decency to explain away these disasters. Patrick Moore, who falsely claims to be a founder of Greenpeace, has called TMI a “success story.” An industry doctor long ago argued that Chernobyl would somehow “lower the cancer rate.”

In human terms, such claims are beneath contempt. As one of the few reporters to venture into central Pennsylvania to study the health impacts of TMI, I can recall no worse experience in my lifetime than interviewing the scores of casualties.

The farmers made clear, with appalling documentation, that the animal death toll alone was horrendous. But the common human symptoms, ranging from a metallic taste the day of the accident to immediate hair loss, bleeding sores, asthma and so much more, came straight out of easily available literature from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There is no mystery about what happened downwind from TMI, only a conscious, well-funded corporate, media and judicial blackout.

At Chernobyl, the experience was repeated a thousand-fold. More than 800,000 (that’s NOT a typo) Soviet draftees were run through the radioactive ruins as “jumpers,” being exposed for 90 seconds or so to do menial clean-up work before hustling out. The ensuing cancer rate has been catastrophic (this huge cohort of very angry young men subsequently played a key role in bringing down the Soviet Union).

In both cases, “official” literature negating (at TMI) or minimizing (at Chernobyl) the death toll are utter nonsense. The multiple killing powers of radiation remain as much a medical mystery as how much fallout escaped in each case and where it went.

The economic impacts are not so murky. Moore’s assertion that TMI was a success story is literally insane. A $900 million asset became a $2 billion clean-up job in a matter of minutes. At Chernobyl, the cost of the accident in lost power, damaged earth, abandoned communities and medical nightmares has been conservatively estimated at a half-trillion dollars, and still climbing.

The price of a melt-down or terror attack at an American nuke is beyond calculation. In most cases, reactors built in areas once far from population centers have now been surrounded by development, some of it bumping right up to the plant perimeters. Had the jets that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 instead hit Indian Point Units Two and Three, 45 miles north, the human and financial costs would have been unimaginable. Imagine the entire metropolitan New York area being made permanently uninhabitable, and then calculate out what happens to the US economy.

There remains no way to protect any of the roughly 450 commercial reactors on this planet from either terror attack or an error on the part of plant operators.

Those advocating more nukes ignore the myriad good reasons why no private insurance company has stepped forward to insure them against catastrophe. Those who say future accidents are impossible forget that exactly the same was said of TMI and Chernobyl.

The commercial fuel cycle DOES emit global warming in the uranium enrichment process. Uranium mining kills miners. Milling leaves billions of tons of tailings that emit immeasurable quantities of radioactive radon. Regular reactor operations spew direct heat in to the air and water. They also pump fallout into the increasingly populated surroundings, with impacts on the infant death rate that have already been measured and proven. And, of course, there is no solution for the management of high-level waste, a problem the industry promised would be solved a half-century ago.

Economically, early forays into a “new generation” of reactors have already been plagued by huge cost overruns and construction delays. At best they would take ten to fifteen years to build, by which time renewable sources and efficiency—which are already cheaper than new nukes—will have totally outstripped this failed technology. Small wonder Wall Street wants no part of this radioactive hype, which is essentially just another corporate campaign for taxpayer handouts.

This past Earth Day an orgy of corporate greenwashing, aided by the always-compliant major media, tried to portray nukes as “green” energy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We will never get to Solartopia, a sustainable economy based on renewables and efficiency, as long as atomic power sucks up our resources and threatens us with extinction.

Twenty-one years ago this week, Chernobyl became something far worse than a mere warning beacon. The radiation it spewed still travels our jet stream, still lodges in our bodies, still harms our children.

Only by burying this failed, murderous beast can we get to a truly green future.

–
Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

Atomic Bulletin: Nuclear power and climate change Roundtable w/Amory Lovins

Nuclear power and climate change | The Bulletin Online

Nuclear power and climate changeIn Progress: 25 April 2007

When considering ways to limit carbon dioxide emissions, experts argue that all options should be considered—including nuclear power. But with nuclear power comes concerns about proliferation, waste disposal, and cost. R. Stephen Berry, the former Special Advisor to the Director of Argonne National Laboratory for National Security, Amory B. Lovins (PDF, 136 KB), the chairman and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, consider the feasibility of nuclear power as a remedy to climate change in the Bulletin Online’s inaugural roundtable.

Go here for the rest of the roundtable

Patrick Moore Transcript

E&ETV

Nuclear: CASEnergy’s Patrick Moore explains move from Greenpeace founder (PR LIE ed…) to nuclear energy advocate
OnPoint, 04/23/2007

As discussions about Yucca Mountain and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership continue on Capitol Hill, nuclear power advocates are pushing this energy source as a viable way to reduce the United States’ consumption of fossil fuels. During today’s OnPoint, Patrick Moore, co-founder of Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy) and founder of Greenpeace, explains his transition from Greenpeace, an anti-nuclear group, to CASEnergy, an organization that supports the implementation and expansion of nuclear power in the United States. Moore addresses proliferation concerns associated with nuclear and explains the technological hurdles that stand in the way of broader implementation of nuclear energy. Moore also discusses the questions surrounding Yucca Mountain and the storage of spent nuclear waste.

watch video

Transcript

Mary O’Driscoll: Welcome to OnPoint. I’m Mary O’Driscoll. Our guest today is Patrick Moore of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition. Thanks for joining us today.

Patrick Moore: Nice to be here Mary.

Mary O’Driscoll: Dr. Moore you were one of the founding members of Greenpeace, an environmental group that is quite decidedly anti-nuclear. But now you’re an environmental consultant and co-chairman of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, a nuclear industry group, or it’s sponsored originally by. And now it’s a group that encompasses a lot of businesses and individuals that support nuclear power. How did your change of heart come about?

Patrick Moore: Well, you know actually the reason we started Greenpeace was because we were against nuclear war and nuclear weapons testing. It wasn’t really a group that started against nuclear energy. And I think we made the mistake early on of lumping the peaceful use of nuclear in with the war-like use of nuclear. And I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t make sense to ban the beneficial uses of a technology just because that technology can be used for evil. I mean otherwise they wouldn’t have harnessed fire. Car bombs are made with diesel oil, fertilizer, and an automobile. We’re not about to ban the useful, beneficial uses of those three things. So I’ve had a change of thinking over the years. Back then, and maybe it was understandable that we made this mistake in logic, as I think it was at the time, but it’s very clear to me that today, in today’s environment of concern for climate change and concern for clean air that nuclear energy satisfies both those concerns. It is both clean from the point of view of air pollution and air pollution from fossil fuels is one of the biggest public health concerns we have in the country and in the world. And it’s also clean from a climate change point of view. It doesn’t emit carbon dioxide like fossil fuels do.

Mary O’Driscoll: OK. We’ll get to that in just a minute. I wanted to note environmental group representatives, by and large, really don’t want anything to do with you. They say that you’re doing this for the nuclear industry’s money and that you really have no environmental constituency to speak of. How do you respond to those kinds of things, those kinds of accusations?

Patrick Moore: Well, just off the top, some very notable environmentalists have supported nuclear energy now and for the same reasons I do. Among those is James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia hypothesis; Stewart Brand, the founder of Whole Earth catalog; Tim Flannery from Australia who is a longtime speaker and thinker on environmental issues, the author of the book “The Weather Makers,” about climate change; Jared Diamond, the author of “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” and the book “Collapse” has recently come out in favor of nuclear energy. So there’s a lot of independent thinkers in the environmental field, like myself, who recognize this. Now if you’re in Greenpeace or the Sierra Club you’re not allowed to say you’re in favor of nuclear energy even if you have changed your mind or changed your thinking. It’s kind of like considered heresy. I don’t believe in working in that kind of environment. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I left the organized environmental movement when I left Greenpeace, is because I want to be able to have an intellectual discussion and I don’t want people telling me that I can’t say certain things or else I’m going to be kicked out or something. I mean what kind of environment is that to be working in? I’m a free thinker. I believe we need to be able to change our opinions in the face of new information and new circumstances. And certainly here we are in the year 2007 with climate change at the very top of the international political and environmental agenda.

Mary O’Driscoll: Not to mention the safety agenda, national security and that kind of thing.

Patrick Moore: Absolutely. All of these issues, energy security, air pollution, the geopolitical considerations, the fact that we’re burning up our fossil fuels at a ridiculous rate. And it took 300 million years for those fossil fuels to be created and we’re burning them up in the few centuries. That’s hardly a model of conservation. Whereas, there’s only one good thing to do with uranium, and that is to make nuclear power for running our civilization. Whereas, fossil fuels can be used to make plastics and fertilizers and chemical feedstocks and we’re just burning them all up at a fast rate. So there’s all kinds of good reasons why we should reduce fossil fuel consumption. Then when you do the arithmetic it becomes very clear that that cannot be accomplished with renewables alone. Windmills and solar panels cannot replace all the fossil fuels in this world; 86 percent of our total energy supply is coming from fossil fuels. The only technologies that can really effectively work to replace fossil fuels are nuclear and hydroelectric. And because hydroelectric is largely built to capacity in most of the industrial countries you really come down to a choice between fossil fuels like coal and natural gas versus nuclear energy for producing the majority of our base of electrical energy that’s on the grid.

Mary O’Driscoll: OK. Well, worldwide now it looks like many people are really jumping on the nuclear bandwagon. You have the finance ministers from the G-7 industrialized nations just embrace nuclear in a meeting last week. You’ve got the New York Times recently writing an article, a front-page article, about how even Middle Eastern countries are interested now in nuclear power and want to start building reactors. But amid all this enthusiasm for it, particularly when you’re looking at the situation in the Middle East, isn’t there a big fear of the proliferation concerns that you mentioned, that early on it was that Greenpeace that, the idea was that you were against nuclear war? But it’s very difficult to be able to separate the two when you’re talking about nuclear materials that can be turned into dirty bombs, nuclear bombs, any of that kind of thing. So how do you handle that?

Patrick Moore: It’s unfortunate that a lot of activists insist on making us connect those two things as if they’re one and the same, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, but it isn’t true. First thing, you don’t need a nuclear reactor to make a nuclear weapon. With the new centrifuge technology you just enrich uranium. That’s what Iran is suspected of doing. So there’s no nuclear reactor involved in that. They aren’t even connected in that sense, because it’s easier to make a nuclear bomb with centrifuge technology than it is to use the plutonium from used nuclear fuel after you’ve had to build a nuclear reactor as well for billions of dollars. Secondly, do you think that if we shut down all the civilian reactors on this planet, there’s over 440 of them, that the generals would give up their bomb making reactors? Because the plutonium and uranium that is being made for the military is not coming out of the civilian reactors. That’s coming from special reactors and enrichment plants that belong to the military in the various nuclear capable countries.

Mary O’Driscoll: Well, but a lot of these countries, such as Iran, you cited them, India, they are developing nuclear and the fear is that they’re developing nuclear weapons under the guise of developing nuclear power. And so it is connected in that way, that they’re talking about how they need nuclear power, but the fear is that they’re really developing nuclear weapons. So how can you calm people’s fears about that kind of a link?

Patrick Moore: Well, this is a problem with these countries and we can’t control what everybody in the world does. Maybe in the end force is necessary, but the fact is, is countries like the United States and China and Britain and Russia and France and Great Britain, they have separated their military and civilian nuclear industries. There is no relationship in the United States for example between civilian nuclear power and military use of nuclear technology. I mean I’m in favor of banning the bomb. That’s how I started in life. I don’t know that’s ever going to happen or whether it’s realistic, but the more we can reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the more we can restrict the spread of those weapons the better. But on the other hand that doesn’t have very much to do with nuclear energy. Yes, under the guise of is one matter, but that’s just cloak and dagger stuff and secrecy and we don’t really know what Iran’s intentions are. But we’re not going to change that if we shut down all the nuclear plants in the world. That wouldn’t change Iran. Iran would still be trying to get nuclear technology. Those issues are diplomatic issues and issues of making treaties and issues for the United Nations. And in the final analysis, maybe we have to use force in some cases to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Mary O’Driscoll: Right.

Patrick Moore: But in terms of nuclear power we need clean and safe energy and nuclear energy is the way to go and isn’t really connected to nuclear weapons in any direct sense.

Mary O’Driscoll: OK. I wanted to shift gears a little bit. The nuclear industry in the United States has been essentially moribund for 25 or 30 years and there’s very little left of the infrastructure that the United States at one time had to be able to build the facilities and to build all the parts to manufacture it. We’re having to depend on importing them from other countries and that there’s a huge concern about the need to do mass hiring of engineers and other technical jobs for these new jobs that are going to be created by all this new construction, this new nuclear construction. And the fear is that there are going to be a lot of competing interests. The industry needs them, the regulators need them and so there’s going to be this big fight over this and that there may be a shortage of workers and very expensive high prices for parts and for the pieces of the reactors. It’s not exactly a rosy scenario I would think if you’re trying to have this renaissance of this nuclear industry when the prices are going up. The price of fuel is going up. Uranium prices have risen. You’ve got worker shortages and we’re having to import a lot of the technologies.

Patrick Moore: Well, the fact is the price of all energy resources is going up, but there’s never been any problem with ramping up technologies. I mean we know how to do that. You start training more people. You start building more factories to supply the materials that are needed. It does take time, but we can ramp up pretty quickly when we want to. We are very good at that in our industrial society. So as far as I can see the demand is there now. Countries want more nuclear power, from Finland to Brazil to Argentina to France to Canada. Canada has made the decision to build new nuclear as the United States appears to be going forward with a number of new plants. So this is an international phenomenon. It’s called a nuclear renaissance. More people are enrolling now in nuclear science and nuclear engineering. And so there will be a build-up period of five or 10 years, but then we will have the capacity to start rolling out nuclear power at a much higher level than we’ve even had in the past.

Mary O’Driscoll: OK. We’re almost out of time and I almost regret having to leave this question for last, but it’s the nuclear waste question. That for a lot of environmentalists who oppose nuclear power they’ve always considered nuclear waste the Achilles’ heel of the U.S. nuclear industry because Yucca Mountain is already a couple of decades behind, there’s still a question about whether it’s actually going to be built, whether we support it or not. And so there’s just this huge question overhanging all of this through the progress that the industry has made with its operations. It’s gotten better. The record’s gotten better. Things are starting to fall into place for constructing a new nuclear power plant, but still you’ve got the Yucca Mountain situation sitting out there. How would you like to see that handled?

Patrick Moore: Well, I don’t really see that the nuclear waste or used nuclear fuel issue is such a pressing problem. No one is being injured by it, whereas, tens of thousands of people are dying from respiratory diseases that strictly linked the emissions from fossil fuels. It’s the fossil fuel industries whose waste is out of control and who are causing to the general population and to the environment through CO2 emissions and the concern for climate change. The waste from the nuclear industry is fully contained and has never leaked out anywhere and isn’t going to. I think people have this idea that the waste is kind of roiling around inside these containers trying to get out. It’s little solid pellets. It’s sort of like putting bricks in concrete. The bricks aren’t going to just like run out of there. They’re just going to stay there. And these containers are extremely solid. They’re good for 100 or more years. And if we need to repackage the material in the future that is easily done. So, in fact, the waste issue is under control. It is safely and securely stored and at some point in the future it will be recycled in order to recapture the tremendous amount of fuel and energy that’s still in those fuel rods after the first cycle. That may not happen for 30 years. It may not happen for 50 years. I don’t think that really matters. I just think we need to keep the nuclear waste safely and securely stored, which engineers are quite capable of doing, which is being done every day now as we speak at 103 reactors around the country. I don’t really think there’s a big danger from it.

Mary O’Driscoll: OK. Well, we’re going to have to end on that note. I’d like to thank Dr. Patrick Moore for joining us today. I’m Mary O’Driscoll. Thank you for joining us. This is OnPoint.

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A vow unfulfilled for ill nuclear workers 5,600 awaiting money promised three years ago

Rocky Mountain News

A vow unfulfilled for ill nuclear workers
5,600 awaiting money promised three years ago

George Barrie inhaled and ingested plutonium.   April 27  2007

The government still hasn’t paid the money it promised 5,600 sick nuclear weapons workers up to three years ago, the Rocky Mountain News has learned.

The former employees received letters authorizing them for a program that pays for medical care, lost wages and permanent health impairment. But none has received the cash, which can reach $250,000 for total disability.

The Department of Labor didn’t discover the problem until late 2006. Officials said that more than half of the 5,600 eligible workers did not file the necessary paperwork, even though the department says it issued proper instructions.

But the Rocky found two workers who were given incorrect information.

It isn’t clear why the workers who followed procedures haven’t been paid, Labor Department officials said.

Congress created the compensation program in 2000 to help workers who sacrificed their health in the dangerous process of building nuclear weapons during the Cold War. To qualify, workers must prove that radiation or toxic chemicals caused their illnesses.

The program has been plagued with problems, from slow processing to missing radiation records. Ill workers, including thousands from the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, have been frustrated by long waits for badly needed money.

The Labor Department is contacting the 5,600 workers to re-explain the procedures for collecting under the program’s Part E, said Assistant Secretary of Labor Victoria Lipnic. A third, or about 1,900, have responded seeking information, she said.

So far, 887 have spoken with staffers about applying, Lipnic said. She said she did not know how many have filed.

Lipnic announced the unpaid claims on the department’s Web site, but she didn’t reveal that 5,600 workers were involved until questioned by a Rocky reporter. If workers have been waiting years for their money, “that is unacceptable,” she said.

“There’s no deliberate delay going on,” she said. “It’s my experience that everybody in this program has been imbued with the sense of urgency because of so many people who are elderly.”

A department spokesman said that normal processing time should be closer to three or four months.

The Department of Energy ran the compensation program from 2001 to late 2004, spending $95 million on paperwork and paying 31 workers. Congress transferred it to the Labor Department, which took over a backlog of 25,000 aid applications 2 1/2 years ago.

Former Rocky Flats worker George Barrie, who inhaled and ingested plutonium while working at Rocky Flats, has 30 ailments.

The Craig resident was approved for one illness in March 2004 but didn’t receive a medical insurance card for that ailment until December 2005. That’s when he was told he had to write a letter to claim compensation for his lost wages and impairment, even though he and his wife repeatedly have told claims administrators they wanted to apply.

Today, three years after his original approval, he has not been paid. In the meantime, he must do without needed medical care, said his wife, Terrie, an activist seeking reform of the program.

She said that officials are failing to act on a claim that he has gastritis while they decide her husband’s appeal of their denial on other ailments. In particular, the Barries are pushing a claim for kidney tubal disease, saying that tests prove he processed uranium through his kidneys.

James Turner won approval years ago for his claim for beryllium disease caused by his work at Rocky Flats, and he was given health care and compensation under another section of the program called Part B. But he didn’t apply for impairment and lost wages under Part E until March 2006. Thirteen months later, his Part E claim has been approved but not paid. Approval should have been automatic because he was a Rocky Flats worker already approved for Part B.

A Rocky Flats worker who died last year was approved for Part E medical care in September 2005. The letter approving his medical benefits said he could not get lost wages or impairment benefits until after a certain set of rules took effect. In fact, those rules had taken effect three months earlier.

He was never told that he needed to apply, according to his widow, who asked not to be named. Now, she is eligible for only half of the $250,000 that her husband might have received.

Connect Savannah: Endless power, endless cost

Connect Savannah 

Endless power, endless cost

The brutal economics of a move to more nuclear energy

By Kathleen Graham

Two views of Plant Vogtle’s twin cooling towers on the Savannah River
Two views of Plant Vogtle’s twin cooling towers on the Savannah River

Editor’s Note: In last week’s Lead Story “Atomic Spring,” Kathleen Graham brought us an overview of the resurgence of nuclear power advocacy in Georgia. This week she delves deeper into the economics a move to more nuclear energy would bring the taxpaying public.

Proponents of nuclear power as an energy resource often argue three things in its favor: it’s cost-effective during operations, reliable and clean.

“One of the reasons we and many other utilities have gone back to give nuclear energy a strong look is because when you look at the cost of other fuels for generating electricity- when you look at the whole production costs and construction costs- nuclear energy stacks up very competitively,” says Carol Boatright of Georgia Power.

“It’s cheaper than gas or coal or any others. The things we are seeing right now indicate that nuclear energy is the most effective, efficient and economic means for meeting the growth and demand that we’re seeing.”

Sara Barczak, Safe Energy Director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), disagrees and argues nuclear power is a poor investment.

“The economics of this as an investment have been masked for decades,” says Barczak. “Now it’s masked even more because you have old plants that are operating right now and their operational costs are cheaper than a coal plant. But they aren’t thinking about the fact that it cost 12 times what they predicted to build it, and we’re still paying for those investments.”

One investment now sits in Burke County, near Waynesboro, Georgia. Final construction costs for the Plant Vogtle Electric Generating Plant and its two nuclear reactors were capped at nearly $8.87 billion, a twelve-fold increase from its initial estimated cost of $660 million.

According to Georgia Power’s Carol Boatright, many factors contributed to the unexpected cost increase, including high interest rates at that time and a nuclear accident.

“During the period of construction, the incident of Three Mile Island occurred,” explains Boatright, referring to the accidental meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island Generating Station, a commercial nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

“After that incident, there were a lot of changes- re-engineering, regulation changes and reviews- that slowed down the process.”

Boatright describes how parts of the plant already built had to be torn down or reconstructed to meet new regulations, and the blueprints were being reworked while construction was ongoing.

In addition, Plant Vogtle was originally intended to accommodate four reactor units before it was downsized to two units, mostly due to a decline in growth and financial constraints within the company, according to Boatright.

Since the two current reactors came online in 1987 and 1989, ratepayers have paid, and continue to pay back the $8.87 billion used to build the units, resulting in the largest rate hike in Georgia’s history.

“It’s still in the rate base, and it’s still an asset our ratepayers are paying on,” says Boatright.

Recently, Southern Company, the operator of Plant Vogtle (Georgia Power is the majority co-owner) applied for an Early Site Permit (ESP), which if approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Georgia Public Service Commission, would allow the company 20 years to decide whether or not to build two additional reactors on the site.

While an ESP is not a commitment to build anything, the cost of the ESP application ($51 million) and the exhaustive measures taken to secure approval from the necessary commissions says something of Southern Company’s intentions.

No final cost estimate for the two reactors has been set, but a $3-4 billion price tag would be in the neighborhood.

With respect to unanticipated construction costs and rate hikes, what’s to keep history from repeating itself in Georgia?

“That is why we are in contract negotiations now,” says Boatright. “We want to confirm everything ahead of time as much as possible. We want to have a firm price from the vendors as to how much various materials and the total project itself would cost. The economics are part of the decision on whether we do go forward.”

Sara Barczak of SACE maintains government subsidies and incentives make nuclear power seem more attractive as an investment.

“If the Energy Policy Act of 2005 didn’t have these subsidies ($13 billion in subsidies allocated to the nuclear industry), I don’t think we’d be seeing this race by these utilities to build these new nuclear plants,” says Barczak. “The more money that they can get for free, so to speak, from taxpayers and ratepayers, the less risk they have and their shareholders like that.”

Barczak also argues, rather than sinking large amounts of money into building nuclear reactors, there are better ways to invest that capital.

“Let’s just say, let’s give it to them that it’s going to cost $4 billion and they’ll get it online by 2015-2017,” she says. “There’s so much more that you could have done with that same amount of money in terms of energy efficiency.”

For the most part, Georgia Public ServiceCommissioner Stan Wise supports nuclear energy.

“To go forward we’ve got to look and see what do we do to promote efficient and reliable production of electricity in our state, not only for our current customers but also for the new Georgians that will move here in the next 20 years,” says Wise, underlining the importance of utility companies to remain healthy and earn a profit as well.

“I think we have to do the very best we can and know that fuel diversity, reliability and safe generation for future Georgians is vital. I think the nuclear option has to be one that’s in the mix.”

The Public Service Commission (PSC), made up of five elected commissioners, negotiates with utility companies and regulates utility rates on behalf of ratepayers. With respect to electricity, while the goal is to keep electric rates as low as possible and electric generation high, Commissioner Wise argues Georgians shouldn’t expect a free lunch.

“I wish I could tell you that all of this could be done at no cost, but that’s the head in the sand approach that I don’t believe this commission can afford to take,” says Wise. “If you go into the hearing room expecting a free lunch, you’re going to walk out with no lunch.”

Although he’s a keen supporter of nuclear energy, Commissioner Wise criticizes the federal government’s failure to take ownership of the steadily accumulating nuclear waste stored on-site at commercial plants around the country.

No one, not even the federal government, gets a free lunch.

“Ratepayers in this state have paid a significant sum of money on their power bills every month to the federal government, the black hole of all black holes, for a nuclear waste repository, always with the expectation that it would be Yucca Mountain,” argues Wise. “We continue to pay into that fund.”

In 1982 the federal government established the Nuclear Waste Fund, one of its first steps toward taking ownership of the spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste generated by nuclear reactors around the country.

Power plants that use nuclear energy to produce electricity also produce extremely toxic nuclear waste. In the early 1980’s utility companies began paying into the Nuclear Waste Fund with the expectation that the government would eventually remove the waste from their plants and store it elsewhere.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) took charge of designing and developing a permanent repository that could safely store radioactive waste over a long period of time, 10,000- 100,000 years.

For several years the DOE studied the suitability of building a permanent repository at different sites around the country, but in 1987 Congress directed the DOE to focus on Yucca Mountain in Nevada, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Since then the Yucca Mountain Repository has faced much opposition and repeated setbacks, and what was supposed to open in 1998 now has a “best-achievable” opening date of 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Energy website.

“Yucca Mountain has been both a political and scientific nightmare,” says Sara Barczak of SACE.

“It was just a few years ago when the project sort of imploded on itself because scientists working on the project came forward and admitted there was a lot of falsified information. The science is now essentially discredited and billions of dollars have been spent on it.”

Carol Boatright of Georgia Power arguesthe problems with Yucca are mostly political.

“It’s bogged down in politics,” she says. “It’s been called the most expensively studied piece of real estate on earth.”

Whether the delays are due to science, politics or both, Commissioner Stan Wise argues it’s not fair on Georgians and other ratepayers who continue to pay the federal government for services it isn’t providing.

Even as more money is poured into the Fund, local utility companies and ratepayers pay for the waste to be stored on-site at their local plants.

“We’re already paying for a national waste repository and now our companies have to fund a ‘temporary’ site, which we know good and well won’t be temporary,” says Wise, arguing that the federal government is content to let utility companies handle their own waste in the meantime.

Wise, who has visited the Yucca Mountain Repository, insists it must be approved and opened as soon as possible. Continuing to pay for two repository sites is simply not fair to ratepayers, and it’s deceptive on the government’s part.

“If you’re not going to finish this, we want our money back, and we’ll refund our ratepayers,” says Wise. “When you’ve opened Yucca Mountain, then we’ll forward you back your money. This continues to be bought and paid for, and we don’t get anything for our money. It’s wrong, and it’s theft on a grand scale.”

Since 1982 electricity customers nationwide have paid over $28 billion into the Fund. Out of that total payment, $9.1 billion has been put toward the repository.

According to Carol Boatright of Georgia Power, Georgians have paid $616.3 million into the Nuclear Waste Fund. Meanwhile, nuclear facilities like Plant Hatch in Baxley, Georiga have run out of space in their spent fuel pools and have begun storing nuclear waste aboveground in dry-cask storage containers. Plant Vogtle will run out of space in its spent fuel pools in 2014, after which it will move to dry-cask storage.

“There’s really no specific length of time we could not store in dry-cask storage,” says Boatright. “If we had to we can continue to store like that.”

Both Wise and Boatright are hoping the right amount of political pressure will force the government to shift into a faster gear, and both are encouraged that the DOE is finally getting around to applying for its permit to finish construction of the Yucca Mountain Repository. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must still approve the permit.

Sara Barczak is worried about another permit closer to home. “Why would you advocate to build new reactors when there’s no end in sight as to what to do with the nuclear waste?” she asks. ƒç

To comment, e-mail us at

letters@connectsavannah.com

Learn more about the concerns raised by Southern Alliance For Clean Energy at www.cleanenergy.org, or to learn more about Southern Company’s nuclear operations, visit www.southerncompany.com. A Public Service Meeting will be May 11 at 9:45 a.m. at the offices of the Georgia Public Service Commission, 244 Washington Street, in Atlanta. Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and other groups will present their case against the construction of 2 new reactors at Plant Vogtle. The public can call the Georgia Public Service Commission at (404) 656-4501 or (800) 282-5813.

Guardian Unlimited: Reactor Makers Asked to Ponder Plane Hit

Reactor Makers Asked to Ponder Plane Hit | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited

Reactor Makers Asked to Ponder Plane Hit

Wednesday April 25, 2007 1:46 AM

By H. JOSEF HEBERT

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON(AP) – The Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposed a new requirement Tuesday for nuclear reactor builders to consider how they might increase protection against an airliner crash.

The rule, however, does not propose any specific standards nor mandate design changes.

“This proposal gives us the chance to assess and make practicable changes to new reactor designs early in the design process,” said NRC Chairman Dale Klein.

The proposal, expected to be made final later this year after a public comment period, was approved by a 4-1 vote.

U.S. companies are considering building as many as 30 new nuclear power reactors.

Commissioner Gregory Jaczko, who voted against the measure, had wanted the NRC to establish specific design standards and require that new reactors withstand aircraft impacts.

His four colleagues on the commission didn’t want to go that far and his proposal was rejected, also by a 4-1 vote.

The NRC has certified two reactor designs with several additional ones expected to be certified in the near future. The agency anticipates receiving applications for the first construction and operating licenses before the end of the year.

Among the thorniest issues facing the NRC and reactor builders is to what extent the new plants will be protected if a terrorist were to fly a large plane into the concrete containment dome or the plant’s fuel storage pool.

The new NRC proposal requires companies seeking design approval to first “assess how the design, to the extent practicable, can have greater built-in protection to avoid or mitigate the effects of the large commercial aircraft impact,” the agency said.

Such an assessment, according to the proposal, should specifically consider design improvements in reactor cooling systems, integrity of the containment vessel and protection of reactor fuel storage pools.

Jaczko, in a telephone interview, said the biggest shortcoming in the proposal “is that it asks questions without getting answers.”

“We’re requiring assessments to be done, but we have put in place no standards for what criteria those designs have to meet to be acceptable,” Jaczko said. “We’re not requiring them to fix the design.”

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a frequent critic of the NRC, said the agency “abdicated its responsibility to protect the American people against a terrorist attack on a nuclear reactor” by not requiring that a new reactor be designed to withstand the impact of a large aircraft.

Markey said the proposed assessment “amounts to a nuclear book report which the NRC may or may not grade” when submitted by reactor vendors.

The three reactor designs that have attracted the greatest interest from American utilities are from Westinghouse Electric Co., owned by Toshiba Corp.; General Electric Co.; and the French conglomerate Areva Group.

The Westinghouse AP1000 reactor already has received NRC certification, while both the Areva and GE reactor designs are in the application process.

All three companies have said their new reactors will be designed with more passive safety features and other improvements to enhance safety. The Areva design, for example, includes a double-hull containment dome.

The ability of reactors to withstand an aircraft impact has been a subject of intense controversy.

The 103 reactors now in use were designed under regulations that did not require consideration of a direct hit by an aircraft, but concern over such an event has increased since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The nuclear industry has produced computer models that indicate even a direct hit on a reactor would not penetrate the concrete dome and internal reactor vessel. Skeptics have doubts and fear that an explosion and fire from such a crash could release radiation.

CFR: Report, nuke reality don’t mesh

United Press International – Energy – Analysis

Analysis: Report, nuke reality don’t mesh

- Energy – Analysis
Published: April 23, 2007 at 6:55 PM
By BEN LANDO
UPI Energy Correspondent
WASHINGTON April 23 (UPI) — A new report by the Council on Foreign Relations makes broad characterizations about humanity as a whole and those who want to increase the amount of nuclear energy for electricity generation, purportedly as a way to halt and reverse global climate change.”According to a prevailing belief, humanity confronts two stark risks: catastrophes caused by climate change and annihilation by nuclear war,” begins the report, “Nuclear Energy at a Crossroads,” released last week.

The climate-change issue has momentum; U.S. media, the White House and Congress all talk it up regularly. But the CFR report says proponents “advocate a major expansion of nuclear energy” that “oversells the contribution nuclear energy can make to reduce global warming and strengthen energy security while downplaying the dangers associated with this energy source.”

“To realistically address global warming, the nuclear industry would have to expand at such a rapid rate as to pose serious concerns for how the industry would ensure an adequate supply of reasonably inexpensive reactor-grade construction materials, well-trained technicians, and rigorous safety and security measures.”

That’s true, the nuclear industry says. Its main goal is to maintain nuclear’s electricity share.

“Nuclear energy is not a silver bullet,” said Mitch Singer, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the U.S. nuclear industry’s trade group. Rather, Singer said, it is one piece of the overall picture, which includes renewable energy, clean-coal technology and energy conservation and efficiency. (Two top NEI officials served on the advisory committee for the CFR report, but not all of their comments were included in the final draft, the Brookings Institution’s Susan Rice wrote.)

While nuclear-power proponents are trying to make talk of the “nuclear renaissance” in this country a reality, after a nearly 30-year absence of new nuclear activity, the industry is merely trying to maintain.

“To be able to do that, we have to build 35 new reactors by 2030,” said Adrian Heymer, senior director of new plant deployment at NEI.

Nuclear energy feeds about 20 percent of U.S. electricity demand and 16 percent of worldwide demand, which is expected to triple by 2050. No nuclear plant has been licensed since 1978, before a chill brought on by accidents at Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and a move to coal and natural-gas plants, the latter which, at the time, had low fuel costs.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects applications for at least 30 new reactors in the next few years, pushed largely because of a new — though untested — streamlined application process and various subsidies and tax breaks in energy legislation passed in 2005. There are 103 reactors operating now.

The NEI and other nuclear proponents are keen to point out nuclear’s near zero carbon dioxide emissions — “clean-air energy” — which is true compared to standard coal, oil and natural-gas operations. Nuclear power does emit, however, if you take into account its entire cycle, which includes mining and enriching the uranium to fuel the reactor, as well as construction of the plants.

Most of the climate-change-causing toxins are related to transportation. The United States imports more than 60 percent of the oil it uses, the vast majority of it being used for transportation. Nuclear power can’t replace that.

There is much in the CFR report that the nuclear industry echoes, and vice versa. It costs $3 billion to $4 billion to build a plant, much more than other electricity sources, though nuclear plants are big baseload generators that have, in the United States, operated at more than 90 percent capacity.

An already tight supply of material and labor would squeeze further, and costs would go up if there was an all-out blitz — either in the United States or worldwide — to replace fossil-fuel electricity generation with nuclear. Other issues would be exacerbated as well: There is no general consensus on what to do with the nuclear waste created by nuclear plants; the additional spent fuel is a risk for weapons proliferation, as is the enrichment needed to get the fuel reactor ready; and if, in the midst of the expansion, another Chernobyl were to happen, the boom would immediately stall and possibly bust.

Instead of relying on nuclear power to address global warming, the CFR report recommends the U.S. government “should shift from providing subsidies to holding all energy sectors equally accountable for their external costs. … The costs incurred through carbon pollution are a debt unpaid.”

Polluters should be charged for polluting, which “would act to level the economic playing field among high-carbon emitters such as traditional coal-fired plants and no- and low-carbon emitters such as highly efficient natural gas plants, nuclear plants and wind- and solar-generated electricity.”

The CFR’s nuclear energy report appears, rather, to be advocacy for creating a more equal footing for energy sources to compete for their place in the mix. As the report puts it: “Nuclear power will remain part of this mix for the foreseeable future.”

–

(e-mail: energy@upi.com)

Study: Why GNEP can’t jump to the future

Why GNEP can’t jump to the future

Contact: Denise Hughes
Denise@creative-connectors.com
917-549-2621
Institute for Policy Studies
Why GNEP can’t jump to the future
New study highlights flaws in President’s nuclear proposal

WASHINGTON D.C.—April 23rd 2007 — Congress is now considering whether to approve or zero out the $405 million that President Bush is proposing to spend in fiscal year 2008 on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)—a program aimed at rendering plutonium inert in nuclear weapons but still useful in nuclear power plants.

Nuclear experts at the National Academy of Sciences have long questioned the practicability of the technologies GNEP plans to employ. Currently, the Government Accounting Office is now reviewing the program. This, however, leaves legislators with an information gap as they struggle to decide whether to fully fund the plan, eliminate it altogether, or redirect some of its funding to the many successful energy programs whose budgets President Bush is proposing to gut in FY 2008. In particular, major questions have been raised about the magnitude and costs of radioactive wastes stemming from the GNEP program.

To help legislators and the American public bridge this information gap, the Institute for Policy Studies will release a rigorous study of GNEP on April 23rd. Directed by Robert Alvarez, Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy from 1993 to 1999, the report concludes that the program is likely to squander billions in taxpayer dollars on an unproven reprocessing technology that will generate unprecedented and unmanageable amounts of highly radioactive wastes without plausible disposition paths.

The potentially deadly flaws documented in Alvarez’s study include:

* The amount of long-lived radioactivity disposed of into the environment at a reprocessing site could be thousands of times greater than from nuclear weapons production. Much smaller concentrations of similar wastes at the DOE’s Savannah River Site have been characterized by the National Academy of Sciences as representing “a long term safety concern.”

* GNEP would allow large quantities of cesium 135—a radionuclide with a half life of 2.3 million years—to be disposed in the near surface and pose serious contamination problems for many thousands of years.

* More than four thousand shipments of spent nuclear reactor fuel will be transported on rails and highways through cities and farmlands to the reprocessing site, posing unprecedented emergency response and security challenges.

* Despite DOE’s claims that recycling of reactor spent fuel will solve the nuclear waste disposal problem, a small fraction is likely to be recycled. Uranium constitutes more than 95 percent of the materials in spent nuclear fuel by weight. But, it will require costly treatment for reuse in reactors – estimated in the billions of dollars. As a result, DOE’s plans include the landfill disposal of tens of thousands of tons of recovered uranium.

Alvarez’s study concludes that the Energy Department “lacks a credible plan for management and disposal of radioactive wastes stemming from the GNEP program, particularly regarding waste volumes, site specific impacts, regulatory requirements and life-cycle costs.”

Or as Alvarez has put it more bluntly in conversation, “You can’t just park some of the most highly radioactive wastes in the world at a landfill and assume that by so doing you have kept them safely removed from humans for the next 2.3 million years.”
###

For copies of the report or an interview with Robert Alvarez, call Denise Hughes at (917) 549-2621 or Alex Raksin at (323) 301-8205.

On April 23rd at 2 p.m. Eastern, IPS will also host a press conference call and simultaneous web cast featuring Alvarez as well as Tom Carpenter of the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and Brent Blackwelder from Friends of the Earth (FOE). To join the telephone press conference, calll Denise Hughes at 917-549-2621— Please RSVP to be included in the call and simultaneous web presentation. To dial in direct in the USA call: 888 343 7268—Ask for the GNEP call outside the USA, dial: 415 537 1924 —Ask for the GNEP call.

Indy Bay: Will Nuclear Waste be Shipped on Central Valley Rail Lines?

Will Nuclear Waste be Shipped on Central Valley Rail Lines? : Indybay

Will Nuclear Waste be Shipped on Central Valley Rail Lines?
by Mike Rhodes
Sunday Apr 22nd, 2007 8:14 PM

Last week, in a presentation at CSU-Fresno about the proposal to build a nuclear power plant in this community, it was reveled that there are plans to ship nuclear waste products up the Central Valley on the railroad lines. David Weisman is seen in the 5:42 minute video below speaking at the forum – The Cost of Nuclear Energy: What’s Really at Stake? What he says is that if Yucca Mountain is opened, nuclear power from around the country will go right through Fresno.

New Scientist: Chernobyl alert over birth defects

Chernobyl alert over birth defects

• 23 April 2007

People
living around the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine have
unusually high levels of physical abnormalities and birth defects. The
International Atomic Energy Agency has suggested that the abnormalities
are caused by the impact of relocation and stress on the population,
and Timothy Mousseau, at the University of South Carolina, Columbia,
wanted to put this to the test.

Mousseau
and his colleagues examined 7700 barn swallows from Chernobyl and
compared them with birds from elsewhere. They found that Chernobyl’s
swallows were more likely to have tumours, misshapen toes and feather
deformities than swallows from uncontaminated parts of Europe (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0136).

“We
don’t fully understand the consequences of low doses of radiation,”
says Mousseau. “We should be more concerned about the human population.”

Washington Post: U.S. Centrifuge Work Revived in Updated Form

U.S. Centrifuge Work Revived in Updated Form – washingtonpost.com

U.S. Centrifuge Work Revived in Updated Form

By Dan Charles
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, April 23, 2007; Page A06

PIKETON, Ohio — Inside an enormous structure here, shielded by heavy security, a U.S. company is hard at work constructing tall, slender, uranium-enriching centrifuges designed to obtain uranium-235 for nuclear fuel — the very technology that is provoking a standoff between the United States and Iran.

China planner sees limited role for nuclear power: uranium supplies

Forex News Update China planner sees limited role for nuclear power

FOREX NEWS & ANALYSIS

China planner sees limited role for nuclear power
04/21/07 12:03 pm (GMT)
BOAO, China (AFX) – China is developing nuclear power as it looks for alternative forms of energy, but the role of the energy source will be limited by a shortage of uranium, a senior state planner said.

Chen Deming, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that nuclear energy will only be a provisional solution to meeting the nation’s growing demand for energy.

“Nuclear has a lot of advantages, but geographically-speaking for China it is not great as most reserves are overseas and there will not be enough to meet all of our energy demands,” Chen told the Boao Forum for Asia, an annual regional conference.

The means of disposing of radioactive material is another concern, Chen said, noting that even advanced countries like the US and France have to resort to burying waste underground, where it will remain toxic for centuries.

“Nuclear cannot be a long-term solution, it is a provisional and partial solution for future needs. Also the burying of radioactive waste underground is one of the costs of development of the nuclear industry, and it is a cost that will be borne by our children,” he added.

China had seven mln kilowatts of installed nuclear capacity at the end of last year, Chen said, adding that more will come on line over the next few years, bringing the total to around 16 mln kilowatts.

Just 1.92 pct of China’s total energy was generated from nuclear energy in 2006.

China will also build a strategic uranium reserve and seek uranium overseas.

Two companies, the China National Nuclear Group and Guangdong Nuclear Group, are authorized to source uranium from overseas, Chen said.

will.davies@afxasia.com

Telegraph: ‘How we made the Chernobyl rain’

‘How we made the Chernobyl rain’ | Telegraph

‘How we made the Chernobyl rain’

By Richard Gray, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 11:55pm BST 21/04/2007

Russian military pilots have described how they created rain clouds to protect Moscow from radioactive fallout after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

Major Aleksei Grushin repeatedly took to the skies above Chernobyl and Belarus and used artillery shells filled with silver iodide to make rain clouds that would “wash out” radioactive particles drifting towards densely populated cities.

More than 4,000 square miles of Belarus were sacrificed to save the Russian capital from the toxic radioactive material.
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“The wind direction was moving from west to east and the radioactive clouds were threatening to reach the highly populated areas of Moscow, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl,” he told Science of Superstorms, a BBC2 documentary to be broadcast today.

“If the rain had fallen on those cities it would’ve been a catastrophe for millions. The area where my crew was actively influencing the clouds was near Chernobyl, not only in the 30km zone, but out to a distance of 50, 70 and even 100 km.”

In the wake of the catastrophic meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, people in Belarus reported heavy, black-coloured rain around the city of Gomel. Shortly beforehand, aircraft had been spotted circling in the sky ejecting coloured material behind them.

Moscow has always denied that cloud seeding took place after the accident, but last year on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, Major Grushin was among those honoured for bravery. He claims he received the award for flying cloud seeding missions during the Chernobyl clean-up.

A second Soviet pilot, who asked not to be named, also confirmed to the programme makers that cloud seeding operations took place as early as two days after the explosion.

Alan Flowers, a British scientist who was one of the first Western scientists allowed into the area to examine the extent of radioactive fallout around Chernobyl, said that the population in Belarus was exposed to radiation doses 20 to 30 times higher than normal as a result of the rainfall, causing intense radiation poisoning in children.

Mr Flowers was expelled from Belarus in 2004 after claiming that Russia had seeded the clouds. He said: “The local population say

Observer: Revealed: UK nuclear tests on workers

Revealed: UK nuclear tests on workers | UK News | The Observer

Revealed: UK nuclear tests on workers

Sellafield memos uncover fears over legality of making volunteers drink radioactive isotopes

Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
Sunday April 22, 2007
The Observer

Workers at Sellafield, the nuclear plant at the centre of the missing body parts scandal, were subjected to secret Cold War experiments in which they were exposed to radiation, The Observer can reveal.

One experiment, described in a confidential memo, involved volunteers drinking doses of caesium 134, a radioactive isotope that was released in fatal quantities following the Chernobyl disaster. Other experiments involved exposing volunteers to uranium, strontium 85, iodine 132 and plutonium

Modesto Bee: Military has left a deadly legacy

The Modesto Bee

Military has left a deadly legacy
Old and forgotten Navy, Army bases filled with environmental hazards

Comment on this story

By RUSSELL CAROLLO
THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Last Updated: April 22, 2007, 04:24:08 AM PDT

First of two parts.

SACRAMENTO -Time bombs lurk beneath California, from the Mexican border to the Oregon state line, under hills, valleys and coastlines, poised to contaminate wells, pollute waterways, jeopardize property values and endanger human lives.

Hundreds of locations already have been polluted, and how much more of the state is at risk, no one really knows.

What is known is that more than 1,000 confirmed and suspected military sites, the largest number in the country, are spread across California, covering an area more than twice the size of Connecticut. Many were abandoned decades ago but may still be contaminated with toxic chemicals, bombs and other munitions or even radioactive waste, a six-month examination by The Sacramento Bee found.

Oshkosh Northwestern: Dominion seeks OK to build new reactor

Oshkosh Northwestern: Dominion seeks OK to build new reactor

Posted April 22, 2007

Richard Ryman column: Dominion seeks OK to build new reactor

By Richard Ryman

Dominion Resources Inc. moves a step closer to being allowed to build a new nuclear reactor with an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board hearing Tuesday in Virginia.

Dominion is among a handful of U.S. utilities pursuing government permission to build a nuclear plant. A new nuclear power plant has not been built in the United States in more than 30 years.

SF BG: Going to bat for PG&E

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Going to bat for PG&E

Going to bat for PG&E
Bait and switch on the stadium solar deal?
BY AMANDA WITHERELL
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During the coming months Pacific Gas and Electric Co. will be sprinkling $5 million worth of solar panels around San Francisco, to be paid for by its customers. One of the first will be a $1.5 million, 120-kilowatt array at the Giants’ stadium, providing power for an average of 25 homes.

The team was enticed into the project by David Hochschild of the solar advocacy group PV Now, who dreamed of a green 2007 All-Star Game, which the Giants are hosting. To help make an environmental example for Major League Baseball, Hochschild approached the Mayor’s Office, which got involved with facilitating the deal. Somehow, even though the team buys its power from Constellation New Energy, PG&E and the Mayor’s Office ended up executing and getting credit for a deal that neither is paying for.

PG&E’s logos will get big-league exposure when the city’s long-stalled Community Choice Aggregation could have received it, argues Aliza Wasserman of Green Guerrillas Against Greenwash, a group that protested a PG&E press conference March 21 at the stadium and is concerned about the mayor’s relationship with the utility.

SF may offer ‘green’ power to residents – Examiner.com

City may offer ‘green’ power to residents – Examiner.com

City may offer ‘green’ power to residents
3 days ago » City may offer ‘green’ power to residents «
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Apr 18, 2007 3:00 AM (3 days ago)
by Bonnie Eslinger, The Examiner

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Supervisor Tom Ammiano has sponsored legislation that would enable The City to increase its use of renewable energy sources.
(AP file photo)
Supervisor Tom Ammiano has sponsored legislation that would enable The City to increase its use of renewable energy sources.

SAN FRANCISCO (Map, News) – By as early as next year, San Francisco residents and businesses could be asked to make a choice for their energy needs — stay with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. or go with a newly created energy program focused on renewable sources and backed by The City.

On Tuesday, Supervisor Tom Ammiano — who first sponsored a Community Choice resolution in 1999 — and Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi introduced legislation that outlines the Community Choice Aggregation implementation plan, which has a goal of making the energy supply for city residents 51 percent renewable by 2017. Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission have also championed the idea of Community Choice Aggregation.

“San Francisco has the know-how and vision to purchase electricity at our own discretion from energy providers who will buy renewables … and not look at fossil fuels,” Ammiano said at a press conference Tuesday to announce the plan. “Everybody’s concerned about global warming.”

Under the plan, The City would select an energy supplier that would contractually agree to build 360 megawatts of local renewable power, including solar and wind power. The citywide energy program would be financed through investing $1.2 billion of revenue bonds and interest payments, a financing plan supported through the passage of Proposition H in 2001, which amended the city charter to allow the Board of Supervisors to authorize revenue bonds for renewable energy and conservation projects.

The supplier would be a single contractor that could hire subcontractors. The supplier would be asked to include the repayment of the revenue bonds and other related costs of the program within the rates charged to customers, but the rate would not be allowed to be higher than PG&E’s rates, according to the plan.

While San Francisco’s chosen contractor would provide the electricity, PG&E would still handle the transmission of the power and the billing of customers, among other responsibilities, according to the plan.

PG&E spokeswoman Darlene Chiu said the utility hopes San Franciscans choose to opt out of the Community Choice plan and remain with PG&E.

“In terms of increasing the clean renewable energy, we’re willing to partner with The City to make that happen,” Chiu said.

Twelve percent of PG&E’s energy portfolio comes from renewable sources, including biomass and waste (5 percent), hydroelectric (4 percent), geothermal (2 percent), wind (1 percent) and solar (less than 1 percent), according to PG&E.

One component of the legislation that is already being challenged is a plan to create a Community Choice Aggregation Board of Control to oversee the program’s startup. There’s a question of whether that conflicts with the city charter, which grants that authority to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

“If and when the CCA goes forward, the PUC is very excited about the possibility of implementing it and building more renewables. That is our charge, that’s what we do and that’s what we know how to do,” said Laura Spanjian, an assistant general manager with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

beslinger@examiner.com

Action Alert: CBS’s Nuclear Revival 60 Minutes’

Green Nuclear Butterfly Blog

Action Alert

Calling all Green Nuclear Activist…we need to jump on this Action Alert from FAIR and run with it. We know the truth about nuclear, and must get our voice heard.

CBS’s Nuclear Revival
60 Minutes’ critic-free boosterism

4/18/07

On April 8, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes aired a segment about the “resounding success” of the French nuclear power program, suggesting that “emission-free” nuclear power might offer an easy solution to the problem of climate change. The report protected this dubious assertion from skeptical scrutiny by failing to quote a single bona fide critic of the nuclear industry.

The segment was titled “Vive Les Nukes,” which gave a good indication of the slant it took. Describing it as “an efficient means of producing large amounts of carbon-free energy,” correspondent Steve Kroft announced at the top of the segment that nuclear power is “a technology whose time seemed to come and go, and may now be coming again.” The notion of a nuclear power renaissance was bolstered by CBS’s choice of interview guests—the program spoke only to nuclear power supporters (in France and elsewhere), thereby allowing their rhetoric to go unchallenged.

Guests on the segment were French energy official Pierre Gadonniex, French nuclear industry executive Bertrande Durrande, White House deputy secretary of energy Clay Sell (Bush’s “point man on nuclear power”), French nuclear executive Anne Lauvergeon, MIT nuclear researcher Andrew Kadak and David Jhirhad of the World Resources Institute, described as “an environmental think tank in Washington.”

Jhirhad was the only potentially balancing source, but he is quoted only to make Kroft’s point that “even some environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power.” This is an emerging line in much of the corporate media (e.g., Washington Post, 4/16/06; New York Times, 2/27/07), though the actual number of green groups embracing nuclear power is quite small. The World Resources Institute receives contributions from several energy companies and other major polluters, information that would have been useful for CBS viewers in evaluating Jhirad’s claim that the nuclear industry’s “safety record has been pretty good.”

The segment’s one-sided sourcing was made all the more problematic when the White House’s Sell claimed that “no serious person can look at the challenge of greenhouse gases and climate change and not come to the conclusion that nuclear power has to play a significant and growing role in meeting that challenge worldwide.” Of course, “serious people” do question precisely that–and CBS should have interviewed them.

Excluding such sources meant excluding important information. While France’s nuclear power is portrayed as widely popular, CBS failed to mention large protests held across the country on March 17 (Agence France Presse, 3/17/07) against construction of a new nuclear plant. Nor, in touting the massive nuclear reprocessing plant France has built in Normandy, did the show refer to the radiation it releases into the English Channel (NIRS Nuclear Monitor, 3-4/00) or the cluster of leukemia cases occurring around the plant (British Medical Journal, 1/11/97).

Kroft even adopts industry-friendly language in describing the push to revive U.S. nuclear power, discussing the “financial incentives” and “streamlined regulatory system” intended to encourage nuclear energy development. Such “incentives” might better be described as government subsides, which have long been criticized by nuclear industry critics as a waste of taxpayers’ money. Unmentioned in the CBS report were similar subsidies in France; according to the U.S.-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (5/4/06), $1 billion a year in government subsidies go to plutonium production alone.

Excluding critical voices allowed grossly misleading information to go unchallenged, as when nuclear executive Lauvergeon claimed, in the segment’s conclusion, that “wind and solar are, you know, temporary sources of energy. It works when you have wind, it works when you have sun. No sun, no wind, no energy. You don’t want to watch TV only when you have wind.” Of course, wind and solar energy are not “temporary” sources of energy; power generated by both can be stored. Airing this sort of misinformation eliminates any real consideration of viable alternatives to nuclear energy.

At one point, Kroft says that “the Bush administration is pushing a nuclear revival.” The same could be said for CBS.

ACTION:
Contact 60 Minutes to ask why its report on nuclear energy excluded the views of the industry’s numerous critics.

CONTACT:
CBS 60 Minutes
60m@cbsnews.com
(212) 975-3247

Paul Loeb: Target Global Warming, Target EXXON

TARGET
GLOBAL WARMING, TARGET EXXON

By Paul
Rogat Loeb

With over 1400 local events, theApril 14 National Day of Climate Action, www.StepItUp07.org, offered a national wakeup call, with citizens in every state raising their voice. But even as we build on this powerful day to move forward, we need to talk about why it’s been so hard for Americans to recognize the climate issue’s urgency.

As recently as July 2006, the acknowledgement of the crisis by ordinary Americans lagged behind not only our counterparts in Great Britain, Germany and Japan, but also behind those polled in China, India, Argentina, Nigeria and Indonesia. U.S. citizen awareness has increased significantly in the wake of this past winter’s massive storms (even before the latest East Coast disaster) and coverage of the international scientific reports. But though between 77% and 83% of Americans now acknowledge that global warming poses a serious problem, only 55% in a January Pew poll say the issue requires immediate government action, and only 47% in the same Pew poll say that they believe it’s human caused. This means there’s still serious denial. And to dismantle its architecture means taking on the key role of ExxonMobil.

Those who dismiss global warming’s threat have embraced a series of arguments, retreating from one to the next as they’re trumped by reality. The planet isn’t really warming, they say. If it is, it’s due to random fluctuations or sunspots, not human-created greenhouse gases. And even if global warming is real, it will bring more benefits than problems. Wherever I go, people offer up the same rationales. Some even rattle off the names of dissenting scientists, websites, or journal articles. They dismiss the 99% unanimity of international climate scientists and scientific associations by saying those sounding the warning are all on the take and probably also personal hypocrites.

“They’re just giving the government funding agencies what they want,” a student in Colorado Springs told me two weeks ago. “If they don’t, they won’t get their grants.” It’s an odd concept of pandering, given the massive challenges faced by any elected leader who takes the scientific message seriously. But the deniers insist that a handful of contrarians whose views are refuted by every major scientific study are somehow more credible than the collective judgment of practically every climate scientist in the world.

These arguments emerge from the standard echo chamber of Hannity, Rush, and Fox News. But the spokespeople who articulate them in these venues and others more mainstream have been overwhelmingly sponsored by Exxon. As the Union of concerned Scientists explores in their meticulously detailed report, Smoke, Mirrors and Hot Air, and as George Monbiot examines in his powerful global warming book Heat, Exxon’s strategy of using a handful of industry-funded dissenters to cast doubt on an overwhelming scientific consensus was borrowed from the fight over tobacco regulation. In 1992, a major EPA report warned of the medical harm from second hand smoke. In response, Philip Morris hired the PR firm APCO to create a supposedly independent group, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), to promote scientists who’d dispute this harm. Enlisting enough other corporate supporters so the effort didn’t seem just a tobacco industry
creation, TASSC’s mission echoed the phrase from a memo of fellow tobacco company Brown and Williamson, “Doubt is our product.”

As part of creating that doubt, APCO’s Steven Milloy founded JunkScience.com, which would later become a key website for global warming denial. Milloy also became associated with other key climate change denial organizations, like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which has called the Kyoto accords “a power grab based on deception and fear”), and later become a columnist for Fox. Major climate denial activist Frederick Seitz also had strong tobacco industry ties, drawing $585,000 from RJ Reynolds between 1979 and 1987 before going on to the George Marshall Institute. Exxon jumped in to support these efforts early on, as part of a more general assault on government regulation and action. As the scientific consensus around global warming began to solidify, they began
funding a series of studies and spokespeople to insist that mainstream scientific opinion was sharply divided. Between 1998 and 2005 the company has invested over $16 million in challenging the overwhelming consensus among climatologists, spreading the resources among at least 43 different institutions to give the appearance of a broad chorus of dissent. Whether the Heartland Institute, Alliance for Climate Strategies, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, or the Competitive Enterprise Institute and George Marshall Institute, they all got major Exxon support for their role in arguing that no global warming crisis existed. Until recently, the efforts to sow doubt have worked, with the help of a compliant media and the Bush presidency. And though a number of other energy companies also participated, ExxonMobil was the critical initiator, and remained firmly denying the crisis even as other oil companies, like BP Amoco and Shell, acknowledged the gravity of the threat.

Japan: Seven nuke utilities told to conduct new checks

Seven nuke utilities told to conduct new checks | The Japan Times Online

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Seven nuke utilities told to conduct new checks
Kyodo News

The government ordered four power utilities Friday to conduct additional checks, along with regular inspections, on seven nuclear plants in order to prevent further data falsifications and reactor defect and accident coverups in an industry that has been plagued with such misdeeds.

Observers, however, see this administrative “punishment” as limp-wristed and indicative of the ministry giving the utilities special consideration.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry did not order any of the utilities’ nuclear power plants shut down, saying that their latest inspections show they are safe.

The order was part of a 30-point set of measures the ministry released the same day to ensure the nation’s nuclear plants are safe and to rebuild public trust in atomic power after past accidents and coverups and recent revelations by two utilities that they concealed criticality accidents and other utilities came clean on defect coverups.

The targeted utilities are Tokyo Electric Power Co., Hokuriku Electric Power Co., Chugoku Electric Power Co. and Japan Atomic Power Co.

Not targeted, however, is Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd., whose spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, has a design flaw, a miscalculation for earthquake resistance, that its maker, a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., allegedly kept secret for 11 years until it was reported Thursday.

Officials at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, an arm of the ministry, will also carry out special monitoring and supervision of the seven plants.

The seven are Tepco’s Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 plants in Fukushima Prefecture and the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata Prefecture, Hokuriku Electric’s Shika plant in Ishikawa Prefecture, Chugoku Electric’s Shimane plant in Shimane Prefecture, Japan Atomic’s Tsuruga plant in Fukui Prefecture and Tokai plant in Ibaraki Prefecture.

The agency suspects the operations of nine reactors at the seven plants were in violation of the Electric Utility Law or other reactor laws.

Meanwhile, the trade ministry ordered Tepco’s Komukawa hydroelectric plant in Yamanashi Prefecture and Hokuriku Electric’s hydroelectric plant in Ichinose, Ishikawa Prefecture, to be shut down until repairs they have done meet government standards.

In the past, the ministry ordered tough punishments, including business license cancellations and suspended reactor operations, when utilities were found to have faked reports on reactor accidents and safety defects.

In 2003, Tepco was ordered to shut down all of its reactors in order to perform inspections and repairs, after it was revealed by a whistle-blower that the utility had covered up reactor faults. At the time, however, it failed to disclose the 1978 criticality accident at its Fukushima No. 1 plant.

Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Akira Amari told reporters that he wants to remind management and employees at utilities once again that they are tasked with the vital undertaking of providing the public with a stable, and safe, electricity supply.

He stressed the importance of atomic power, calling it the most promising and environmentally friendly energy source for the future.

Asked if he thinks the latest steps are lukewarm since they don’t entail punishment, including reactor shutdowns, Amari reckoned, without elaborating, that the utilities “have had enough social disadvantages.”

“It is most important (for the government) to disclose their irregularities, such as data falsifications, to society and to make them build an accountable system,” he said.

Retired military officers (CNA) produce climate change report

National Security and the Threat of Climate Change – The CNA Corporation

Global climate change presents a serious national security threat which could impact Americans at home, impact United States military operations and heighten global tensions, according to a new study released by a blue-ribbon panel of retired admirals and generals from all branches of the armed services.

The study, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” explores ways projected climate change is a threat multiplier in already fragile regions, exacerbating conditions that lead to failed states — the breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism.

The CNA Corporation brought together eleven retired three-star and four-star admirals and generals to provide advice, expertise and perspective on the impact of climate change. CNAC writers and researchers compiled the report under the board’s direction and review.

The report includes several formal findings:

* Projected climate change poses a serious threat to America’s national security.
* Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world.
* Projected climate change will add to tensions even in stable regions of the world.
* Climate change, national security and energy dependence are a related set of global challenges.

The report also made several specific recommendations:

* The national security consequences of climate change should be fully integrated into national security and national defense strategies.
* The U.S. should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.
* The U.S. should commit to global partnerships that help less developed nations build the capacity and resiliency to better manage climate impacts.
* The Department of Defense should enhance its operational capability by accelerating the adoption of improved business processes and innovative technologies that result in improved U.S. combat power through energy efficiency.
* DoD should conduct an assessment of the impact on US military installations worldwide of rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and other possible climate change impacts over the next thirty to forty years.

Oakland top renewable city in country

Top Ten U.S. Cities Ranked by Use of Renewable Energy

April 18, 2007
Top Ten U.S. Cities Ranked by Use of Renewable Energy
Peterborough, New Hampshire [RenewableEnergyAccess.com]

A newly released study conducted by SustainLane Government concludes that Oakland, California, generates the highest percentage of renewable energy out of all U.S. cities, producing 5 percent more energy than any other city surveyed.

“Results in Oakland are built on the substantial foundation of renewable energy created by California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard.”

– Scott Wentworth, City of Oakland, Energy Engineer
Leading the nation with 17 percent of its electricity produced by sources such as solar, wind and geothermal, most renewable energy generation in the city comes from commercial and residential photovoltaic (PV) systems.

According to City of Oakland Energy Engineer Scott Wentworth, the city is undertaking many important projects including: working with San Francisco State University, Marin County, and the City and County of San Francisco to create tools for assessing solar potential of commercial and residential properties; conducting wave and tidal power studies in collaboration with the Electric Power Research Institute and other California cities; and outfitting new municipal buildings to accommodate solar systems — even if the resources are not available to install the system immediately.

Oakland has strongly supported solar energy and encouraged citizens to do the same, said Wentworth.

“We are excited that SustainLane Governments figures show that we are achieving positive results. The results that are happening in Oakland are derived from increasingly effective collaboration between government agencies, utilities, for-profit businesses and non-governmental organizations,” he said.

Wentworth noted that Oakland works with other California cities like San Francisco and Marin to learn from one another and develop stronger renewable energy and energy efficiency programs. San Francisco, Sacramento and San Jose all tied for second place with 12 percent of their energy coming from renewable energy sources.

Percentage of Power from Renewable Energy

1

Oakland, CA

17%

2

Sacramento/San Francisco/San Jose, CA

12%

3

Portland, OR

10%

4

Boston, MA

8.6%

5

San Diego, CA

8%

6

Austin, TX

6%

7

Los Angeles, CA

5%

8

Minneapolis, MN

5%

9

Seattle, WA

3.5%

10

Chicago, Il

3%

Source: SustainLane U.S. City Rankings data 2006/2007

Chernobyl death toll underestimated says Greenpeace

UNIAN – Chernobyl death toll underestimated says Greenpeace

Chernobyl death toll underestimated says Greenpeace

The death toll from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 20 years ago could be far higher than official estimates, with up to 93,000 extra cancer deaths worldwide, environmental group Greenpeace said on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Based on research by the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, the report said that of the 2 billion people globally affected by the Chernobyl fallout, 270,000 will develop cancers as a result, of which 93,000 will prove fatal.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates 4,000 people died as a result of the explosion in reactor number four at the power plant in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl on April 26, 1986.

The explosion sent a plume of radioactive dust across northern and western Europe and as far as the eastern United States.

“It is appalling that the IAEA is whitewashing the impacts of the most serious nuclear accident in human history,” said Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigner Ivan Blokov.

The IAEA was not immediately available for comment.

The Greenpeace report further extrapolates that in total some 200,000 people in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus could have already died as a result of medical conditions — such as cardiovascular diseases — attributable to the disaster.

“Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases,” Greenpeace campaigner Jan van de Putte told Reuters.

“The only methodology that is accepted is for calculating fatal cancers,” he said.

The report said the incidence of cancer in Belarus jumped 40 percent between 1990 and 2000, with children not even born at the time now showing an 88.5-fold increase in thyroid cancers.

Leukaemia is also reported to be on the increase in the region, as are cases of intestinal, rectal, breast, bladder, kidney and lung cancers.

The relocation of hundreds of thousands of people as a result of the explosion has put further strains on the population, the report said.

“The Chernobyl accident disrupted whole societies in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia,” Greenpeace concluded.

“A complex interaction between factors such as poor health, increased costs of health systems, relocation of people, loss of agricultural territories and contamination of foodstuffs, economic crisis, the costs of remediation to the states, political problems, a weakened workforce … creates a general crisis.”

The relocation of hundreds of thousands of people as a result of the explosion has put further strains on the population, the report said.

“The Chernobyl accident disrupted whole societies in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia,” Greenpeace concluded.

“A complex interaction between factors such as poor health, increased costs of health systems, relocation of people, loss of agricultural territories and contamination of foodstuffs, economic crisis, the costs of remediation to the states, political problems, a weakened workforce … creates a general crisis.”

ctnstant URL of article:
http://www.unian.net/eng/news/news-192597.html

Kyodi news: Nagasaki Mayor assasianted

Mayor’s assassination stuns Japan – Breaking News – World – Breaking News

Mayor’s assassination stuns Japan

April 18, 2007 – 9:58PM

Stunned Japanese laid flowers and called for even tighter controls on guns after the mayor of Nagasaki was shot dead by a member of the nation’s largest underworld gang.

The rare political killing in one of the world’s safest countries led authorities to tighten security around political leaders ahead of local polls this Sunday, in which the mayor was campaigning for re-election.

“This criminal act during the election campaign is a challenge to democracy. It cannot be forgiven no matter what,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters in Tokyo.

Sixty-one-year-old Iccho Ito died early Wednesday due to massive blood loss hours after being shot outside his campaign offices in Nagasaki.

“This is not an act by a human being. If he had grievances, he should have said them to the mayor instead of shooting him,” said Yoshinori Hirano, 57, a gas company worker, as mourners left flowers at the shooting site.

“To see an important person get killed violently is very shocking because Nagasaki is the city of peace,” he said as he started to weep.

Police said the assailant belonged to the Japanese mafia, or “yakuza,” who hold wide interests in seedy nightlife and are linked to most of Japan’s gun-related violence.

Ito, a political independent, was an outspoken pacifist born a month after the atomic bomb that devastated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 and helped bring World War II to an end.

Chief government spokesman Yasuhisa Shiozaki said authorities would look into how criminal groups were able to skirt Japan’s tough gun controls.

“The government will make more efforts to crack down on gun trafficking at ports through cooperation with police, customs houses and coast guards, as well as other countries,” Shiozaki said.

Police said they were investigating how the suspect, 59-year-old Tetsuya Shiroo, obtained the lethal weapon, a 0.38-caliber US-made Smith and Wesson “Bodyguard” revolver.

Amid the widespread condemnation of the attack, gaffe-prone Defence Minister Fumio Kyuma came under fire for saying the shooting would boost the chances of the opposition.

Ito’s son-in-law, a 40-year-old Tokyo-based newspaper reporter who has never held elected office, said he would run in Sunday’s election.

“As a journalist, I have always distanced myself from my father, Iccho Ito,” Makoto Yokoo said. “This is something I never thought about before, but someone has to carry on the job that Iccho Ito wanted to do.”

Police said the assailant was an executive member of a local group affiliated with the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest criminal syndicate with some 40,000 members nationwide.

Motohisa Mizuta, head of the local group, went in person to a police station with a letter announcing the affiliate, Suishinkei, was disbanding, a senior police officer said.

“Our organisation has caused trouble to society,” the officer quoted the letter as saying.

But police said they were still questioning Shiroo to learn his motives.

Shiroo had grievances with the city after his vehicle was damaged at a construction site four years ago, police said.

But a city spokesman said an official who dealt with Shiroo doubted the accident was his real motivation. News reports said the dispute may be linked to a public works contract.

Ito’s killing was the second assault on a mayor in the deeply pacifist city.

In January 1990, a right-wing extremist shot and wounded then mayor Hitoshi Motoshima for saying late emperor Hirohito bore responsibility for World War II.

Tadatoshi Akiba, the mayor of Hiroshima, the only other city to suffer nuclear attack, said he felt “deep sorrow and strong anger” over the death.

“I deeply regret that his strong wish for the abolition of nuclear weapons was stalled by the violence of the bullet.”

© 2007 AFP

AFP: Pacific nuclear victims awarded one billion dollars -

Pacific nuclear victims awarded one billion dollars – Yahoo! News

Pacific nuclear victims awarded one billion dollarsby Giff Johnson Wed Apr 18, 3:49 AM ET

MAJURO (AFP) – Residents from a Marshall Islands atoll exposed to fallout from US nuclear tests have been awarded more than one billion dollars of compensation, but may never receive a cent of it.
The Marshall Islands-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal, which issued the ruling Tuesday, has virtually no money to pay the award and has labeled United States-provided compensation “manifestly inadequate.”

The ruling was issued more than 15 years after the claim was first filed by leaders from Rongelap, a low-lying western Pacific coral atoll engulfed in snow-like nuclear fallout from the 1954 Bravo test at nearby Bikini atoll.

Bravo was the biggest ever US nuclear test and was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs which devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The tribunal was set up in 1988 under an agreement with the US when the Marshall Islands gained independence from its former colonial master.

Since 1991 it has paid personal injury claims of Marshall Islanders affected by 67 US atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958.

But the tribunal halted payments in 2006 for lack of money. A Tribunal official said the compensation trust fund provided by the US has dropped from its original 1986 amount of 150 million dollars to just one million dollars, which is expected to be exhausted by next year.

Rongelap mayor James Matayoshi said that the islanders plan to file suit against the United States in the US Court of Claims to seek enforcement of the tribunal’s 1.03 billion dollar award.

The award is the largest of the four “class action” awards made by the tribunal, none of which have been paid because of the lack of funds.

Bikini and Enewetak islanders filed suit last year against the US government in the Court of Claims to get enforcement of their tribunal awards. A hearing is expected to take place on April 23 in Washington.

The tribunal has already issued awards totaling over one billion dollars for claims filed by Enewetak and Bikini atolls, which were the sites of the 67 nuclear tests, and for Utrik, another atoll that was hit by fallout from the Bravo test.

Rongelap islanders were evacuated from their island home for three years after the Bravo test but were exposed to more radiation when repatriated to their island by the US in 1957, the tribunal said.

“Although the people were assured that it was safe to return to Rongelap in 1957, it was evident that the US knew Rongelap was still contaminated at that time,” tribunal judges James Plasman and Gregory Danz, both Americans, said in their ruling.

The judges said that the people “came to feel like guinea pigs, used for experimentation by the US.”

Rongelap Islanders evacuated themselves from the atoll in 1985, fearing continued radiation exposure.

The islanders “suffered emotional distress and a degraded quality of life as a consequence of the contamination of their property,” the ruling said.

The award covers loss of property value from radiation contamination, the costs of a clean-up to allow future resettlement, and hardship and suffering.

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NRC: 3rd ESR issued at Grand Gulf

FR Doc E7-7261

Federal Register: April 17, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 73)] [Notices] [Page 19217-19218] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr17ap07-77] ======================================================================= ———————————————————————– NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION [Docket No. 052-00009] Notice of Issuance of Early Site Permit (ESP) for Grand Gulf ESP Site Located 25 Miles South of the City of Vicksburg, MS AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ACTION: Notice of issuance of Early Site Permit. ———————————————————————– FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: George F. Wunder, Senior Project Manager, ABWR/ESBWR Projects Branch 1, Division of New Reactor Licensing, Office of New Reactors, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001. Telephone: (301) 415-1494; Fax number: (301) 415-2102; e-mail: gfw@nrc.gov. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: I. Introduction Pursuant to 10 CFR 2.106, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is providing notice of the issuance of Early Site Permit (ESP) ESP-002 to System Energy Resources Inc. (SERI, or the permit holder), for approval of a site located near Port Gibson, Mississippi, approximately 25 miles south of the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, for one or more nuclear power reactors; this action [[Page 19218]] is separate from the filing of an application for a construction permit or combined license for such a facility. The NRC has found that the application for an ESP filed by SERI complies with the applicable requirements of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, and the applicable rules and regulations of the Commission, and all required notifications to other agencies or bodies have been duly made. Based on consideration of the site criteria contained in 10 CFR Part 100, a reactor, or reactors, having design characteristics that fall within the site characteristics and controlling parameters of the Grand Gulf ESP Site can be constructed and operated without undue risk to the health and safety of the public. There is reasonable assurance that the permit holder will comply with the regulations in 10 CFR Chapter I, and the health and safety of the public will not be endangered. Issuance of an ESP to the permit holder will not be inimical to the common defense and security or the health and safety of the public. There is no significant impediment to the development of emergency plans, as referenced in 10 CFR 52.17(b)(1) and 10 CFR 52.18. The descriptions of contacts and arrangements made with Federal, State, and local governmental agencies with emergency planning responsibilities, as referenced in 10 CFR 52.17(b)(3), are acceptable. Major features A, B, C, D, E, F, G, I, J, K, L, O, and P of the emergency plan are acceptable to the extent specified in NUREG-1840, “Safety Evaluation Report for an Early Site Permit (ESP) at the Grand Gulf Site.” The issuance of this ESP is in accordance with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, as amended, and with applicable sections of 10 CFR Part 51 as referenced by Subpart A of 10 CFR Part 52, and all applicable requirements therein have been satisfied. The permit holder’s request for the proposed permit was previously noticed in the Federal Register on January 16, 2004, (69 FR 2636), with a notice of hearing and opportunity to petition for leave to intervene. This ESP complies with the standards and requirements of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, and NRC’s rules and regulations as set forth in 10 CFR Chapter I and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. Accordingly, this ESP was issued on April 5, 2007, and is effective immediately. II. Further Information The NRC has prepared a Safety Evaluation Report (SER) and Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), that document the information that was reviewed and NRC’s conclusions. In accordance with 10 CFR 2.390 of the NRC’s “Rules of Practice,” details with respect to this action, including the SER, FEIS, and accompanying documentation included in the ESP package, are available electronically at the NRC’s Electronic Reading Room at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html. From this site, members of the public can access the NRC’s Agencywide Document Access and Management System (ADAMS), which provides text and image files of NRC’s public documents. The ADAMS accession numbers for the documents related to this notice are: ———————————————————————— ———————————————————————— ML070780457………………………. Issuance of Early Site Permit for System Energy Resources, Inc.–Grand Gulf Site (ESP- 002). ML061070443………………………. NUREG-1840–“Safety Evaluation Report for an Early Site Permit (ESP) at Grand Gulf Site”. ML060900037………………………. NUREG-1817–“Environmental Impact Statement for an Early Site Permit (ESP) at the Grand Gulf ESP Site” Final Report. ML032960291………………………. Grand Gulf Early Site Permit Application, Part 1, Cover and Table of Contents. ———————————————————————— Persons who do not have access to ADAMS or who encounter problems in accessing the documents located in ADAMS should contact the NRC Public Document Room (PDR) Reference staff at 1-800-397-4209, 301-415- 4737, or by e-mail to pdr@nrc.gov. These documents may also be viewed electronically on the public computers located at the NRC’s Public Document Room (PDR), O 1 F21, One White Flint North, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland 20852. The PDR reproduction contractor will copy documents for a fee. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 9th day of April, 2007. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Mohammed Shuaibi, Chief, ESBWR/ABWR Projects Branch 1, Division of New Reactor Licensing, Office of New Reactors. [FR Doc. E7-7261 Filed 4-16-07; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P

Salt Lake Tribune – Focus is on renewable power

Salt Lake Tribune – Focus is on renewable power

Wind, solar, other sources still go begging in most of the West
By Patty Henetz
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 04/17/2007 01:16:04 AM MDT

What’s not to like about renewable energy?
Apparently a lot, given that non-hydroelectric renewable energy accounts for just 2 percent of the nation’s energy mix. Wind power, which makes up half that total, accounts for just one-tenth of 1 percent of Utah’s electricity despite abundant potential.
And it’s not just wind resources that go begging. Solar, geothermal, biomass, biofuels and landfill and livestock methane present economic opportunity as well as a way to limit greenhouse gas emissions, a panel of experts said Monday at the Utah Energy Summit in Salt Lake City.
“The United States is well-endowed with renewable resources, basically in every state,” said Doug Arent, of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
The discussion was part of Gov. Jon Huntsman’s three-day summit that began Sunday with a meeting of the National Governors Association on the subject of Western energy development.
Opening the summit, Huntsman said the governors want to spur economic development through expanded alternative fuels programs, vehicles with better fuel efficiency, continued renewable energy development tax credits, new clean-coal technology that will eliminate emissions of greenhouse gases, enhanced focus on conservation and energy efficiency and a massive funding infusion for new technology.
Above all, they want to counter global
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warming, Huntsman said.
But even with escalating technological advances and significant efforts to increase energy efficiency and conservation, the world’s energy demand is expected to double current levels by 2050, when it will reach 20 million megawatts, Arent said.
By that same year, renewable energy is expected to yield one million megawatts of electricity.
Environmental advocates and renewable energy developers – including large corporations such as Chevron and Mid- American Energy Holdings, owner of Rocky Mountain Power – exchanged opinions on this apparent contradiction.
Their conclusion? Federal leadership has fallen short, state legislatures refuse to mandate renewable portfolios and regulatory commissions have yet to fully appreciate the costs of including renewables in the utility mix.
Transmission lines need to be built and utilities are unable to attract investment when financial returns can’t be guaranteed. Obstacles also include inconsistent federal tax incentives, a global wind turbine shortage, huge cost increases for construction, materials and transportation and a persistent attitude that wind isn’t a reliable resource.
Still, major players are investing in wind and other renewable resources. General Electric, Siemans, Goldman Sachs, BP and Shell are now big names in wind investment, said Ron Lehr, the American Wind Energy Association’s Western representative.
“The wind is always blowing someplace,” Lehr said.
What’s needed is more turbines. And remember, Lehr said, all energy is subsidized – witness the recent 20-year extension of the $10 billion nuclear industry insurance program under the Price-Anderson Act – so get over the idea that renewables ought to stand on their own in the market.
But bringing renewables to market is expensive, said Jonathan Weisgall, MidAmerican’s vice president for regulatory and legislative affairs and president of the Geothermal Energy Association.
“No company is going to put up three, four, five billion dollars for transmission without understanding the cost of [investment] recovery,” he said.
All renewable energy sources together account for about 2 percent of the mix in the seven Rocky Mountain interior states, said John Nielson, executive director of Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit law and advocacy organization based in Boulder, Colo.
But no state has more than 500 megawatts of renewable generation, far below what could be developed, Nielson said.
The organization’s studies have shown that the most effective policy for unleashing renewable potential has been renewable portfolio standards, which state percentage goals for the energy mix.
Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Montana have goals ranging from Arizona’s 1.1 percent renewable mix by this year to California’s 20 percent goal by 2017. Utah, Idaho and Wyoming do not have renewable portfolio standards.
Instead, Huntsman has chosen to focus on efficiency and conservation, and has set a goal of increasing overall savings of 20 percent by 2015.
Utah’s 2007 Legislature also passed laws extending the renewable energy tax credit, establishing a revolving loan fund for energy efficiency and state fleet efficiency requirements. It did not, however, approve a tax credit for fuel-efficient vehicles.

Fresno Bee: Local: Panel rejects bill to lift nuclear ban

FresnoBee.com: Local: Panel rejects bill to lift nuclear ban

Panel rejects bill to lift nuclear ban
Assembly committee vote doesn’t deter Fresno group.
By E.J. Schultz / Bee Capitol Bureau
04/17/07 04:16:02

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An Assembly committee on Monday rejected a bill to lift California’s ban on nuclear power plants, as backers of a proposed Fresno plant said they might take their case directly to the state’s voters.

As expected, Democrats on the Assembly Natural Resources Committee voted against the measure, siding with environmentalists who raised concerns about storing radioactive waste and nuclear weapons proliferation.

Assembly Bill 719 failed 3-6, with the three yes votes coming from Republicans.

Assembly Member Chuck DeVore, R-Irvine, had pitched the bill as a way to help increase the state’s electricity supply while complying with new restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear power plants produce few greenhouse gas emissions, the leading man-made cause of global warming.

The bill would have boosted efforts by a group of Fresno business leaders seeking to build a $4 billion, 1,600-megawatt nuclear reactor in Fresno.

But project supporters said they weren’t disappointed because they had nothing to do with DeVore’s effort.

“It came [as] unexpected to us that this was even proposed in the first place, so we don’t look at it as a setback at all — we will continue to move forward,” said John Hutson, president and chief executive of the Fresno Nuclear Energy Group.

Bypassing lawmakers, the group has been considering launching an effort to lift the ban with a ballot measure, he said.

About 13% of the state’s electricity supply comes from nuclear power, including two California plants. But a state law passed in 1976 prohibits the construction of plants until the federal government finds a way to dispose of high-level nuclear waste.

The most-discussed proposal is a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but the project has been plagued by delays.

DeVore, who vowed to re-introduce the bill next year, said the state’s portfolio of electricity options will continue to narrow — and grow more costly — as more environmental controls are put in place.

“You can’t power an electrical grid on good intentions,” he said.

Greenhouse gas legislation that passed last year calls for reducing emissions by 25% by 2020. Another law prohibits utilities from entering into long-term contracts with coal-fired power plants.

Last week, the State Lands Commission rejected a proposed liquefied natural gas facility off the Southern California coast, which supporters said was needed to keep up with energy demands.

About 16% of the state’s electricity supply comes from coal and 42% comes from natural gas, according to a recent report by the California Energy Commission.

Opponents of DeVore’s bill said lifting the ban is premature.

“Nuclear technology is the most dangerous technology on earth,” said Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, an anti-nuclear group. “We haven’t solved the waste problem, [and] we haven’t solved the proliferation problem.”

Anti-nuclear activists worry that materials from nuclear plants could fall into the wrong hands and be turned into weapons, or that terrorists might attack a plant.

Environmentalists testifying Monday also pointed to cost overruns that plagued existing plants. Construction of the Diablo Canyon plant exceeded the $320 million estimate, according to the energy commission.

A better solution, environmentalists said, is to invest in alternative energy like wind and solar power.

Proponents of the Fresno plant would face a divided public if they are able to get an initiative on the ballot. Of likely voters, 46% support new nuclear plants and 46% oppose them, according to a July poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The Fresno Nuclear Energy Group is doing its own polling on the issue and is expected to reach a decision soon on the best way to move forward, Hutson said.
The reporter can be reached at eschultz@fresnobee.com or (916) 326-5541.

A4NR: NUCLEAR REVIVAL DIES IN COMMITTEE: Bill to lift 30-year state ban defeated

April 16, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Rochelle Becker, (858) 337-2703

NUCLEAR REVIVAL DIES IN COMMITTEE: Bill to lift 30-year state ban defeated

Today, a controversial bill that would have allowed the construction of nuclear power plants to resume in California died in committee before reaching the floor of the State Assembly.

AB 719 (Devore) would have struck down California's 1976 Nuclear Safeguards Act, a moratorium on building nuclear power plants until a permanent solution to the storage of high-level radioactive waste is developed. The Assembly's Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, voted ­ 4 to 2 to uphold the ban. Several members who expressed concern about lifting the ban were not there when the vote was counted as they had conflicting bills in other Committees.

The California legislature enacted the Nuclear Safeguards legislation to prohibit new plant construction because of the federal government's failure to create a central nuclear waste repository. Thirty-one years later, no such solution exists and approximately 75,000 tons of radioactive byproducts of nuclear power generation have accumulated and are stored adjacent to the nation's rivers, lakes and oceans awaiting disposal.

According the Resources Committee's analysis of the Devore bill, "the federal waste disposal program has been plagued with technical and legal challenges, managerial problems, licensing delays, persistent weaknesses in quality assurance for the program, and increasing costs."

The Devore bill claimed to address the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to curb global warming. According to the California Energy Commission, the most significant reductions in CO2 emissions from electricity generation can be achieved through energy efficiency programs and integrating renewable energy resources -- solar, wind, thermal, biomass and hydropower-- into electricity supplies.

"The so-called nuclear renaissance and the idea the nuclear power is the way to combat climate change is based on a tall stack of fallacies, unsupported by past experience or future promises," said Rochelle Becker, Executive Director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, which spearheaded opposition to the Devore bill. “Just because nuclear power proponents call their technology green, doesn’t make it so,”

"The Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility welcomes every opportunity to discuss issues of nuclear power and waste versus solutions to global warming that focus on efficiency and renewable energy with Assemblyman Devore and all members of our state legislature. We anticipate the results of an upcoming study by the California Energy Commission that will analyze the costs, benefits and risks of continuing down a nuclear energy path will lead us to a clearer understanding of where to invest our energy dollars,” Becker said.

Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility is an educational and advocacy organization that works with other environmental and policy groups to stop nuclear power development and relicensing of aging nuclear facilities in California and promote create clean, renewable and economic energy sources that will create jobs, provide energy independence and serve as a model for other states and countries. For more information, see: www.a4nr.org

________________________________

AU: ABC: Global warming, nuclear power health risks underestimated

Global warming, nuclear power health risks underestimated: Caldicott. 16/04/2007. ABC News Online

Global warming, nuclear power health risks underestimated: CaldicottA leading environmentalist and physician says the health risks posed by global warming and nuclear power are worse than those of smoking.

Prominent environmentalist, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and paediatrician Dr Helen Caldicott says global warming and nuclear power plants will increase the spread of disease.

She says nuclear power plants contribute substantially to climate change and expose humans to radiation-related illnesses.

Dr Caldicott says public awareness of the health risks posed by nuclear power has dropped off.

“Each reactor makes 200 kilograms of plutonium a year, whose half life is 240,000 years,” she said.

“[It's] the most toxic substance known to the human race, such that a couple of kilos if adequately distributed could give everyone on earth cancer.

“So we’re talking about a spread of disease that will make the tobacco industry look benign in terms of cancer.”

Dr Caldicott has welcomed a new website by medical students at the ANU, which monitors the connection between a changing environment and human health.

She says the development of the research website is timely.

“It’s been known for several decades that as the earth heats there will be epidemics of malaria, particularly in places that are now cool like Melbourne and Seattle,” she said.

“Diseases spread by arthropods like mosquitos and the like that will breed in the hot climates that normally are cool.”

Akron Beacon Journal: NRC license granted to planned uranium enrichment plant

AP Wire | 04/13/2007 | NRC license granted to planned uranium enrichment plant

NRC license granted to planned uranium enrichment plant
Associated Press

PIKETON, Ohio – The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday issued a construction and operating license for USEC Inc.’s American Centrifuge Plant, which will enrich uranium in southern Ohio.

Enrichment is the process by which uranium is made into fuel for nuclear power plants. The license is good for 30 years.

USEC, based in Bethesda, Md., is developing the American Centrifuge enrichment project at a former atomic weapons plant in Piketon, about 65 miles south of Columbus. The company estimated the project would cost $2.3 billion, and the plant would employ more than 400 people.

“With plans under way for more than 30 new reactors around the country, a stable, domestic source of enriched uranium is vital,” said John K. Welch, USEC president and chief executive officer.

American Centrifuge is only the second major nuclear facility to be licensed in the past three decades under the NRC’s licensing process for uranium enrichment facilities.

USEC plans to begin operations at the plant in late 2009, concentrating uranium isotopes into forms that can be used as fuel. The project would also generate tons of radioactive waste – enough over 30 years to fill 41,000 cylinders weighing about 14 tons apiece, according to the NRC.

ON THE NET

http://www.usec.com/

SF Chronicle: Nuclear Power’s flaws

Letters: Nuclear Power’s flaws

Nuclear power’s flaws

Editor — There is a reason why California should not adopt the nuclear power option at this time (”Fresno a player in debate over nuclear power,” April 8). In brief, the water that cools each nuclear reactor’s core is at a much higher pressure than its surroundings. Thus, the water is susceptible to leaking, producing a meltdown of the core.

If the core melts, intensely radioactive substances may well be released into the environment, causing deaths and injuries and making large areas of land uninhabitable. Safety inspections are conducted in an attempt at heading off leakage. The designs of the inspection systems are seriously flawed, but the nuclear industry and its federal regulatory agency refuse to correct the flaws.

TERRY OLDBERG

SF Chronicle: SOLAR POWER COMES OF AGE

SOLAR POWER COMES OF AGE / Light-sensitive panels today are a boon to the wallet as well as the environment

San Francisco Chronicle
SOLAR POWER COMES OF AGE
Light-sensitive panels today are a boon to the wallet as well as the environment

Dana Perrigan, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, April 15, 2007

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Solar panel installer Becca Litke pauses amid on work a s… A pallet of solar panels is dropped to the roof of the Mi… Today’s solar installations are a far cry from the clumsy… A Grupe home in Rocklin, Placer County. Photo courtesy of…

During the disco days of the 1970s, a few brave pioneers began installing solar panels on the roofs of their homes. With the enthusiasm of the newly converted, they explained to their incredulous neighbors that the flat, black objects would harness the power of the sun to provide the family with hot water.

The neighbors, no doubt, reacted much as if their acquaintance had insisted on demonstrating his newly acquired magic skills by sawing his wife in half: They nodded their heads in wary approval — and made a silent vow to immediately install a more secure lock on the side gate.

Now, 30-odd years later, California is the third-largest market for solar power systems — behind Germany and Japan. Eighty-five percent of all systems installed in the nation are here. Due to a growing concern for the environment and rising energy costs — as well as the economic incentives provided by state legislation and federal tax credits — droves of homeowners and business owners are following in the footsteps of those early pioneers.

A further sign of this booming trend is that some developers have even started incorporating solar power as a standard feature in their new subdivisions.

“Some of them have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it,” says Gary Gerber, president of Sun Light & Power in Berkeley, “while others have seen the advantages and recognized that this is actually a sales tool for them. Once that gets going, they’ll all jump on board.”

Aaron Nitzkin, vice president of Old Country Roofing’s solar division in Vacaville, agrees.

“What’s really driving the growth now is competition,” Nitzkin says. “It’s the next granite countertop. In five to seven years, all roofing companies will be doing solar — or they won’t be in business.”

The largest roofing contractor in Northern California, Old Country Roofing built its first solar roof in 2001 in Sacramento. Since then, the company has installed several hundred. Two months ago, it opened a solar division.

“Basically,” Nitzkin says, “we put our toes in the water and learned the market. I believe that in five to seven years, solar will be standard on all new homes.”

The largest developer of residential properties in the East Bay, Lennar Bay Area Homebuilding, recently completed the first community of new homes in the Bay Area built with a roof-integrated solar electric system. Located in Danville, the 77 homes range in size from 3,673 to 4,243 square feet and are priced at about $1.3 million.

The company is building an additional 250 homes equipped with solar power systems, priced at $900,000, in San Ramon.

“I think consumer demand is increasing as people become more aware of the technology,” says Bill Kelly, general manager of the new-home division of San Jose’s SunPower, which designed and built the solar power systems for the Lennar homes. “I don’t know of any other feature in the home that provides monthly savings to homeowners.”

It’s also a boon for the environment. While the early solar power systems were primarily thermal and provided hot water, most of those now being installed are photovoltaic, which generate electricity. A government study concludes that, when compared with electricity produced by fossil fuels, each kilowatt of solar-produced electricity offsets up to 830 pounds of nitrogen oxides, 1,500 pounds of sulfur dioxide and 217,000 pounds of carbon dioxide each year.

Even for those who aren’t especially concerned with the environmental benefits of solar power, the economic benefits are impossible to ignore. The cost of a system for an average home, says Sun Light & Power’s Gerber, is about $29,000. Subtract about $7,000 for the state rebate, which is currently based on how much electricity the system is capable of producing. Subtract an additional $2,000 for the federal tax credit, and the cost is reduced to $20,000. Over the 25- to 30-year life span of the system, the homeowner will save — based on current electrical rates and a conservative estimate of a 6 percent annual inflation rate for future costs — about $60,000 in electricity. After subtracting the system’s cost, the bottom line is $40,000 in savings.

The bottom line is also influenced by the tier rate system used by utility companies. Excess electricity produced by a homeowner’s solar power system is funneled into the utility’s grid. The homeowner receives a credit based on when the electricity was produced. If it was produced during the peak hours of summer, the homeowner is credited at the higher rate of about 45 cents per kilowatt-hour. That credit offsets power used by the homeowner during winter months, for which he or she pays only about 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. “You save about three times what you spend,” says Gerber. “That’s what a lot of people don’t get.”

Sherry Boschert, the owner of a 1,200-square-foot home in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood, has been getting it for quite awhile now. Boschert, who is also president of the S.F. Electrical Vehicles Association, upgraded her old system with a 4.8-kilowatt unit in 2002. Now, less than five years later, Boschert has nearly recouped the $27,000 she spent on the new system.

The system even provides all the electricity for her electric car.

“Once you start making electricity from the sun,” Boschert says, “you say, ‘What else can I plug in?’ ”

While the bulk of new solar power systems are retrofits on existing homes, Gerber says, an increasing number of businesses are seeing the advantages as well.

Give Something Back, an office supply company that — modeled after Newman’s Own — donates its profits to nonprofits, installed a 50-kilowatt solar power system at its 20,000-square-foot headquarters in Oakland. The $450,000 cost of the system was ameliorated by a $167,000 rebate and $80,000 in federal tax credits.

“Economically, it’s very, very viable, says the company’s president, Mike Hannigan. “It cuts our energy costs in half. It’s probably saving us $1,500 a month.”

Initially, Hannigan says, the company expected to recoup the entire cost of the system in 10 or 11 years. Now, with rising energy costs, he expects it will take half that time.

“What was originally a decision based on environmental reasons turns out not be inconsistent with the corporate mission,” Hannigan says.

Urban Pacific Properties, which manages Mission Plaza apartments in San Francisco, expects similar benefits on its recently installed 47-kilowatt system. Owned by Mission Plaza Limited Partnership, the 132 units are home to 180 elderly and disabled residents and their families. Urban Pacific had installed a solar thermal system to provide hot water back in 1982. When it became time to replace the roof, management — hoping to reduce its monthly $5,000 electrical bill — decided to also add a photovoltaic system.

“Once we get into the summer months we’ll be able to see how much more efficient it is,” says Kereen Stoll of Urban Pacific Properties. “Electricity is the biggest cost for Mission Plaza.”

In a couple of years, Gerber expects that half of the 150,000 single-family residences built in the state each year will be equipped with solar technology.

“I think a huge percentage of future development will be solar powered,” he says. “It’s in its infancy now.”

One of the founders of Sun Light & Power in 1976, Gerber — a former mechanical engineering student who left his master’s studies program at UC Berkeley to work with an architect who was designing solar homes — remembers its conception.

“It was so unbelievable. Our main business was educating people about what was possible,” he says. “Most of our customers back then were pioneers — just as we were pioneers.”

A mini-boom sparked by the oil embargo of 1979 came to a screeching halt with the election of Ronald Reagan. The new president eliminated the tax credit for alternative energy that President Carter had enacted. To add insult to injury, Reagan had the solar power system removed from the White House roof.

State legislation passed in 1998 — which was mostly about allowing utility companies to recoup their losses related to the abandonment of nuclear energy — earmarked 10 percent of $500 million allocated for all renewal types of energy for solar.

“So that was really the beginning of what’s turned into a stampede,” Gerber says. “It was all started with $50 million, which is a pittance when you think about it.”

Gerber, who struggled through the lean years, says his company did about $12 million in business last year.

“Solar has become more popular,” he says. “People aren’t as afraid of it. They don’t question it. It’s not the iffy proposal it once was.”

E-mail Dana Perrigan at perrigan2000@yahoo.com.

EPA finalizes renewable-fuel standard, evaluates emissions ruling With much fanfare

Wednesday, 11 Apr 2007 | Grist | Daily Grist | 11 Apr 2007

Will Johnson Stand Firm on Emissions?
EPA finalizes renewable-fuel standard, evaluates emissions ruling
With much fanfare, the Bush administration has finalized a renewable-fuel standard for cars and trucks. The rule, mandated by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, requires 4.7 billion gallons of motor fuel — a little more than 4 percent of the total produced — to come from renewable sources this year, increasing to 7.5 billion by 2012. EPA chief Stephen Johnson says the plan “offers the American people a hat trick — it protects the environment, strengthens our energy security, and supports America’s farmers.”

An interview with Rep. Jay Inslee, clean-energy champion

An interview with Rep. Jay Inslee, clean-energy champion from Washington state | By David Roberts | Grist | Main Dish | 11 Apr 2007

Jay Fever
An interview with Rep. Jay Inslee, clean-energy champion from Washington state
By David Roberts
11 Apr 2007
Rep. Jay Inslee’s two central passions, clean energy and global warming, received scant attention during his last eight years in Congress. Now, after a power shift on Capitol Hill, he’s at the center of high-profile efforts to attack climate change and promote a new energy economy — not to mention get his colleagues up to speed on the issues.

George Monbiot: Peak Oil vs Global climate change

George Monbiot on Peak Oil and Transition Towns | EnergyBulletin.net | Peak Oil News Clearinghouse

George Monbiot on Peak Oil and TransitionThe danger’s lie in pushing peak oil vs pushing global warming… Peak oil strategies are giving us more coal and syn fuels!

Japan Times: 1999 uncontrolled reaction suspected

1999 uncontrolled reaction suspected | The Japan Times Online

Thursday, April 12, 2007

1999 uncontrolled reaction suspected
Kyodo News

An uncontrolled nuclear reaction may have occurred during a 1999 accident at Hokuriku Electric Power Co.’s Shika power plant, the Japan Nuclear Technology Institute said Wednesday.

Michio Ishikawa, president of the institute comprising companies related to the electricity business, dismissed concerns that the “prompt critical” reaction could have resulted in a serious accident, like the deadly Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, saying what happened at the Shika plant was “a phenomenon of a very small scale.”

According to Ishikawa, the reaction might have occurred in parts of the reactor where three control rods were accidentally dislodged. The plant is located in Shika, Ishikawa Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast.

The institute analyzed various conditions that could have resulted from the development. The worst possible case it came up with suggested that the temperature of the troubled spot could have gone up to about 150 degrees. He said 3,300 degrees is the point that can melt nuclear fuel and release radioactivity into cooling water, according to Ishikawa.

EnergyBiz: A New Approach to Electric Power

 EnergyBiz Magazine Online

EnergyBiz Insider — Article
A New Approach to Electric Power
March 26, 2007
Martin Rosenberg, Editor-in-Chief
EnergyBiz Magazine

 
A large group of utility industry executives quietly convened in Kansas City, Mo., on a snowy day in January to sign on to an unprecedented shift in business strategy and corporate culture, entirely rethinking how they keep the lights on in homes and offices across America. The twin goals they hope to reach are a dramatic boost in energy efficiency and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Court denies group’s request to halt Diablo steam generator replacement

San Luis Obispo Tribune | 04/11/2007 | Court denies group’s request to halt Diablo steam generator replacement

Court denies group’s request to halt Diablo steam generator replacement
By David Sneed
dsneed@thetribunenews.com

A San Francisco Superior Court Wednesday denied a petition to suspend Pacific Gas and Electric’s permits to replace Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant’s steam generators.

The request to stay the permits was filed as part of a lawsuit by a Southern California environmental group against the California Coastal Commission, which issued the final permits for the replacement project in December.

The court’s refusal to issue the stay allows PG&E to proceed with the replacement project as planned. Work to replace the plant’s eight steam generators is scheduled to begin next year.

The utility has offered to conserve 1,200 acres of land it owns around the Point San Luis Lighthouse as a means of offsetting any damage the project will cause the environment. The environmental group that sued and Coastal Commission staff wanted more than 9,000 acres conserved, but the commission rejected that recommendation

Audience told GNEP plan will be ‘good for the world’

Chillicothe Gazette – www.chillicothegazette.com – Chillicothe, OH

Audience told GNEP plan will be ‘good for the world’ By ASHLEY LYKINS
Gazette Staff Writer

A new nuclear plant in Piketon would be “good for the world,” according to officials who spoke at Ohio University-Chillicothe Tuesday night.

Greg Simonton, director of Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative, said the amount of investment and jobs that could be brought with the project – the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership – would be “unprecedented.”

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The initiative, part of the Southern Ohio Nuclear Integration Cooperative, conducted its third and last public meeting Tuesday as part of its detailed siting study.
The group was one of 11 sites awarded a grant to do the study, which will determine the appropriateness of Piketon to host a GNEP facility.

If it’s chosen as the site, nuclear waste would be transported to the area to be recycled and reprocessed through two possible facilities.

The advanced nuclear fuel recycling center would separate the used nuclear fuel into its reusable and waste components, and the advanced recycling reactor would obliterate radioactive aspects of the used fuel while generating electricity.

SONIC maintains this process would reduce permanent nuclear waste and prevent proliferation because nuclear-capable countries, such as the U.S. and France, would provide reprocessing services to other countries that agree not to pursue their own programs.

“The risk that this is an unsafe operation is just not there, period,” said Dan Moore, president of SONIC, referring to some residents’ concerns regarding dangers of the project.

The meeting involved presentations by SONIC, with a question-and-answer segment following. Members of the panel answered questions submitted on note cards.

“I think (the meetings are) not for public participation,” said Vina Colley, of Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security. “People want to believe them because they want jobs … People don’t have the whole story.”

Moore said a comparable 2-mile-long reprocessing plant built in La Hague, France, created jobs for 6,000 people and cost $15 billion. SONIC visited the facility, and persuaded “my mind that this can be done safely,” he said.

Ross County Commissioner Frank Hirsch agreed, noting the recycling of nuclear fuel is like recycling other things.

“This is like recycling your cans or newspapers or tires,” he said, expressing his support for the project.

Two Chillicothe residents who attended Tuesday night’s meeting said they are still learning about the project’s process.

“It’s definitely interesting,” said Justice Gray. “A few things piqued our curiosity.”

Teresa Gray said the jobs would be beneficial.

“My biggest thing is it seems like it will create jobs,” she said. “It looks like it will be a good thing.”

In response to some concerns of whether spent nuclear fuel would be shipped to Piketon and stored permanently, Moore said the site would be “inappropriate” for long-term storage.

It has “none of the characteristics that you’d want,” he said.

Furthermore, Tom Anderson, senior environmental project manager, said by the time a GNEP facility would be built, a Yucca Mountain facility out west would be open to accept waste storage.

Joni Fearing, of Portsmouth, however, said she agreed with Colley.

“I don’t think the process is fair,” she said of the lack of public dialogue at the meeting. “I don’t think we’re getting the whole story. This is a global issue.”

Chillicothe Mayor Joe Sulzer, who addressed the group of about 30 attendees, said in many instances, the public doesn’t get the opportunity to play a part in a company’s moving to the area and providing jobs.

“This process has been open, and it’s been open for a reason,” he said. “I want the jobs. I want the economic development.”

Information contained in SONIC’s study, which is due May 31, might be used in the Department of Energy’s Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement. The statement will evaluate and analyze both alternatives to the nuclear waste recycling and impacts the facilities could have on the environment.

The public is welcome to provide comments for the statement. The comment period was recently extended to June 4. Submissions can be made to Timothy A. Frazier, GNEP PEIS Document Manager, Office of Nuclear Energy, U.S. Department of Energy, 1000 Independence Ave., SW, Washington DC 20585. Comments also can be made via phone at (866) 645-7803, fax at (866) 645-7807 or e-mail at GNEP-PEIS@nuclear.energy.gov.

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Palo Alto Daily News: Power panel talks on energy

Palo Alto Daily News

Tuesday Apr 10

Victor Maccharoli / Daily News file

Sen. Barbara Boxer and Stanford President John Hennessy spoke Monday in Sunnyvale at a summit on alternative energy and how local companies can reduce their energy consumption.

Power panel talks on energy

Summit focuses on possible cures for global warming

By Kristina Peterson / Daily News Staff Writer
U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and Stanford University President John Hennessy agreed Monday that it would take one kind of green to fund another.

“We need support from Congress to ensure that we can do research,” Hennessy said during a panel discussion with Boxer, D-Calif., at a summit on alternative energy solutions hosted by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group at the Advanced Micro Devices headquarters in Sunnyvale.

Boxer, now the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, vowed to seek funds for local research, touting new technology as a potential “cure” for the problems of global climate change.

“Alternative energy doesn’t mean clean energy,” Boxer told the assembled group of Silicon Valley executives and local municipal employees. “Renewable is what we’re looking for.”

Hennessy warned that no single source of energy would provide all the answers.

“Ethanol from corn will not solve our problem in the long haul,” he said.

Stanford and other local research institutions and companies must look into converting other materials into energy, including biofuel and cellulosic fuel, which is made from sugars distilled from plant fibers and is “the largest bio-manufactured substance in the world,” Hennessy said.

Boxer and Hennessy said that nuclear energy, which does not release harmful greenhouse gases, will likely play a larger role in meeting the nation’s energy demands in the future.

“Nuclear does have to be part of the puzzle,” Hennessy said.

Boxer said that while “most of Congress” supports using nuclear energy, she still has concerns over the safety of nuclear power plants, which should not be built on earthquake faults.

“We can’t give huge subsidies to nuclear companies,” she said. “They should compete like anybody else.”

Local executives voiced their enthusiasm for a wide range of energy sources.

“It’s time to warm up to nuclear energy,” said Sass Somekh, president emeritus of Novellus, a company that produces semiconductor equipment.

Charles Gay, vice president of Applied Materials, called solar power “the only big solution that’s out there,” citing its rapid price drop over the past 30 years. He noted that the “payback time” for an average installation of solar panels is now less than seven years.

Boxer said the next steps in addressing global climate change would include bringing the Environmental Protection Agency before her committee in an attempt to create new standards of carbon dioxide emissions. She said she would also use her position as chair to make alternative energy “one of the biggest issues in the presidential race.”

E-mail Kristina Peterson at kpeterson@dailynewsgroup.com.

Russell Hoffman: Why a Carbon Offset Tax is just another nuke bailout

Earlier this morning Newt Gingrich and John Kerry pretended to debate
Global Warming issues, in a bipartisan love-fest which spun around
the following issue:

Can free-market incentives produce a reduction in carbon poisoning in
the atmosphere, or must we resort to government regulations and all
the bureaucratic hoopla THAT entails?

Gingrich argued that a few million-dollar prizes for innovative ideas
will cause the markets to move forward by themselves. Kerry argued
that government needs to do something, but not much. He supports
“carbon credits.”

Yesterday, a New Zealand research lab announced a breakthrough that
may reduce the cost of solar panels by 90%, says Newt. It may get as
cheap as coal or hydro, he adds.

We need “cleaner, safer nuclear power, like they are developing in
France” says Newt, acknowledging an earlier and very brief
pro-nuclear comment by his “friend” John.

The fact of the matter is, a carbon tax credit is yet another way to
give an enormous new income stream to nuclear power. Oh sure, it
also might give a small incentive to an outgunned small-scale
renewable energy industry, which right now produces about 1% of the
electricity produced by the nuclear power industry and which has
about 0.01% of the political power of the Nuclear Mafia.

When a lady in the audience asked directly: “What about
nuclear? France is over 70% nuclear! Why can’t WE do this?” a small
portion of the audience applauded vigorously.

“In the near-term, [nuclear] is GOING TO BE PART OF THE MIX”
emphasized Kerry in response, despite the three problems he
sees: Cost, waste stream, proliferation. (He didn’t mention safety,
security, nukes as weapons for the enemy, etc. etc..)

Gingrich was ready for this planted pro-nuclear question, and
responded with a long list of numbers he had on hand for the moment,
such as that the U. S. Navy operates 82 reactors, and has operated
over 500 reactors overall, with almost 6,000 cumulative operating
years of experience, and has “never had a fatality.”

So obviously, for Newt, fatal brain cancers among ex-submariners
don’t count. Their children’s leukemias don’t count. Hundreds of
sailors lost in sub accidents where the reactors (and the subs) were
also lost — and the cause NEVER definitively determined — don’t
count. Harrumph!

It’s interesting to note, although Newt didn’t mention it, that,
based on these statistics, the average naval reactor operates for
only about 10 years. It should also be noted that naval reactors
don’t burn nuclear fuel efficiently, when one takes into account the
energy used to make the fuel in the first place — or the lives lost
in the process. Naval reactors are “compact and robust” — they are
considered unlikely to fail despite “battle conditions.” In reality,
a lost reactor at sea is an environmental catastrophe, regardless of
whether the reactor itself is the cause of the loss or merely a
victim of some other failure. And, ANY nuclear navy reactor (at
least when it’s surfaced) can get “sunburned” (hit by a Sunburn
missile) just like anything else.

This author has only informal, anecdotal information to go on, but
having met scores of ex-submariners and their family members (I do
live in a navy town!), he is CERTAIN that cancer IS an epidemic among
them — and not just among the U.S. Navy’s submariners, but also
among nuclear submariners from Russia and other countries too. Of
course, NO navy will study this.

While debating a carbon tax to save the planet, neither John Kerry
nor Newt Gingrich can envision a RADIATION TAX to save our DNA. For
the first hour this morning, nuclear power went nearly unmentioned –
John Kerry’s early use of the phrase “half-life” referred to how long
global-warming gasses stay in the atmosphere — a wholly
inappropriate reference.

John Kerry is not an environmentalist, and neither is his friend Newt Gingrich.

This meeting was a sham to promote nuclear power and denigrate ANYONE
who would question that policy — Mr. Kerry called such people
“leftists” and “extremists.” Undoubtedly, some are.

Off to the side, after the meeting had ended, you could hear some
young engineers — clearly the people who had cheered the lady’s
pro-nuclear softball question — upbraiding Kerry for not being more
adamantly pro-nuclear. “What about France’s fusion torch, which
reduces nuclear waste?” asked one. “All these things are important
and America needs to do more research too” was Kerry’s response.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman

Carlsbad, CA

*************************************************

** THE ANIMATED SOFTWARE COMPANY

** Russell “Ace” Hoffman, Owner & Chief Programmer

** P.O. Box 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018-1936

** (800) 551-2726 (U.S. & Canada)

** (760) 720-7261 (elsewhere)

** www.animatedsoftware.com

*************************************************

IF YOU RECEIVED THIS EMAIL IN ERROR AND/OR DO NOT WISH TO RECEIVE ANY
MORE EMAILS FROM US FOR ANY REASON, PLEASE CONTACT RUSSELL HOFFMAN AT:

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Harvey Wasserman: Why Must Nuke-Power Lemmings Again Flock to the Radioactive Sea?

Why Must Nuke-Power Lemmings Again Flock to the Radioactive Sea? – CommonDreams.org – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

Published on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Why Must Nuke-Power Lemmings Again Flock to the Radioactive Sea?
by Harvey Wasserman

It’s baaaaaack. The fifty-year multi-trillion dollar failure of atomic energy has resumed its lemming-like march to madness.

Why?

Isn’t the definition of insanity the belief that if you do the same thing again and again you’ll somehow get a different result?

The first commercial reactor opened in Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957. America was promised electricity “too cheap to meter.”

That was a lie.

America was promised there’d soon be consensus on a safe way to dispose of high-level radioactive waste.

That was a lie.

America was promised private insurance companies would soon indemnify reactor owners—and the public—against the consequences of a catastrophic meltdown.

That was a lie.

America was promised these reactors were “inherently safe.”

Then America was told no fuel had melted at Three Mile Island.

Lie and lie.

Then they said nobody was killed at Three Mile Island

Another lie.

They said it took six years for acid to eat through to a fraction of an inch of the steel protecting the Great Lakes from a Chernobyl at Davis-Besse, Ohio. That’s a lie too.

Now they say they say nukes are economically self-sustaining.

But de-regulation stuck the public with the capital costs, and hid the true amortization for the long-term expenses of rad waste disposal, plant decommissioning, on-going health impacts and likely melt-downs by terror and error.

Now they say nukes can fight global warming. But they ignore huge radon emissions from uranium mill tailings, huge CO2 emissions from fuel enrichment, and huge direct heat that results from nuke fission itself, not to mention the long-term energy costs of decommissioning and waste handling.

All reactors are pre-deployed weapons of mass radioactive destruction for any willing terrorist. Had the jets that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 hit nukes instead, the death toll and the (uninsured) economic losses would be beyond calculation.

It could be happening as you read this.

They say a new generation of nukes will be “inherently safe,” which is exactly what they said about the last one. Limited construction experience with this “new generation” already shows massive cost overruns. There is no reason to believe these will be any safer, cheaper, cleaner or more reliable than the last sorry batch.

They say more reactors won’t be a proliferation problem. But they want war on Iran which wants the Peaceful Atom to give it nuke weapons like those in India and Pakistan.

They say the green alternatives won’t work, but wind power is the cheapest form of new generation now being built. The Solartopian array of wind, solar, bio-fuels, geothermal, ocean thermal and increased conservation and efficiency are attracting billions in investments all over the world. The immensely profitable green energy industry is growing at rates of 25-35%.

Meanwhile, “there isn’t enough money in the federal till to change Wall Street’s calculation of the financial risks” for new nukes, says Philip Clapp of the National Environmental Trust.

It is impossible to embrace both nuclear power and a free market economy.

Nuke power cannot exist without massive government subsidies, government insurance, government promises to deal with radioactive waste, government security, government blind eyes to basic safety and environmental standards.

A terrorist reactor attack would mean the end of our political rights and the beginning of martial law, killing all the basic freedoms which have defined the best of this country.

America is again being told this can’t happen here. It is another lie.

Yet Clinton, Obama, Pelosi, McCain, Lieberman and other mainstreamers flock to the nuke madhouse. Al Gore says new nukes must prove themselves economically (they can’t) but that there’ll be a “small part” for reactors in the future, and that the waste problem will be solved.

There’s a move to reverse California’s ban on nuke construction pending a solution to the waste problem. (California has four active reactors near major earthquake faults).

Environmental Defense doesn’t think “any options should be taken off the table.”

But in 1952 a Blue Ribbon Commission told Harry Truman the future of America was with solar power.

Then Dwight Eisenhower embraced the “Peaceful Atom”, sinking America in the most expensive technological failure in human history.

In 1974 Richard Nixon responded to the Arab Oil Embargo by promising a thousand US reactors by the year 2000. The No Nukes movement and soaring oil prices kicked in, and the industry tanked.

So Jimmy Carter started us up the road to Solartopia … until Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House roof and forced us into Death Valley.

Now Gore has sold the world on the dangers of global warming. But will it just be another excuse to throw more good money at more bad reactors?

Clearly, there will be no easy end to this madness. But atomic energy’s bio-economic clock has clearly run out.

Basic sanity, ecological truth and the smart green money are all on our side.

Our challenge is to put them in charge before more Three Mile Islands or Chernobyls—or a nuclear 9/11—irradiate the asylum.

Harvey Wasserman is author of SOLARTOPIA: OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 (www.solartopia.org). Read more of his columns at www.freepress.org .

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Online Power: Lack Of Fuel May Limit U.S. Nuclear Power Expansion

Lack Of Fuel May Limit U.S. Nuclear Power Expansion

Lack Of Fuel May Limit U.S. Nuclear Power Expansion
4/10/2007

Limited supplies of fuel for nuclear power plants may thwart the renewed and growing interest in nuclear energy in the United States and other nations, says an MIT expert on the industry.

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SLO Trib: Environmental group to try to halt Diablo steam generator replacement

San Luis Obispo Tribune | 04/10/2007 | Environmental group to try to halt Diablo steam generator replacement

Posted on Tue, Apr. 10, 2007
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Environmental group to try to halt Diablo steam generator replacement
David Sneed
dsneed@thetribunenews.com

A Southern California-based environmental group will ask a San Francisco Superior Court to stop the steam generator replacement project at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

The Coastal Law Enforcement Action Network of Playa del Rey will ask in a hearing Wednesday that a stay be placed on a permit issued Dec. 11 by the California Coastal Commission giving Pacific Gas and Electric Co. permission to do the replacement project.

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UPI: Helen Caldicott: Growing nuclear threat

United Press International – Security & Terrorism – Outside View: Growing nuclear threat

Outside View: Growing nuclear threat
By HELEN CALDICOTT
UPI Outside View Commentator

WASHINGTON, April 9 (UPI) — According to the British counter-intelligence group MI-5, over 360 private companies, university departments, and government organizations in eight countries, including Israel, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, India, Egypt, the Pakistani High Commission in London, and the United Arab Emirates, have been procuring nuclear technology and equipment for use in nuclear weapons construction.

At the same time that the International Atomic Energy Authority and the U.S. government profess extreme concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, they are actively promoting and encouraging the dissemination of technology, expertise, and materials that make proliferation likely.

With sophisticated technology the minimum amount of plutonium required to make a bomb is 1 to 3 kilograms (2.2 to 6.6 pounds), however the generally accepted amount is 5 kg (11 pounds) of weapons-grade plutonium and 8 kg (17.6 pounds) for reactor-grade plutonium. The design is available on the Internet; the essential materials can be bought at any hardware store. A homemade plutonium bomb would be difficult to make but a bomb using highly-enriched uranium would be less so. And the world is awash in plutonium

In light of terrorist attacks using conventional weapons, it is only a matter of time before someone steals enough plutonium to make an adequate nuclear weapon. Then we proceed into the age of nuclear terrorism.

Even as there is much hand-wringing at the United Nations about the possibility that Iran and North Korea may be developing nuclear weapons, eight nations — Russia, the United States, France, China, Britain, India, Israel, and Pakistan — possess their own nuclear arsenals, and others are free to develop weapons without the admonitions that the United States and the United Nations are imposing upon Iran and North Korea.

On the strategic front, the Bush administration has drafted a revised plan allowing military commanders to request presidential approval to use nuclear weapons to preempt an attack by a nation or terrorist group deemed to be planning to use weapons of mass destruction. These military commanders will also be permitted to use nuclear weapons to destroy known enemy stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. The United States has always had a “first-use” policy against nuclear-armed nations, but now this strategy is also being applied to non-nuclear nations for the first time. Had this strategy been in place before the invasion of Iraq, a nuclear attack could have been justified to “take out” Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction.

Many countries are angry about the paternalism and arrogance displayed over the years by the nuclear-haves. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, which is now actively developing uranium enrichment facilities, said recently, “Every day they (the Americans) are threatening other nations with nuclear weapons, and they are never inspected.” He said that Western countries were “relying on their power and wealth to try to impose a climate of intimidation and injustice over the world.”

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela displayed similar feelings when he said recently, “It cannot be that some countries that have developed nuclear energy prohibit those of the Third World from developing it. We are not the ones developing atomic bombs, it’s others who do that.”

The United States is directly responsible for the breakdown of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review conference at the United Nations in May 2005, which collapsed when U.S. Under Secretary for Disarmament John Bolton refused to participate in meaningful discussions, thereby sabotaging the meeting, to the despair and disgust of the rest of the world. By the time of the United Nations summit in September 2005, John Bolton had been promoted to the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and he intervened, vehemently objecting to the United Nations’ focus on disarmament of the major powers, rather than on the spread of nuclear weapons among rogue states and terrorists. Because the United States wields enormous power at the United Nations, the proposed new rules on disarmament and nuclear weapons proliferation were completely disregarded.

Then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan concluded the summit by ruing its outcome. He made a final speech in which he said, “It’s a real disgrace,” lamenting the omission, blaming “posturing” for a failure to find a common approach to the spread of weapons of mass destruction. He said that nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament is “our biggest challenge” and our “biggest failing,” as he recalled the collapse of the NPT review conference earlier in 2005.

–

(This piece originally appeared in Dr. Helen Caldicott’s “Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer,” The New Press, 2006. Ths piece is published here with the permission of The New Press. Helen Caldicott is president of the Washington-based Nuclear Policy Research Institute. She was a founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the organization that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.)

–

(United Press International’s “Outside View” commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)

CIA Blocks Book on Chinese Nuclear Weapons

Secrecy News

CIA Blocks Book on Chinese Nuclear WeaponsAn eagerly awaited book on the history of the Chinese nuclear weapons program will not be published due to objections from the Central Intelligence Agency, which said it contains classified information.

A federal court last week ruled (pdf) that the CIA was within its rights to block disclosure of 23 sections of a manuscript by former Los Alamos intelligence specialist Danny B. Stillman, who had brought a lawsuit asserting his First Amendment right to publish the volume.

During the 1990s, Mr. Stillman traveled to China nine times, including six trips that took place after his retirement in 1993. He visited nuclear weapons facilities and “engaged in extensive discussions with Chinese scientists, government officials, and nuclear weapons designers,” resulting in a 506-page manuscript entitled “Inside China’s Nuclear Weapons Program.”

Since he was a Los Alamos employee prior to retirement, and maintained a security clearance thereafter, he submitted his manuscript to the government for pre-publication review, as required by the non-disclosure agreements that he had signed.

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