"The New Environmentalists"

[Willinois]

An article in the Illinois Times about coal power plants and an agreement between the Sierra Club and the municipal utility in Springfield Illinois. That's me in the cover photo.

http://www.illinoistimes.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A6378

Springfield activist Will Reynolds was part of a Sierra Club team that negotiated cleaner air from the city utility’s new coal-fired power plant, but his environmental concerns don’t involve birds and fish, nor is he well versed in the causes and effects of global warming. Instead, Reynolds is fighting for his health.

Suffering from asthma, Reynolds has had to curtail the wilderness hikes he loves on days when smog alerts advise vulnerable populations, such as children, the elderly and those with respiratory problems, to stay indoors.

Those air-quality warnings — prompted by dangerous emissions from coal-fired power plants — too often kept him out of the Great Smoky Mountains when he lived in eastern Tennessee. The memory of being sidelined in the Volunteer State surfaced again last year when City Water, Light & Power announced plans for a new coal-fired power plant that would spew more life-threatening dirty particles into the air.

“No one can tell me that energy issues don’t affect my wilderness experience,” Reynolds says. “That plant will be here for decades. Now’s the time to do something about it, or else it would be too late.”

[bananas]

1. Congratulations.

That was a good article, thanks.

[Willinois]

4. Thanks!

[NNadir]

2. The only way to make a coal plant safe is to shut it.

The nuclear remarks in this article, as might be expected from a stupid media, are beyond stupid.

How does it make sense to discuss so called "nuclear waste" in an article about coal filth and say that so called "nuclear waste" is a huge problem?

Not one person has been killed by so called "nuclear waste." In fact not one person has suffered from asthma from nuclear operations.

The media is trained like a bunch of Pavlov's dogs to only say the word "waste" when they say "nuclear." Coal waste is not called "waste." The fact is, in spite of a Sierra Club brat's about his drives to go hiking, carbon dioxide is dangerous fossil fuel waste and yes, it kills.

[Shoelace]

3. Nuclear power is NOT the answer!!!

you do of course realize that Plutonium has a half life of about a half million years, yes? Also, one molecule of Plutonium can cause lung cancer!!
That is old news, so old in fact that I can't document it...sorry about that.

There are so many clean alternatives to coal and nuclear energy, why do we insist on giving more govt. monies to such corrupt corporations as Halliburton and especially Bechtel, the most corrupt corp. on the planet!

READ THIS:

Bechtel's Nuclear Nightmares

by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch
May 1st, 2003
Last month, the San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation won a $68 million contract to rebuild Iraq following the devasation wrought by the US invasion. Bechtel is notorious for having friends in high places, perhaps explaining how they got the contract in the first place. The privately owned corporation has operated with impunity, whether siphoning off millions of taxpayer dollars from government contracts or poisoning the communities surrounding their ventures. In the second part of our series we look at the environmental and human right impacts of just a few of Bechtel's operations.

San Onofre, California, has a 950-ton radioactive problem: a nuclear reactor built by Bechtel that nobody wants. The unit was shut down over a decade ago in 1992 by its owners, Southern California Edison, who preferred not to spend $125 million in required safety upgrades.

The only place that will accept the reactor is a dump in South Carolina but railway officials refused to transport the cargo across the country. The next suggestion was to ship it via the Panama Canal but the canal operators said no. So did the government of Chile when the power plant owners asked for permission to take it around the Cape of Good Hope.

The only option left is to ship it all the way around the world, although even that is looking unlikely as harbor officials in Charleston, South Carolina, are already suggesting that they may deny the reactor entry. Edison officials are currently desperately looking for a port that might accept the toxic cargo before the dump shuts its doors in 2008.

Part of a Pattern
This is, by no means, the only nuclear headache created by Bechtel. The company estimates that it has built 40% of the United States nuclear capacity and 50% of nuclear power plants in the developing world. That accounts for 1,200 reactor years at 150 nuclear power plants. Indeed, Bechtel is still building nuclear reactors including the 1,450 megawatt nuclear reactor in Qinshan, China.
(MORE AT LINK)

Environmental Perils
The local environmental costs continue to mount every day as the plant sucks in huge quantities of plankton, fish and even seals with the water to cool the reactors. It is destroying miles of kelp on the seabed by discharging water that is 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than ocean temperature, according to Mark Massara, director of the Sierra Club's coastal program.

"It's an unequivocal environmental and economic disaster with no redeeming features whatsoever," Massara noted.

And Don May, the president of California Earth Corp who has been fighting the plants since the 1960s, says that the future cost could be much higher because there is a major fault line about two miles away that is overdue for an earthquake. What worries him most is the fact that Bechtel installed one of the reactors backwards.

"The way the reactor has been installed at the site means that the seismic braces will exacerbate the impact of an earthquake rather than reduce it. In addition the reactor walls have been worn down to half their original thickness from constant bombardment." May explained. "If there is an earthquake, Lord help us."

(if you can stand the heat, there much, much more info on this corp behind the "new energy" drive than you can probably stand).

Wind and Solar and investments into new technology beyond these - the only way to save our planet. Nuclear power is at best dangerous and at worst a giveaway of our tax dollars to GLOBAL CORPORATE POWER BROKERS!!!

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=6669

[Willinois]

6. The first time a train derails

while carrying nuclear waste to a storage facility will be the last time we hear about the environmental benefits of nuclear power.

[Dead_Parrot]

7. How'd you figure that out?

I recall seeing a test done in the UK where they piled a train doing ~100mph straight into a nuclear shipping cask. The train was pulverised, the cask was intact. I'm sure there would be a mess to clear up, but it wouldn't be radioactive.

But yeah, there'd be lots of calls to ban nuclear reactors from people who who think it could have been dangerous.

Incidentally, over 500 people died last year in train accidents, none of which involved nuclear fuel. A decent train wreck can kill more people in 10 seconds than the Chernobyl fire has in the last 20+ years: But non-nuclear accidents are perfectly acceptable, so don't hold your breath waiting for Concerned Citizens to suggest improving rail safety. Helen Caldicott, to pick a name at random, doesn't give a fuck - it wouldn't sell as many books.

[Radical Activist]

9. I'm sure we can expect

the companies shipping the waste to always use the best and most safe methods, just like the Exxon Valdez.

Have we found a placed to store the nuclear waste yet, other than Yucca Mountain where it isn't wanted? I'm sure many communities will be itching for the chance to store it in the near future.

[Dead_Parrot]

11. Well...

...given that used nuclear fuel has been shipped around for over 50 years, I'm sure you'll have no problem producing a list of, say, a dozen people killed by the shipments. In fact, it should should be so easy, you'll have lots of time left over to learn about fuel reprocessing.

[Radical Activist]

14. Global Warming hasn't happened yet either

so I guess it never will. :shrug: For every disaster in history, there was a time when it had never been a problem before.
Greater use of nuclear power will result in more demand for a centralized storage facility, such as Yucca, which will increase the likelihood of such an accident.

[Dead_Parrot]

18. Global Warming hasn't happened yet ?

Is that you, Jim? How's the weather up in Oklahoma? Say Hi to Kay and the kids. :hi:

[NNadir]

8. Where do you come up with "half a million years" for plutonium's half-life?

Could you know anything LESS about this topic?

When you even know where the Table of Nuclides is on the internet, come and tell me about plutonium.

Let me know too, when you give a fuck about the millions of people who die each year from air pollution, not theoretically, but actually.

By the way, the biggest solar manufacturer in the world - and solar power has alwasy been trivial and useless in the fight against climate change - is fucking BP, the same corporation that blew up a refinery, killing 15 and injuring 100 - unremarked by YOU - the same company that dribbles oil across the Alaskan Tundra.

One hundred million people could die from fossil fuels, and you wouldn't raise a wimper about corporations. How do I know? I just have to count the dead from air pollution over the last 20 years, and note that you don't spew any such ignorance about this that you arbitrary reserve for nuclear power.

Here's a fact for you: IGNORANCE KILLS.

Every nuclear reactor that operates SAVES lives.

[Dogmudgeon]

10. Lighten up, Francis

Your hyperbole is out of control. For example, Plutonium's half-life is between 500 and 22,000 years, depending on which isotope you're dealing with.

But there are more pressing issues involved:

1. The continuing "Nuclear is Corporate" noise is ridiculous. What kind of power generation ISN'T corporate? Do you think solar panels are manufactured in cottages by revolutionary leftists who sing union songs all day? It takes heavy corporate backing to build a wind farm. And solar panels are made by the behemoths of multinational commerce, the semiconductor companies.

For example, GE has a nuclear division ... and a solar thermal division ... and a PV division ... and a wind power division. If there's a market for it, GE will try to profit from that market. As will about a thousand other firms.

The issue of corporate corruption is worth pursuing. Why aren't more leftists doing anything about corrupt firms? All we seem to want to do is "investigative journalism" by recycling other people's rhetoric. There are at least twenty groups like Corpwatch and they all recycle each other's material -- and just about all of it is publicly available, not secret.

2. Nuclear is NOT worse than anything else you can imagine. In the context of all our various methods of generating power, nuclear reactors have an enviable record.

Coal, for instance, carries slow-decaying radioactive materials, most of which are isotopic metals. When it is burned, it produces fly ash, incombustible residue. It is not as radioactive as, for instance, uranium, but it's in powdered form, unlike the uranium in a reactor. And as you yourself said, it only takes one molecule.

Do you have any ideas how much fly ash is generated by a coal-burning generator? It's huge; coal combustion produces one to ten tons per second of this ash, and a great deal of it is airborne, so it can be breathed in. Even if we had a monumentally sloppy nuclear program that resulted in five Chernobyl-style disasters a year, we would still be better off.

So, do we swap nuclear generators for coal-fired generators?

3. People who advocate for nuclear power are not necessarily evil. I had to put that in bold font since many anti-nuclearists jump right in with the insults and accusations. For example, I am not receiving money from any evil "corporation", nor am I taking orders from Moscow or Dick Cheney.

Like most pro-nuclearists here, I started out as a passionate anti-nuclearist on the 1970s. But reality did not match the FUD I was promoting, that there would be million-death nuclear accidents on a regular basis by the mid '80s (Chernobyl produced about 40 "immediate" deaths and about 5,000 long term).

My present concern is that if a sufficiently wide "energy gap" between our needs and our energy supply develops, there will be hell to pay. This is especially critical with agriculture, which has become petroleum-intensive worldwide since the 1970s. Preventing socioeconomic collapse and mass privation are strong reasons to build reactors. However, I am quite aware that our society and the world socioeconomic system must be revamped to conform with the reality of nature, not the other way around. Nuclear power could facilitate that transition, but it's going to take a lot more than replacement energy sources of any kind.

Our latest phase of environmental and energy awareness began at the end of the Clinton years. In the last 7 years, "alternative" energy hasn't even really gotten off the pin. It has averaged 30% growth per year, but it's still around 2% of the total energy capacity, just in the USA. On the other hand, we know that we can build nuclear reactor power plants in about three years, at a gigawatt each, even with strong oversight in place.

If you can improve that non-nuclear power growth rate, by all means do so. I would be glad to help. I do not accord nuclear power any special privilege other than its readiness and suitability for the job. But I fear that the window of opportunity of an all-Arcadian solution closed about 20 years ago. The modern alt-energy movement is proving to be too cautious and too slow to interdict the shit on its way to the fan. And it's dominated by tribalism and ego, which you can see in some of the biofuel arguments, especially outside of DU.

We pro-nuclearists aren't crouched in our lairs, twirling our pencil-thin mustaches, plotting mass destruction. We, too, care for our planet and the well-being of its human population. If there is a better way, show us; but don't expect us to listen to bourgeois hobbyists who promote opinion as fact and who cite each other's work in a never-ending circle. The hour is late and the stakes are too high.

--p!

[Honeycombe8]

13. Some good points. I will add one...

With the possibility of recycling nuclear radioactive waste, nuclear power may become more viable as one of MANY alternative energy sources.

I used to be against nuclear power. Now, I'm re-thinking that position, IF the toxic waste issue can be resolved.

I think that many alternative energy sources will be the answer to our oil dependency problem. Nuclear MAY be one of them. Maybe not. Still, it deserves another look.

[Shoelace]

15. thanks for your thoughtful reply, I have rethought the whole nuclear issue and

now think that I was pretty wrong about alot of issues therein. God, at this point, whatever can get us out of this CO2 mess is just fine with moi! We really do NOT have much time left. Thanks for taking the time and making me think with my brain and not my left foot!lol. :grouphug:

[XemaSab]

16. Why you got to dis the people who make solar panels?

Man, this forum is fulla playa-hatas. :P

[hunter]

17. My thoughts on San Onofre, posted earlier...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=57616&mesg_id=57616

Shoelace's post has got to be a parody, right???

I especially like the part that asks, "...if you can stand the heat..." in a place where one dim match flickers and dies in a cold dark cavern of reverberating ignorance.

[Willinois]

5. huh

Your message is confused and nasty.
Part of the agreement mentioned in the article did shut down an older coal power plant. It also brought the city of Springfield into compliance with the Kyoto treaty.

More than a few people have died from exposure to nuclear waste as well. I'll take renewables like wind, which the city of Springfield will now be using thanks to the Sierra Club brats in the article.

[Honeycombe8]

12. Good pic! Interesting article, too.

Congratulations.