http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5153.shtmlFrance’s atomic power industry is a failed radioactive flame. Its 58 reactors are unpopular, unsafe, uneconomical, dirty, direct agents of global warming, weapons proliferators and major generators of atomic waste for which there is no management solution.
But self-proclaimed “green advocate” Thomas Friedman seems to think otherwise. In his just published New York Times op ed, “Real Men Tax Gas,” Friedman applies the term “wimp” to those who fail to fight global warming. But in true corporate style, he can’t face the hard truths about France’s industrie atomique. To wit:
1) In denial verging on psychosis, Friedman says France has “managed to deal with all the radioactive waste issues without any problems or panic.” In fact, France’s unsolved waste problem has thousands of ultra-hot fuel rods building up at reactor sites, just like here. Its hugely expensive attempts to reprocess spent fuel cause devastating radiation releases into the English Channel and elsewhere, prompting continual demands from around Europe that they stop.
2) Friedman says, “France today generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants.” But he ignores “wimpy” French public opinion that has turned decisively against building new reactors while strongly approving new wind production. The big “Non” to new nukes stems in part from massively inefficient, unreliable reactors, some of which have recently been forced shut because they are overheating the rivers meant to cool them. Is this Friedman’s “macho” solution to global warming?
3) Friedman complains that the US has “not been able or willing to build one new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even though that accident led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or neighbors.” Friedman misses those 2,400 “wimpy” central Pennsylvania families who sued for widespread death and disease they suffered after TMI’s radiation releases showered their homes and fields. The utility responsible quietly paid out more than $15 million in secret settlements.
Friedman has also missed important new findings by nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen and epidemiologist Stephen Wing, indicating far more extensive TMI radiation releases and far more widespread health impacts than previously believed.
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The true green technologies of a Solartopian Revolution are proven, ecologically sound and economically essential. They are also ready for rapid installation.
But they are decentralized and subject to community control rather than corporate domination. While Friedman and his moneyed elite continue to grasp at the failed, centralized straw of atomic energy, technology and history have passed them by.
“Real men” -- and women -- know we will never get to a green-powered Earth by trying to ride a dead radioactive horse -- even if it’s French.
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agree