Nuclear Power – Page 68

October 13, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Renewable Generation Overtakes Nuclear Years Earlier Than Expected

Fall Quarterly 2017

By Lauren Tyler

The latest issue of the US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Electric Power Monthly (with data through April 30) reveals that renewable energy sources—including wind, solar, geothermal and hydropower—are now providing a greater share of the nation’s electrical generation than nuclear power, according to a new analysis from nonprofit SUN DAY Campaign.

For the first third of this year, renewables and nuclear power have been running neck-in-neck, with renewables providing 20.20% of U.S. net electrical generation during the four-month period (from January through April) compared to 20.75% for nuclear power. Yet, SUN DAY says that in March and April, renewables surpassed nuclear power for the first time and have taken a growing lead: 21.60% (renewables) versus 20.34% (nuclear) in March and 22.98% (renewables) versus 19.19% (nuclear) in April.

Although renewables and nuclear are each likely to continue to provide roughly one-fifth of the nation’s electricity generation in the near-term, SUN DAY claims the trend line clearly favors a rapidly expanding market share by renewables: Electrical output by renewables during the first third of 2017 compared to the same period in 2016 has increased by 12.1%, whereas nuclear output has dropped by 2.9%.

In fact, the nonprofit says nuclear capacity has declined over the last four years—a trend which is projected to continue, regardless of planned new reactor startups. On the other hand, almost all renewable energy sources are experiencing strong growth rates, new records being set virtually every month. Comparing the first four months of 2017 to the same period in 2016, solar has grown by 37.9%, wind by 14.2%, hydropower by 9.5% and geothermal by 5.3%. Biomass has remained essentially unchanged—slipping by just 0.3%.

For the second month in a row, wind and solar combined provided more than 10% of the nation’s electrical generation. In March, those sources provided 10.04% of the nation’s electrical generation. That record was eclipsed in April, when wind and solar reached nearly 11% (10.92%) of total generation. And, for the first time, wind and solar combined have provided more electricity year-to-date—113,971 thousand megawatt-hours—than has hydropower—111,750 thousand megawatt-hours— according to SUN DAY.

As renewables’ share of electrical generation has grown, that of fossil fuels has declined. SUN DAY says electrical generation by fossil fuels (i.e., coal, natural gas, petroleum liquids and petroleum coke) dropped by 5.2% during the first third of 2017 compared to 2016.

“In light of their growth rates in recent years, it was inevitable that renewable sources would eventually overtake nuclear power,” notes Ken Bossong, executive director of the SUN DAY Campaign. “The only real surprise is how soon that has happened—years before most analysts ever expected.”

“Renewable energy is now surpassing nuclear power,” adds Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “This gulf will only widen over the next several years, with continued strong growth of renewables and the planned retirement of at least seven percent of nuclear capacity by 2025.”

— Lauren Tyler is the editor of NGT News, and also writes and edits for North American Windpower and Solar Industry.

September 4, 2017 by Nukewatch 2 Comments

Choose Your Experts: “Radiation Is Good for You” or “There’s No Safe Dose”

By John LaForge

The old canard that “a little radiation exposure is good for you,” peddled by nuclear power advocates and nuclear waste generators, repeatedly needs refuting because the industry relentlessly downplays the dangers of radiation. It recently convinced the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken water pollution law and allow increased levels of radioactive poisons in our water.

Take David Ropeik writing in The Week, on Aug. 6 of all days, under the headline, “Should we really be so afraid of nuclear radiation?” Ropeik says, “The fear of ionizing (nuclear) radiation is deeply ingrained in the public psyche. For reasons partly historical and partly psychological, we simply assume that any exposure to ionizing radiation is dangerous.”

No David, the reasons are scientific and factual. No less than the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that any exposure to ionizing radiation is dangerous. The NAS has found repeatedly that there is no such thing as harmless radiation exposure, no “threshold” dose below which the exposure is safe.

No one need “simply assume” this. It’s a point of fact, made clear in the most comprehensive government studies of the dangers of radiation exposure, the National Academy’s seven BEIR reports (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation). Its most recent book-length study, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR VII,” was issued June 29, 2006. Consequently, every federal agency that regulates ionizing radiation warns that any exposure to radiation, no matter how small, increases one’s risk of cancer.

Based on BEIR’s repeated declarations that there is no exposure so low as to be harmless, the US Environmental Protection Agency says for example, “There is no firm basis for setting a ‘safe’ level of exposure above background ….” and, “Based on current scientific evidence, any exposure to radiation can be harmful (or can increase the risk of cancer). ….no radiation exposure is completely risk free.” The National Council on Radiation Protection says, “[E]very increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer.” The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says, “[T]he radiation protection community conservatively assumes that any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect, … any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk.”

But nuclear power promoters like those at the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s engineering department, particularly retired professors Michael Corradini and Max Carbon (his real name), still peddle the officially debunked “hormesis” theory: that low-dose exposures act like inoculations and help people build immunity to the damage done by radiation’s effects on cells. The conjecture is even applied to fetuses, infants, children, girls and women, all of whom were reported in the BIER-VII to be far more vulnerable to radiation’s harmful effects than the rest of the population.

Dr. Carbon and Dr. Corradini have no background in health physics or medicine, and taught nuclear reactor engineering. Like business page columnists or nuclear industry investors, they know that the strengthening of radiation protection standards and strictly enforcing current anti-pollution laws will cost the nuclear industry hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. So for decades these vested interests have worked to weaken the regulations using the nonsense that a little radiation exposure won’t hurt you, and may even help.

The National Academy’s BEIR VII report, at page 315, politely refutes the hormesis humbug:

“The possibility that low doses of radiation may have beneficial effects (a phenomenon often referred to as ‘hormesis’) has been the subject of considerable debate. Evidence for hormetic effects was reviewed, with emphasis on material published since the 1990 BEIR-V study on the health effects of exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation. … [T]he preponderance of available experimental information does not support the contention that low levels of ionizing radiation have a beneficial effect.” [Emphasis added]

The late Herbert L. Abrams was chairman of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy’s committee that produced BIER VII. He said when it was published, “There appears to be no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless.” So when deciding about radiation, choose your experts wisely. Do you want health advice from medical doctors or reactor engineers?

June 25, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Socialized Risk, Privatized Benefits, Keep Bum Reactors Afloat

By Kelly Lundeen

Summer Quarterly 2017

Once again corporations get favors when they fail. Westinghouse Inc., maker of the untested AP1000 reactor design, declared bankruptcy March 29, choosing to restructure due to “certain financial and construction challenges.” Its reactors under construction in Georgia and in South Carolina were supposed to be producing electricity by now. Instead they’re running $12 billion over budget and three years behind schedule. Thanks to $4.5 billion in ratepayer financing in South Carolina, $3.9 billion in Georgia, and an $8.3 billion federal loan guarantee authorized by the Department of Energy, the financial picture for Westinghouse, its parent company Toshiba and the state utilities Southern Company and Scana Energy, isn’t as bad as it should be.

Nuclear industry lobbyists and their campaign donations guarantee close ties between the government and the nuclear industry which has always relied on taxpayer subsidies. Despite being hugely unprofitable, it survives. Last August, taxpayers in New York were roped into paying a $7.6 billion to bailout that will benefit Exelon, Entergy and the French firm Electricité de France. Illinois taxpayers are on the hook for a $2.34 billion bailout of Exelon. FirstEnergy is looking to rake in an additional $1.2 billion from the taxpayers of Ohio, even after vocal opposition during legislative testimony in May prompted deliberations to be suspended. Similar legislation to support reactor bailouts is in the works in Connecticut, New Jersey, Texas, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.

The nuclear industry cannot survive indefinitely. France’s nuclear giant Areva has reported financial losses in the billions which, along with the rest of France’s nuclear industry, could cost French taxpayers over $10 billion. Toshiba, has announced that it will not be building any more reactors; its nuclear sector has reported a loss of $6 billion, and that could go up to $10 billion. The near future of nuclear power would appear gloomy if it weren’t for its true saviors, the taxpayers, who will never have the clout of a nuclear lobbyist.

The $8.3 billion federal loan authorized for Georgia by the DOE has barely been mentioned in mainstream media, while the “inexcusable” 2011 loan guarantee given to the solar power company Solyndra, which later failed, was covered extensively and called “scandalous” by the Washington Post among others. The Westinghouse loan was 15 times bigger than Solyndra’s. Odds are that taxpayers won’t get that federal loan money back.

The Westinghouse bankruptcy is just another sign of industry decline. Twelve reactor closures have been announced since 2015, although five of them have been reversed by bailouts. The speed of the decline will depend on how much the nuclear industry is cushioned by a plush, socialist-style welfare system draining the treasury, while the rest of us are subject to free market capitalism.

To help stop bailouts in your state, check out the Coalition Against Nuclear Bailouts (Ohio), Citizens Against Nuclear Bailouts (Pennsylvania), and Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

—PennEnergy, May 19, 2017; Christian Science Monitor, Mar. 30, 2017; The State, June 13, 2016; Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Jan. 11, 2016; Washington Post, Dec. 25, 2011

June 22, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima’s Radiation Will Poison Food “for Decades,” Study Finds

Three of the six reactors at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi complex were wrecked in March 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami. The destruction of emergency electric generators caused a “station blackout” which halted cooling water intake and circulation. Super-heated, out-of-control uranium fuel in reactors 1, 2, and 3 then boiled off cooling water, and some 300 tons of fuel “melted” and burned through the reactors’ core vessels, gouging so deep into underground sections of the structure that to this day operators aren’t sure where it is. Several explosions in reactor buildings and uncovered fuel rods caused the spewing of huge quantities of radioactive materials to the atmosphere, and the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean ever recorded. Fukushima amounts to Whole-Earth poisoning.

Now, researchers say, radioactive isotopes that were spread across Japan (and beyond) by the meltdowns will continue to contaminate the food supply for a very long time.

According to a new study that focused on “radiocaesium” — as the British call cesium-134 and cesium-137 — “food in japan will be contaminated by low-level radioactivity for decades.” The official university announcement of this study neglected to specify that Fukushima’s cesium will persist in the food chain for thirty decades. It takes 10 radioactive half-lives for cesium-137 to decay to barium, and its half-life is about 30 years, so C-137 stays in the environment for roughly 300 years.

The study’s authors, Professor Jim Smith, of the University of Portsmouth, southwest of London, and Dr. Keiko Tagami, from the Japanese National Institute of Radiological Sciences, report that cesium-caused “radiation doses in the average diet in the Fukushima region are very low and do not present a significant health risk now or in the future.”

This phraseology deliberately conveys a sense of security — but a false one. Asserting that low doses of radiation pose no “significant” health risk sounds reassuring, but an equally factual framing of precisely the same finding is that small amounts of cesium in food pose a slightly increased risk of causing cancer.

This fact was acknowledged by Prof. Smith in the June 14 University of Portsmouth media advisory that announced his food contamination study, which was published in Science of the Total Environment. Because of above-ground atom bomb testing, Prof. Smith said, “Radioactive elements such as caesium-137, strontium-90 and carbon-14 contaminated the global environment, potentially causing hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths.”

No less an authority than the late John Gofman, MD, Ph.D., one of the first scientists to produce plutonium, and Professor Emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, spent 50 years warning about the threat posed by low doses of radiation. In May 1999, Gofman wrote, “By any reasonable standard of biomedical proof, there is no safe dose, which means that just one decaying radioactive atom can produce permanent mutation in a cell’s genetic molecules. My own work showed this in 1990 for X rays, gamma rays, and beta particles.”

The Fukushima-borne cesium in Japan’s food supply, and in the food-web of the entire Pacific Ocean, emits both beta and gamma radiation. Unfortunately, it will bio-accumulate and bio-concentrate for 300 years, potentially causing, as Dr. Gofman if not Dr. Smith might say, hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths. — John LaForge

Choose Your Experts: “Radiation Is Good for You” or “There’s No Safe Dose”

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Fall Quarterly 2017

By Lauren Tyler

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Stay Connected