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December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Solar and Wind Now Half the Cost of Nuclear

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

Columnist Emily Schwartz Greco, the Managing Editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies, has penned a scathing critique of nuclear power and its future prospects, particularly in view of the plumetting costs of solar and wind power. Titled, “A Big Fat Radioactive Lie: Billionaires are Hyping Nuclear Power as a Magic Cure for Climate Change,” Greco notes some encouraging news.

Lazard, a giant investment banking firm with offices in 43 cities in 27 countries—and $180 billion under management—says in a lengthy new report about today’s principle energy options: Utility-scale “wind and solar are much cheaper than gas and coal, and less than half the cost of nuclear.”

Source: OtherWords, Institute for Policy Studies, Dec. 2, 2015

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Sierra Club Not Fooled by Pro-Nuclear Lobby

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

Known more for its steadfast work against Big Coal and Big Oil, the Sierra Club has long been critical of nuclear power and is not hoodwinked by industry propaganda about climate-safe “clean” reactors. The Club had this to say in a recent position paper: 

“Nuclear power produces less CO2 than fossil alternatives, but more [CO2] than energy efficiency and most forms of renewable energy on a life cycle basis. Nuclear power is not safe, affordable, or clean with currently available technology and practice. Mining uranium risks workers’ health and creates toxic residues. All current [reactor] designs are complex, prone to accidents and have severe security vulnerabilities. Nuclear waste transportation, storage and disposal problems remain unsolved. The industry is heavily subsidized by public subsidies, incentives and liability shielding everywhere it operates, dependencies that dramatically increased in recent federal legislation. The nuclear fuel cycle increases weapons proliferation and risk among nations and non-state entities.

“The Sierra Club will continue to oppose nuclear power unless these deficiencies are eliminated. While it is possible that a different approach to nuclear power might substantially address these issues, the likelihood is remote given the decades of research and investment already made. Clean energy resources are sufficient to address climate change and are cheaper than nuclear power. In addition, the huge investment to bring additional nuclear facilities online would siphon capital from much more cost-effective uses of financial resources, especially investments in efficiency.

“Existing nuclear plants should be frequently inspected and thoroughly monitored. They should be retired upon the expiration of their licensed operating period, and should be shut down immediately if significant safety, security or environmental threats are found. It is imperative for spent fuel from operating nuclear plants to be moved into safer temporary storage and for an effective long-term storage strategy to be developed as quickly as possible.”

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

 Canada Decides to Further Review Risks of Radioactive Waste Dump on Great Lakes Shore

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

On November 27, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission extended the timeline to issue a decision on the proposed Deep Geologic Repository (DGR) project by 90 days from December 2, 2015 to March 1, 2016.

The proposal by Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is to construct and operate a deep underground disposal facility at the Bruce Nuclear Site, on the shore of Lake Huron on Bruce Peninsula, Ontario. The DGR would be designed to manage low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste from the operation of OPG-owned nuclear reactors at Bruce, Pickering, and Darlington, Ontario.

“We are deeply thankful to all the US Congress Members who urged that the decision be postponed, and the Honorable Catherine McKenna, the newly appointed Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change, for postponing the decision 90 days,” said Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Watchdog at Beyond Nuclear, based in Takoma Park, Maryland, which has helped lead US grassroots resistance to the proposal.

“We urge the delegation of 32 US Senators and Representatives to follow through with securing a meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau and Environment Minister McKenna, to communicate the concerns and objections of tens of millions of US citizens regarding the risks the DGR would inflict on the Great Lakes,” Kamps said.

“We are confident that once Environment Minister McKenna reviews the 13 years of resistance to the DUD, she can do nothing other than reject OPG’s proposal as unacceptably risky to the drinking water supply for 40 million people,” Kamps added. DUD, for Deep Underground Dump, is the opposition’s term for the proposal.

In a November 18 letter to Environment Minister McKenna, a coalition of 65 US and Canadian environmental groups, including Nukewatch, urged an extension of the December 2 decision deadline. But its overriding gist was for Minister McKenna to reject the DGR proposal outright, as it is “plagued by uncertainties, unacceptably risky, unnecessary for the management of the radioactive wastes, and unaffordable from a cost-benefit perspective.”

The coalition’s letter listed the growing opposition, including 182 resolutions passed by municipalities in the US and Canada—including Chicago, Duluth, five communities in metro Detroit, and Toronto—with a combined population of nearly 23 million people. In addition, the National Association of Counties, representing 3,069 counties across the US where 255 million people reside, recently passed a resolution opposing the DGR, as has the Great Lakes Legislative Caucus (comprised of lawmakers in eight US states and two Canadian provinces).

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative has long been critical of the DGR as well.

The organization Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump has more information about the growing number of resolutions posted on its website.

—Beyond Nuclear and Nukewatch 

Filed Under: Environment, Lake Superior Barrels, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

US Wars Burning Through Stockpiles 

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

The US Air Force has fired more than 20,000 missiles and bombs in the air war against the Islamic State, depleting its stocks of munitions and prompting the service to scour depots around the world for more weapons and to find money to buy them. “We’re in the business of killing terrorists and business is good,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said in statement. “We need to replenish our munitions stock. Weapons take years to produce from the day the contract is assigned until they roll off the production line.” The Air Force and the Navy carry out most of the bombing runs, using a variety of warplanes from single-prop Predator drones, F-18 and F-22 fighter bombers, A-10 Warthog gunships, and AC-130 gunships, to huge B-1 bombers. Source: Disarmament Digest, a compendium prepared daily by the UN’s Office of Disarmament Affairs, Dec. 4, 2015. 

Meanwhile, although the Obama Administration promised in Paris to drastically cut US carbon emissions, the Air Force has deliberately expanded its bombardment of oil-producing infrastructure used by the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq to raise funds. Intending to smash the IS revenue stream, US A-10s, which fire depleted uranium shells, and AC-130s have vastly stepped up their attacks on oil facilities and tanker trucks.

Source: New York Times, Nov. 17, 24 & 29, 2015.

Filed Under: Military Spending, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, War

December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear War Theme Parks: Mass Destruction for the Whole Family

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

In what looks like the establishment of state religion, government-funded monuments to nuclear weapons are popping up all over the country, and Minuteman missile sites are part of the scam.

Hoping perhaps to enshrine the myth that the “god of the underworld,” after which plutonium was named, can be transformed from a vengeful, self-destructive, nightmare demon, into a benign, peace-loving, fairy-tale prince, nuclear propagandists and their friends in Congress are establishing nuclear war theme parks—without the uncomfortable taint of mass destruction or Cold War hatreds—at former bomb factories and nuclear weapons launch pads.

  • Tours are being offered at the “B Reactor,” on the Hanford Reservation in Washington State which in 2008 was declared a National Historic Landmark. Plutonium production reactors for the nuclear arsenal were for decades sloppily operated there, releasing large amounts of airborne radioactive fallout and causing long-term pollution of groundwater which threatens the Columbia River.
  • A National Wildlife Refuge has been established at Rocky Flats, Colorado, outside Denver, where the machining of plutonium for nuclear bomb cores has poisoned dozens of square miles.
  • Near Fargo, North Dakota, the State Historical Society owns a deactivated Minuteman missile launch control center, dubbed “Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site,” and has opened it to tourism.
  • In South Dakota, the retired launch control center formerly named D-1 is now called the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site and is run by the National Park Service. Visitors may go underground and personally simulate a nuclear missile launch.
  • Outside Tucson, Arizona, you can tour the Titan Missile Museum which opened in 1986 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994.
  • At White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, six hours from Washington, DC, the Greenbrier hideaway was built by the Dwight Eisenhower administration as a nuclear war fallout shelter for 1,000 people—including members of Congress and their families. The bunker came with a power generator, a 60-day supply of packaged food, a hospital, kitchen, dining room, waste disposal, and a dental operating room. However, a nuclear attack on the capital would have rendered evacuation impossible, the airport a smoldering ruin, and the trains unworkable. Today, deactivated and restored, the site is making money by charging visitors for tours.
  • This November, the Energy and Interior Departments launched a three-site National Historic Park named for the Manhattan Project—the secret World War II program that built atomic bombs that killed 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki. National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis said in a 2011 press release, “Once a tightly guarded secret, the story of the atomic bomb’s creation needs to be shared with this and future generations.”

Jarvis insults our intelligence by denying or feigning ignorance of the vast literature concerning the development and promotion of nuclear weapons. Available from any good library, histories by Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell (Hiroshima in America), Ward Wilson (Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons), and Gar Alperovitz (The Decision to us the Atomic Bomb) debunk the official white wash of the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (that incinerating cities “saved lives”). All these studies are informed by thorough consideration of formerly classified documents regarding use of the bomb, the threat to use it, and its long-term physiological, psychological, and ecological effects.

***

But the government wants us to forget this down-side, and at least two motives are at work.

First, by treating nuclear weapons nostalgically, the centers teach the sham lesson that H-bombs are a thing of the past. South Dakota’s park service website says about the doomsday tour: “At Minuteman Missile NHS, it is possible to learn how the threat of nuclear war came to haunt the world”—as if the Air Force’s 450 city-busting Minuteman III missiles aren’t still on alert, ready to attack, haunting the world. Further, the H-bomb monuments are often given the deceptively sly name of “Cold War memorials,” again treating the nuclear arsenal as a thing of the past, implying that the country’s 7,000 to 10,000 nuclear weapons have gone the way of the Berlin Wall.

Second, official memorials devoted to nuclear weapons self-consciously deny or rewrite the disastrously pollution-intensive and long-lived effects of foisting the Nuclear Age upon the world. This “Columbus Day” style of American history—lionizing heroic efforts and ignoring terrible crimes committed by the hero—is the sort that is being rendered almost as artwork at these idol-worshiping military memorials.

At these shrines, nobody will learn that the Bomb was used unnecessarily against civilians without warning, and tested in the atmosphere hundreds of times in ways that caused at least 75,000 thyroid cancers in the United States alone, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Students will have to look elsewhere to learn that H-bombs have been condemned by every major religion on Earth and that in 1996 a majority of the International Court of Justice declared that the mere threat to use them in a sneak attack or first strike (the “alert” status of our land- and submarine-based missiles maintain this threat) violates International Humanitarian Law.

Neither do the monuments ever acknowledge the Bomb’s legacy of persistent radioactive contamination and the nuclear industry’s resulting worldwide epidemic of radiation-induced cancers. Neither do the memorials note that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are more controversial than any other historical crime of war.

Official US histories and wartime propaganda still claim that the two attacks “ended the war” by preventing a land invasion. This myth is referenced endlessly at the H-bomb monuments. Yet historical records unearthed since the bombings show that in August 1945, Japan was already defeated and, as the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded in 1946, would have surrendered “certainly prior to 31 December and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945,” without the nuclear bombings, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without a US invasion. Indeed, the mass destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was known in advance not to be necessary, as historian Gar Alperovitz has found.

In his book Mandate for Change, President Eisenhower wrote, “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” And Admiral William Leahy, wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender….”

With the Obama Administration working now to complete three giant new nuclear weapon production facilities, we must also confront the utter uselessness of todays nuclear weapons. Even the late Paul Nitze, a founder of the anti-Soviet Committee on the Present Danger and former advisor to President Reagan did so. Writing in the New York Times long after the end of the Cold War, Nitze said:

“I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them adds nothing to our security. I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us.”

These are words to carve in stone at any atom bomb theme park.

—This essay is excerpted from Nuclear Heartland, Revised, published this fall by Nukewatch

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Uncategorized, War

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