Quarterly Newsletter

October 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Alliances Unite in Fight Against Foreign Fossil Fuel Giant

By Kelly Lundeen

Treaty walker Sherry Couture, Fond du Lac Ojibwe, walks to protect water, honor treaties, and oppose Enbridge tar sands pipelines.
Photo: Indigenous Environmental Network

Canadian oil transport company Enbridge has a tough task ahead of it in Wisconsin and Michigan. Keeping their 69-year-old Line 5 pipeline flowing with tar sands requires the approval of two major projects: the reroute of the pipeline around the Bad River Reservation of the Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe), in Wisconsin, and a tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac, the narrow strip of water connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

Opposition to pipelines has been fueled by growing awareness that climate chaos can be diminished by rejecting coal, oil, and gas projects. Furthermore, the Indigenous-led movement against fossil fuel infrastructure reminds US citizens that it is everyone’s responsibility to uphold Article 6 of the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, which states that international law, such as treaties with native nations, takes priority over conflicting state laws.

Sherry Couture spoke at the Treaty People Convergence August 6, which her organization R.I.S.E. Coalition, Nukewatch, and several other groups helped organize through the Wisconsin Building Unity network. “I come from Fond du Lac, the 1854 Treaty territory [of the Lake Superior Chippewa] … I’m known as a Treaty walker … I’ll do anything for the nibi [“water” in Ojibwe]. I’ll live in a ditch. I’ll walk to the Capitol. I’ll sleep on the pipeline. [We] will chase Enbridge down and make sure that they leave our reservation,” she said. The US government violates the Treaty signed with the Fond du Lac by allowing Enbridge’s pipeline to run through the Treaty territory. At the Convergence, on the anniversary of Hiroshima day, Nukewatch linked the issues of the targeting of Indigenous populations and people of color both by nuclear weapons and environmental racism.

Nonviolent action against the Line 5 projects has been ongoing, and Enbridge also faces legal challenges by the Bad River Band and the State of Michigan. In 2013, the Bad River Band refused to renew pipeline easements across their reservation in northern Wisconsin, and in 2019 the Band sued to have the pipeline removed, forcing Enbridge to propose a reroute. On September 7, US District Judge William Conley found Enbridge to be trespassing on the Reservation for nearly a decade, yet didn’t go as far as shutting down the pipeline. Enbridge is working to obtain permits for a reroute while a Final Environmental Impact Statement is being completed. In order to demonstrate union support, Enbridge has already secured project labor agreements with four labor unions and a construction company that was partially owned by Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels (when the contract was signed). Enbridge, a foreign company, is on track to spend as much as $1.7 million on US lobbying for a second consecutive year.

A 2010 Enbridge oil spill into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, the largest inland oil spill in US history, called into question the Line 5 pipeline’s safety, particularly where it runs under the Straits of Mackinac in the Great Lakes, which contain 20% of the world’s freshwater. In 2018, a boat anchor was dragged across the pipeline, causing damage but not a rupture. Even those concerned about energy independence would wonder if putting the Great Lakes at peril is worth the 10% of oil from Line 5 reaching the US market, while 90% returns to Canada. Former Michigan governor Rick Snyder approved Enbridge’s plan to pass the pipeline through a tunnel under the Straits. Enbridge is still hoping to acquire state and local permits.

Nukewatch has supported Indigenous-led objections to both regional Enbridge pipeline projects, Line 3 and Line 5, including Camp Makwa starting in 2017, and a walk supporting Treaty rights last year. This spring Nukewatch organized local events as part of the March Forth to Earth Day actions opposing Line 5, which took place throughout Wisconsin. Pushback against the pipelines will continue in order to protect the water, the Earth, and the people.

What you can do:

• The Army Corps of Engineers is taking comments through October 14 on the proposed tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac for the Environmental Impact Statement scoping process. Participate in a public meeting on October 6, noon Central time, here: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82961743672; or by phone (309) 205-3325 (zoom ID 829 6174 3672).

• Submit comments online with a sample letter here: oilandwaterdontmix.org/submit_army_corps_tunnel_comment.

• See updates at rise-coalition.com, and at communitiesunitedbywater.org.

— Wisconsin Public Radio, Sep. 8, June 8, 2022 & July 20, 2016: GazetteXtra, Apr. 13, 2022; Open Secrets, 2022

October 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Business Case for Nuclear Power Collapsed Forty Years Ago — Economist

By Amory Lovins

Nuclear reactor purchase orders collapsed to zero in [1978] the year before Three Mile Island because they cost too much. How do we know? The cover story of the last 1978 issue of Business Week, months before TMI, reported nuclear power’s commercial collapse. TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima only emphasized the industry’s slow-motion collapse caused not by public fears but by the lack of a business case.

Chancellor Angela Merkel didn’t decide to phase out nuclear power only after Fukushima in 2011; Germany had already written the phaseout into its atomic law in 2002 after a national consensus process in 2001. Fukushima only reversed a delay (added months before) and [Germany] returned to the original 2022 phaseout date. Now the last three reactors may run briefly, probably a few months, into 2023 to help 1-2% with the Russian gas crisis.

https://diablocanyonpanel.org/history-of-dcpp/

California’s legislature just voted to extend Diablo Canyon five years beyond its planned 2024/25 retirement at age 40 — if it meets a slew of conditions it’s unlikely to meet, such as showing 1) the extension is needed, 2) won’t cost too much, and 3) its gotten all required federal approvals and subsidies. In other words they voted to do the analyses no one had done when the Governor’s office, a few weeks before adjournment, introduced this proposal that no state agency or utility had requested, reversing a thoroughly analyzed 2016 agreement that nearly all the legislators had approved just four years ago. Nothing significant changed since except the Governor’s mind.

Renewables’ [often claimed] “unreliability and relatively small contribution to overall power generation” is untrue. Renewables outproduce nuclear energy in the US and the world, and are growing rapidly while nuclear output is stagnant or falling. Solar cells and wind turbines do produce varying output, but those variations are more predictable than nuclear reactors’ bigger, longer, and more abrupt failures. Solar and wind power’s unpredictable (“forced”) outages are roughly one-tenth those of nuclear power, so they need less and cheaper backup to keep the grid reliable.

State-level data confirm that abrupt nuclear retirement (not with the 9-year notice provided in California) can briefly raise gas-fired generation, but only for a year or two; then renewables and efficiency can contest the market space and grid capacity that the nuclear reactor sat on, they win, and they get installed. Since they’re cheaper than running the closed [reactor], they displace more fossil-fueled generation for the same cost, and for many times longer, so they protect the climate better than continuing to run the uneconomic nuclear unit.

— Amory Lovins is a physicist, an architect, an engineering scholar, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and currently Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University.

October 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

EPA Announces Shutdown of Online Archives

By Elena Hight

Less than a year after Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan declared his wish for the EPA to operate “in a ‘fishbowl’ once again,” the agency has decided to close or “sunset” its online archive. The archive hosts digital records of EPA resources, policy changes, regulatory actions, enforcement, and compliance dating back to the 1990s, and it is a vital resource for communities, activist groups, researchers, historians, and citizens.

Although far from perfect, the archive contains reports on thousands of sites within the United States, and it is a rich source of data that individuals can use to better understand the government’s response to a myriad of environmental issues. The closure of this archive signals the abandonment of transparency and the expressed values of administrator Regan.

Activists and environmental organizations have condemned the decision. In a June 13 open letter to the EPA from the Environmental Governance and Data Initiative, the EGDI wrote, “Overall, the lack of transparency in the decision to sunset the EPA’s archive is at odds with the EPA’s commitment to openness.” And, the group added, the closure leaves both the public and federal government “dependent upon third-party non-governmental organizations” to maintain records, groups that are not bound by “federal data integrity and provenance policies.” The EGDI letter is co-signed by 20 other organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Internet Archive, and the Sierra Club.

While public pressure caused the EPA to delay archive closure for a year, until July 2023, it is still unclear exactly why the EPA wants to shutter its archive instead of making it more accessible and user-friendly. In an email statement to The Verge, the EPA claims that the site’s infrastructure is outdated and that it is no longer “cost-effective.” The agency also said that the public could still access archive material through Freedom of Information Act requests and that most EPA documents will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis for submission to the National Archives and Records Administration. However, these claims are widely criticized, as both means of accessing EPA materials can be time-consuming, confusing, and costly.

The EPA archives have already proven to be essential in places like Camp Lejeune, North Carolina where residents used the online repository to better understand the government’s response to the military’s contamination of surrounding land and water, as well as their own exposure to toxic chemicals. In an era in which the Supreme Court is hampering the government’s ability to regulate pollution and toxic exposure, the archives are also a vital source of information about threatened federal programs. Despite problems with the current archive, it is clear that its closure will result in greater barriers to access, especially, as the American Society for Environmental History notes, among “more marginalized and environmental justice communities.”

https://www.selectjustice.com/camp-lejeune-lawsuit

While the delay of the archive’s closure was a short-term victory for environmental groups, the EPA has not publicized next steps for the archive. The Internet Archive and other sites like the Policy Commons are continuing to save tens of thousands of documents from the EPA website. Yet both systems have downsides and are not replacements for free and easily-accessible documents through government agencies. As Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of EGDI, wrote on March 19, “EPA’s archive could become a model of web governance that fosters democratic oversight. Shuttering the archive is moving backwards and is a disservice to the public.”

As we move into an age of greater threats to environmental governance, the EPA should keep the archive open, improve its functionality, and maintain its commitment to transparency and democratic engagement.

— Elena Hight is a writer, educator, activist, and PhD candidate in sociology based in Oklahoma City.

– News Security Beat, July 21, 2022

October 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Military Spending: $87 Million-Per-Hour in 2023

By Matthew Jahnke

In March, the Biden Administration submitted an $813.3 billion military budget request for fiscal year 2023, $773 billion of which would be allocated to the Pentagon. This figure does not include non-Pentagon military spending outlined below. A total of $50.9 billion of the bill is earmarked for nuclear weapons, with $34.4 billion going to the Department of Defense (DOD), and $16.5 billion going to the National Nuclear Security Administration inside the Department of Energy.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said that the nuclear weapons budget will be used to “modernize” the so-called nuclear “triad” — nuclear weapons on land-based missiles, warplanes, and submarines. The request included $6.2 billion for the Navy’s Columbia class nuclear missile submarines; about $9.5 billion dollars to be shared among the Air Force’s B-21 “Raider” heavy bomber, the long-range standoff weapons system, and the Sentinel long-range, land-based missile system set to replace today’s Minuteman III missiles.

Despite the significant increases, it does appear that some nuclear weapons programs will be zeroed out. The nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile system appears devoid of funding in the proposed budget. The same fate befalls the 1-megaton B83 gravity bomb — with 66 times the force of the US Army Air Corps’ Hiroshima bomb that promptly killed 140,000 people. Although the previous administration planned a 2025 retirement date, it now appears the B83 will be phased out earlier.

Ultimately, on June 22, the House Appropriations Committee approved a 2023 Pentagon spending bill of $761.681 billion, which is an increase of $32 billion or 4.4%, over fiscal year 2022, and translate to an eye-popping $87 million-per-hour! Military hawks in the Pentagon and Congress promoted the spending increases by catastrophizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, manufacturing “domino effect” propaganda about Russia’s imperial goals, and stirring up fears of China’s “modernization.”

As always, tens of billions in additional military spending is hidden in officially “civilian” programs. The 2022 fiscal year included at least another $182 billion of non-Pentagon military spending, specifically in allocations to Homeland Security, NASA, retiree pay and healthcare, the Justice Department, the FBI, the State Department, International Security Assistance, the Treasury, and the Secret Service. In addition, the Washington Post has reported that the CIA’s “black budget” amounted to about $52 billion in 2013, and the military portion of its current budget is unknown. (With a grand total of $995.861 billion for next year, the US military all tolled is set to take in $113 million every hour of every day.)

— Matt Jahnke is a published biologist and Nukewatch volunteer based in Duluth, Minnesota.

– teleSUR, Jul 15; Appropriations Committee, June 14; Department of Defense, March 28, 2022

– image credit: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures

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By Kelly Lundeen

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By Elena Hight

https://www.selectjustice.com/camp-lejeune-lawsuit

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Columbia Program Performance (fiscal year 2022 dollars in millions)

By Matthew Jahnke

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