Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Re: Please Help Save San Mateo Creek and Trestles

February 6th, 2008

Dear Readers,

Right now there is a rally going on locally to "Save San Mateo Creek and Trestles." A new highway is being proposed and the California Coastal Commission is about to make a crucial decision.

But there's no chance to stop CA Route 241 -- it can't be done. I've written about it a couple of times before, but now that it's just about a sure thing, the surfers are finally getting involved! But it's too late!

Below is a short essay I wrote more than two years ago on the subject. Look at a map and see where it goes (Yucca Mountain) and what it avoids (HOLLYWOOD!!) The entire nuclear industry doesn't want that waste going anywhere near Hollywood, lest the actors get involved in stopping it. That wouldn't just stop 241, it would have ramifications around the world. So 241 is an absolute, unquestionable, sure thing -- nothing can stop it!

Yours,

Ace


Could California's proposed Route 241 be a nuke-waste highway?

January 22nd, 2006

by Russell "Ace" Hoffman

The real purpose of California's proposed Route 241 is to provide a way to move nuclear "spent fuel" from San Onofre to Yucca Mountain in Nevada, without bringing the waste too near Los Angeles. The city's vast population has undoubtedly been coldly analyzed by government-operated computer programs, which would indicate a grave danger from transporting the waste so near such a large number of people.

And Hollywood activists must not be agitated into action -- that is another reason to keep the waste route away from Los Angeles.

Over 2,000 tons of highly radioactive "spent fuel" sits precariously at San Onofre. The fuel is so deadly it must be isolated from humanity for millions of years. If you stand next to it for a fraction of a second it will kill you, except for the thick steel and concrete around it, which lowers the dosage levels near the massive containers to the range of a chest x-ray every so-many minutes -- still a significant dose.

Moving the backlog of radioactive waste is a nightmare requiring hundreds of individual shipments. Each shipment will need armed guard vehicles front and back, and enormous special transporters with nearly a hundred wheels and a dozen axles. There will be significant radiation exposure risks to the public all along the route even +without an accident. And of course, all this needs to be done without any public announcements as to when it will happen or what is being transported.

Presumably, if all goes according to plan, most of the extremely deadly nuclear waste currently stored at San Onofre will be moved during the first few years after the road is completed. Making Route 241 a "toll road" is truly audacious, but it might be done just to keep traffic as light as possible for as long as possible, and to keep housing construction along the route to a minimum while they transfer the current nuke-waste inventory, built-up from more than 35 years of storing used reactor cores on-site near the ocean.

Would they really build an entire highway just to move that waste?

You bet they would -- they are doing it all over the country, not just here. But the ultimate kick in the pants for Southern California is that they are building Route 241 through some of our few remaining parks and farm areas, at private contractor's expense, and then having users of the road (other than government) pay for it all, at very profitable rates for everybody involved in the building. Ingenious!

Citizens should know that by supporting Route 241, they are choosing, once again, to support San Onofre Nuclear WASTE Generating Station. As usual, support for the old atomic power plant is hidden in some other agenda, but that's still the real choice that is being made here.

It's long past time to shut San Onofre and get realistic about renewable energy.

Russell "Ace" Hoffman
Concerned Citizen
Carlsbad, California USA

At 01:45 PM 1/30/2008 -0800, Brian S. wrote:
>Haven't they paved over enough of our natural lands in the name of $...?
>Don't we have enough concrete structures?
>Can we get back this land after it's gone?
>Which view below do you want your grandchildren to enjoy?
>Please forward this to all your friends to help stop this travesty. Thank you.
>
>San Mateo Creek area prior to HWY 241:
>
>[sorry, picture not available]
>
>…and after the devastation:
>
> [sorry, picture not available]
>
>Please help stop the destructionà http://www.savetrestles.com/ ß visit and let your view be known
>


Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company



Monday, February 4, 2008

The Hoax of Eco-Friendly Nuclear Energy (by Karl Grossman)

February 4th, 2008

Dear Readers,

I think Karl Grossman's Extra! article about the so-called nuclear renaissance is probably the greatest article ever written about nuclear power: The most important, the most complete, the most inarguably correct, the best written, the best documented, as timely as ever, and dramatic and emotive as well. It SHOULD win him a lot of awards. It should be republished everywhere. And I think if just 1% of the population of America reads Karl's Extra! article, it SHOULD mean the end of nuclear power FOREVER.

Karl's puts our case forward beautifully.

If you possibly can, I recommend you read Karl's article aloud to SOMEONE. Spread the word. Get this one out there. Send it to your local paper. Tell your local media to STOP letting the local nuclear power promoters claim that operating nuclear power plants have zero emissions, that Chernobyl only killed a handful of people, that Three Mile Island killed no one, that nuclear power is green or solves global warming, or that the only real problem with nuclear power is politics. None of that is true. Nuclear power's heyday, if it ever had one, is long GONE. Now it is a subsidized, snarling dragon which MUST be slain.

I first met Karl more than a dozen years ago, when he invited me into the Cassini battle, having read a transcript of a side comment I made about shooting radioactive waste into space during a discussion of space debris. I have been a grateful "student" of Karl's ever since. And now he's outdone himself.

Nuclear power is such an obvious mistake to those who have studied it, that it sometimes amazes "pro-DNAer" that there is even an issue here -- "Of course the plants should be closed!" we say. Yes, it's obvious to those who look carefully. For every Patrick Moore there are a thousand, or a hundred thousand, engineers who have turned away from nuclear power -- often while still in school, never to look back. But still, the enormous complexity of the issues blinds most people, who prefer not to think about it at all.

Karl's article cuts through the complexities, and presents overwhelming proof that the nuclear option is a poor one, and always will be a poor one, and isn't getting any safer, or more efficient at anything but killing people. It presents overwhelming proof that we, the citizens, must fight it and stop it. Politicians won't listen to one of us. But they WILL listen to a lot of us, if we keep talking.

I thank Karl, again, for speaking out so well for so many of us! Please send his essay to your elected officials, your friends, your local emergency first responders, your energy suppliers, your teachers, your students . . . hang it in your apartment building's laundry room, and send it to the presidential candidates. Karl tells it like it is.

So enough already. Read it, aloud if possible, then add your own cover letter to his article (with or without THIS cover letter) and send it to others you care about, or who might be able to influence your environment, if they know what you want them to do.

Yours,

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA


Karl Grossman is the author of several books, including:

At 08:24 AM 2/4/2008 -0500, Karl Grossman <kgrossman@hamptons.com> wrote:
> Monday, February 04, 2008

Published on Sunday, February 3, 2008 by Extra!

Money Is the Real Green Power: The Hoax of Eco-Friendly Nuclear Energy

by Karl Grossman

Nuclear advocates in government and the nuclear industry are engaged in a massive, heavily financed drive to revive atomic power in the United States-with most of the mainstream media either not questioning or actually assisting in the promotion.

"With a very few notable exceptions, such as the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. media have turned the same sort of blind, uncritical eye on the nuclear industry's claims that led an earlier generation of Americans to believe atomic energy would be too cheap to meter," comments Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "The nuclear industry's public relations effort has improved over the past 50 years, while the natural skepticism of reporters toward corporate claims seems to have disappeared."

The New York Times continues to be, as it was a half-century ago when nuclear technology was first advanced, a media leader in pushing the technology, which collapsed in the U.S. with the 1979 Three Mile Island and 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accidents. The Times has showered readers with a variety of pieces advocating a nuclear revival, all marbled with omissions and untruths. A lead editorial headlined The Greening of Nuclear Power (5/13/06) opened:

Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists, who feared the potential for catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation contamination. . . . But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better.

Nukes add to greenhouse

Parroting a central atomic industry theme these days, the Times editors declared, "Nuclear energy can replace fossil-fuel power plants for generating electricity, reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute heavily to global warming." As a TV commercial frequently aired by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nuclear industry trade group, states: "Nuclear power plants don't emit greenhouses gases, so they protect our environment."

What is left unmentioned by the NEI, the Times and other mainstream media making this claim is that the overall "nuclear cycle"-which includes uranium mining and milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication and disposal of radioactive waste-has significant greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

As Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, wrote in an (unpublished) letter to the Times, the dirty secret is that nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming. Nuclear power is actually a chain of highly energy-intensive industrial processes. These include uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel; construction and deconstruction of the massive nuclear facility structures; and the disposition of high-level nuclear waste.

She included information on "independent studies that document in detail the extent to which the entire nuclear cycle generates greenhouse emissions."

Separately, Lee wrote to a Times journalist stating that the "fiction" that nuclear power does not contribute to global warming "has been a prime feature of the nuclear industry's and Bush administration's PR campaign" that "unfortunately . . . has been swallowed by a number of New York Times reporters, op-ed columnists and editors."

Greens for hire

In "The Greening of Nuclear Power," the Times, like other mainstream media touting a nuclear restart, also spoke of environmentalists changing their stance on nuclear power. "Two new leaders" have emerged "to encourage the building of new nuclear reactors," according to the editorial. They happen to be Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush's first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and Patrick Moore, "a co-founder of Greenpeace." The Times heralded this as "the latest sign that nuclear power is getting a more welcome reception from some environmentalists."

However, "both Whitman and Moore . . . are being paid to do so by the Nuclear Energy Institute," noted the Center for Media and Democracy's Diane Farsetta (PRWatch.org, 3/14/07). In her piece Moore Spin: Or, How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups, Farsetta also reported: A Nexis news database search on March 1, 2007 identified 302 news items about nuclear power that cite Moore since April 2006. Only 37 of those pieces-12 percent of the total-mention his financial relationship with NEI.

Whitman and Moore were hired as part of NEI's "Clean and Safe Energy Coalition" in 2006, which is "fully funded" by the institute, Farsetta noted. As for Moore and Greenpeace, his "association . . . ended in 1986," and he "has now spent more time working as a PR consultant to the logging, mining, biotech, nuclear and other industries . . . than he did as an environmental activist."

According to Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience With Atomic Radiation (Brattleboro Reformer, 2/24/07), "Moore sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign, but he did not actually found the organization." Wasserman went on to cite an actual founder of the organization, Bob Hunter, describing Moore as "the Judas of the ecology movement."

Scarce high-grade fuel

Insisting that "there is good reason to give nuclear power a fresh look," The Greening of Nuclear Power further claimed, "It can diversify our sources of energy with a fuel-uranium-that is both abundant and inexpensive."

This, too, was bogus. The uranium from which fuel used in nuclear power plants is made-so-called "high-grade" ore containing substantial amounts of fissionable uranium-235-is, in fact, not "abundant." As Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation told BBC News (11/29/05), another "dirty little secret" of nuclear power is that "startlingly, there's only a few decades left of the proven high-grade uranium ore it needs for fuel." This has been the projection for years.

Indeed, this limit on "high-grade" uranium ore is why the industry projects that, in the long-term, nuclear power will need to be based on breeder reactors running on manmade plutonium. But use of plutonium-fueled reactors has been stymied because they can explode like atomic bombs-they contain tons of plutonium fuel, while the first bomb using plutonium, dropped on Nagasaki, contained 15 pounds. Because it takes only a few pounds of plutonium to make an atomic bomb, they also constitute an enormous proliferation risk.

Blaming Jane Fonda

The Jane Fonda Effect (9/16/07), a Times Magazine column by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, blamed nuclear power's stall on the 1979 film The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, which opened days before the Three Mile Island partial meltdown. "Stoked by The China Syndrome," it caused "widespread panic," wrote Dubner and Levitt, even though, they maintained, the accident did not "produce any deaths, injuries or significant damage."

In fact, the utility that owned Three Mile Island has for years been quietly paying people whose family members died, contracted cancer or were otherwise impacted by the accident. While settlements range up to $1 million, the utility company continues to insist this does not acknowledge fault. The toll of Three Mile Island is chronicled in my television documentary Three Mile Island Revisited (EnviroVideo, 1993) and Wasserman's book Killing Our Own (which includes a devastating chapter, People Died at Three Mile Island), among other works.

But Dubner and Levitt continue undeterred, declaring, "The big news is that nuclear power may be making a comeback in the United States." They acknowledge the Chernobyl accident, stating that it "killed at least a few dozen people directly." They admit that it "exposed millions more to radiation," but keep silent about the consequences of this in terms of illness and death. This atomic version of Holocaust denial flies in the face of voluminous research on the disaster that puts the number of dead in the hundreds of thousands.

"At least 500,000 people-perhaps more-have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine," said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine (Guardian, 3/25/06). Dr. Alexey Yablokov, president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, calculates a death toll of 300,000. In the book Chernobyl: 20 Years On, which he co-edited, Yablokov writes, "In 20 years it has become clear that not tens, hundreds of thousands, but millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere have suffered and will suffer from the Chernobyl catastrophe."

The New York Times Magazine also published Atomic Balm? (7/16/06), by Jon Gertner; the subhead read, "For the first time in decades, increasing the role of nuclear power in the United States may be starting to make political, environmental and even economic sense." Gertner used the term nuclear "renaissance," and again forwarded the claim that "the supply [of uranium] is abundant."

Gertner told of how the "lifespan" for nuclear plants was set at 40 years because this was considered "how long a large nuclear plant could safely operate" This has "proved a conservative estimate," he states-without providing a factual basis. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been "granting 20-year extensions" to the 103 U.S. nuclear plants so they "can run for a total of 60 years." (Consider the safety and reliability of 60-year-old cars speeding down highways.)

"Even with such licensing renewals, though, it's doubtful the current fleet of plants will run for, say, 80 years," he continued, and "that means the industry, in a way, is in a race against time." It needs to build new plants because the "absence" of nuclear power "would probably pose tremendous challenges for the United States."

The New York Times also allows its nuclear advocacy to slip into its news stories. In an article (11/27/07) about the French nuclear power company Areva signing a deal with a Chinese atomic corporation, Times reporter John Tagliabue wrote of Areva chief executive Anne Lauvergeon's "long path from dirty hands to clean energy." The "dirty hands" referred to a youthful interest in archaeology; that nuclear power is "clean energy" appears to require no explanation.

Another story, datelined Fort Collins, Colorado (11/19/07), reported on two energy projects proposed for what the paper calls "a deeply green city." Describing the plans as "exposing the hard place that communities like this across the country are likely to confront," Times reporter Kirk Johnson wrote:

Both projects would do exactly what the city proclaims it wants, helping to produce zero-carbon energy. But one involves crowd-pleasing, feel-good solar power, and the other is a uranium mine, which has a base of support here about as big as a pinkie. Environmentalism and local politics have collided with a broader ethical and moral debate about the good of the planet, and whether some places could or should be called upon to sacrifice for their high-minded goals.

Other revivalists

Other media promoting a nuclear revival-their words prominently featured on NEI's website-include USA Today (3/5/06): "The facts are straightforward: Nuclear power . . . creates virtually none of the pollution that causes climate change and delivers electricity cheaper than other forms of generation do." And the Augusta Chronicle (8/21/06): "Nuclear power-for decades perceived as an environmental scourge-is emerging as the cleanest and most cost-efficient source of energy available, a fact conceded even by environmentalists." And Investor's Business Daily (12/1/06): "We can worry about imaginary threats of nuclear energy or the real dangers of fossil fuel pollution."

Glenn Beck of CNN Headline News also joined the chorus of support (5/2/07): "Look, America should embrace nuclear power, even if it's [just] to get off the foreign oil bandwagon." This is also common nuclear disinformation, that nuclear power is needed to displace foreign oil. The only energy produced by nuclear power is electricity-and only 3 percent of electricity in the U.S. is generated with oil.

There are a few exceptions in the mainstream media, notably the other Times, the Los Angeles Times. "The dream that nuclear power would turn atomic fission into a force for good rather than destruction unraveled with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986," the paper stated (7/23/07) in an editorial headlined: No to Nukes: It's Tempting to Turn to Nuclear Plants to Combat Climate Change, but Alternatives Are Safer and Cheaper. Those who claim nuclear power "must be part of any solution" to global warming or climate change "make a weak case," said the L.A. Times, citing the enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste. . . . What's more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks.

Staggering numbers

As to the risks, the mainstream media's handling-or non-handling-of the U.S. government's most comprehensive study on the consequences of a nuclear plant accident is instructive. Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences 2 (known as CRAC-2) was done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1980s. Bill Smirnow, an anti-nuclear activist, has tried for years to interest media in reporting on it-sending out information about it continually.

The study estimates the impacts from a meltdown at each nuclear plant in the U.S. in categories of "peak early fatalities," "peak early injuries," "peak cancer deaths" and "costs [in] billions." ("Peak" refers to the highest calculated value-not a "worst case scenario," as worse assumptions could have been chosen.) For the Indian Point 3 plant north of New York City, for example, the projection is that a meltdown would cause 50,000 peak early fatalities, 141,000 peak early injuries, 13,000 peak cancer deaths, and $314 billion in property damage-and that's based on the dollar's value in 1980, so the cost today would be nearly $1 trillion. For the Salem 2 nuclear plant in New Jersey, the study projects 100,000 peak early fatalities, 70,000 peak early injuries, 40,000 peak cancer deaths, and $155 billion in property damage. The study provides similarly staggering numbers across the country.

"I've sent the CRAC-2 material out for years to media and have never heard a thing," Smirnow told Extra!:

Not anyone in the media ever even asked me a question. There's no excuse for this media inattention to such an important subject, and it shows how they're falling flat on their faces in not performing their purported mission of educating and informing the public. Whatever their reason or reasons for not informing their readers and listeners, the effect is one of helping the nuclear power industry and hurting the public. If the public was informed, this new big pro-nuke push would never happen.

Also in the way of sins of omission is the media silence on "routine emissions"-the amount of radioactivity the U.S. government allows to be routinely released by nuclear plants. "It doesn't take an accident for a nuclear power plant to release radioactivity into our air, water and soil," says Kay Drey of Beyond Nuclear at the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. "All it takes is the plant's everyday routine operation, and federal regulations permit these radioactive releases. Rarely, if ever, is this reported by media." The radioactive substances regularly emitted include tritium, krypton and xenon. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets a "permissible" level for these "routine emissions," but, as Drey states, "permissible does not mean safe."

Hidden subsidies

Another lonely voice amid the media nuclear cheerleaders is the Las Vegas Sun, which recently has been especially outraged by $50 billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear industry to build new nuclear plants included in the 2007 Energy Bill. The Sun demanded (8/1/07): Pull the Plug Already.

In reporting on the economics of nuclear power, mainstream media virtually never mention the many government subsidies for it, while continuing to claim that it's "cost-effective" (Augusta Chronicle, 8/21/06). One such giveaway is the Price-Anderson Act, which shields the nuclear industry from liability for catastrophic accidents. Price-Anderson, supposed to be temporary when first enacted in 1957, has been extended repeatedly and now limits liability in the event of an accident to $10 billion, despite CRAC-2's projections of consequences far worse than that.

Writing on CommonDreams.org (9/11/07), Ralph Nader explored the economic issue. "Taxpayers alert!" he declared: "The atomic power corporations are beating on the doors in Washington to make you guarantee their financing for more giant nuclear plants. They are pouring money and applying political muscle to Congress for up to $50 billion in loan guarantees to persuade an uninterested Wall Street that Uncle Sam will pay for any defaults on industry construction loans. . . . The atomic power industry does not give up. Not as long as Uncle Sam can be dragooned to be its subsidizing, immunizing partner. Ever since the first of 100 plants opened in 1957, corporate socialism has fed this insatiable atomic goliath with many types of subsidies."

Ignored alternatives

Yet another claim by mainstream media in pushing for a nuclear revival is the "success" of the French nuclear program. 60 Minutes (4/8/07) did it in a segment called Vive Les Nukes. (See FAIR Action Alert, 4/18/07.) Correspondent Steve Kroft started with the nuclear-power-doesn't-contribute-to-global-warming myth:

With power demands rising and concerns over global warming increasing, what the world needs now is an efficient means of producing carbon-free energy. And one of the few available options is nuclear, a technology whose time seemed to come and go, and may now be coming again. . . . With zero greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. government, public utilities and even some environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power, and one of the first places they're looking to is France, where it's been a resounding success.

Though she was totally ignored, Linda Gunter of Beyond Nuclear told 60 Minutes of radioactive contamination in the marine life off Normandy where the French reprocessing center sits, leukemia clusters in people living along that coast, and massive demonstrations in French cities earlier in the year protesting construction of new nuclear power plants.

The Union of Concerned Scientists was upset by 60 Minutes' downplaying of alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar. UCS's Alden Meyer wrote to 60 Minutes:

In fact, wind power could supply more energy to the U.S. grid than nuclear does today, and when combined with a mix of energy efficiency and other renewable energy sources, could provide a continuous energy supply that would help us make dramatic reductions in global warming.

Dismissal of renewable energy forms is another major facet of mainstream media's drive for a nuclear power revival. As the St. Petersburg Times put it (12/08/06), "While renewable sources of energy such as solar power are still in the developmental stage, nuclear is the new green." Renewables Are Ready was the title of a 1999 book written by two UCS staffers. Today, they are more than ready. "Wind is the cheapest form of new generation now being built," wrote Greenpeace advisor Wasserman (Free Press, 4/10/07). He pointed to an "array of wind, solar, bio-fuels, geothermal, ocean thermal and increased conservation and efficiency."

Wasserman has also written about another element ignored by most mainstream media (Free Press, 7/9/07): "The switch to renewables defunds global terrorism. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Shutting them down ends the fear of apocalyptic disaster by both terror and error." He stressed, again, that safe, clean energy is here and "we could replace everything with available technology that could easily supply all our needs while allowing a sustainable planet to survive and thrive."

The one green thing

What are the causes of the media nuclear dysfunction? The obvious problem is media ownership. General Electric, for one, is both a leading nuclear plant manufacturer and a media mogul, owning NBC and other outlets. (For years, CBS was owned by Westinghouse; Westinghouse and GE are the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power.) There have been board and financial interlocks between the media and nuclear industries. There is the long-held pro-nuclear faith at media such as the New York Times. (See sidebar.)

There is also the giant public relations operation-both corporate, led by the NEI, and government, involving the Department of Energy and its national nuclear laboratories. "You have the NEI and the nuclear industry propagandizing on nuclear power, and journalists taking down what the industry is saying and not looking at the veracity of their claims," Greenpeace USA nuclear policy analyst Jim Riccio told Extra!.

And then there's lots of money. FAIR recently exposed (Action Alert, 8/22/07) how National Public Radio, which broadcasts many pro-nuclear pieces, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from "nuclear operator Sempra Energy" and Constellation Energy, "which belongs to Nustart Energy, a 10-company consortium pushing for new nuclear power plant construction."

The only thing green about nuclear power is the nuclear establishment's dollars.

Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Books he has written about nuclear technology include Cover Up: What You ARE NOT Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He has hosted many television programs on nuclear technology on EnviroVideo.com


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>Extra! January/February 2008

The NYT's Nuclear "Promised Land"

By Karl Grossman

Sidebar to "Money is the Real Green Power" (Extra! 1-2/08)

The New York Times is not alone in promoting a revival of nuclear power. But as the U.S. paper of record, it sets the media tone. Its pro-nuclear editorial culture began decades ago when the Manhattan Project and its corporate contractors (notably General Electric and Westinghouse, which became the major manufacturers of nuclear power plants) sought to perpetuate what was established during World War II, by making other things atomic.

Because of the Times' importance, Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves personally arranged for its reporter, William Laurence, to join the project. Laurence was responsible for the first piece of nuclear media disinformation; he wrote a press statement to cover up the first test of an atomic device, claiming there had been an ammunition dump explosion. Laurence later, as the only "journalist" that had been at the 1945 Trinity test, wrote that it was like being "present at the moment of creation when the Lord said 'let there be light.'"

After atomic bombs dropped on Japan, the Times both ran and distributed free to the nation's other newspapers a 10-part series written by Laurence glorifying the Manhattan Project, notes News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb by Beverly Keever (Common Courage Press). Radioactivity was all but unmentioned in the series.

And the Times science reporter continued for years to wax poetic about atomic technology. "From the dawn of the atomic-bomb age, Laurence and the Times almost single-handedly shaped the news of this epoch and helped birth the acceptance of the most destructive force ever created," writes Keever, professor of journalism at the University of Hawaii. Laurence would describe nuclear power as "making the dream of the Earth as a Promised Land come true."


Quotes collected by Ace Hoffman:
"Nuclear war must be the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in the contemporary world. People are not curious about the details." -- Paul Brians (author; quote is from: Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction)
"When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." -- Sinclair Lewis (first American Nobel Prize winner in Literature, 2.7.1885 - 1.10.1951)
"There is no such thing as a pro-nuclear environmentalist." -- Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa, 1992)
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." -- Sun Tzu (Chinese general b.500 BC)
"The most intolerable reactor of all may be one which comes successfully to the end of its planned life having produced mountains of radioactive waste for which there is no disposal safe from earthquake damage or sabotage." -- A. Stanley Thompson (a pioneer nuclear physicist who later realized the whole situation)
"Any dose is an overdose." -- Dr. John W. Gofman (another pioneer nuclear physicist who saw the light (9.21.1918 - 8.15.2007))
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery." -- Octavia Butler (science fiction writer, 7.22.1947 - 2.24.2006)
"If you want real welfare reform, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.

If you want to reduce poverty, you focus on a good education, good healthcare, and a good job.

If you want a stable middle class, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.

If you want to have citizens who can participate in democracy, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.

And if you want to end the violence, you could build a million new prisons and you could fill them up, but you never end this cycle of violence unless you invest in the health and the skill and the intellect and the character of our children. You focus on a good education, good health care and a good job.

And other than that, I don't feel strongly about anything."

-- Paul Wellstone (US Senator, D-Minnesota, 7.21.1944 - 10.25.2002)


"There are no warlike peoples - just warlike leaders." -- Ralph Bunche (8.7.1903 - 12.9.1971)
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Please send this to everyone you know!" -- Ace Hoffman (original collector of the above quotes, January, 2008)


Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company



Saturday, January 26, 2008

We are all just hostages on a hostile planet...

January 26th, 2008

Dear Readers,

There are currently over 400 operating nuclear power reactors around the globe, employing approximately one million people, and holding all seven billion people on the planet hostage.

Nuclear power is a very expensive way to provide electrons in wires. There are constant dangers from proliferation, terrorism, waste mismanagement, and accidents. There are NUMEROUS clean alternative energy solutions, but the cost of conversion is considered too high because we give nuclear power a free ride on most of its costs to society. Unfair competition is not capitalism, and nuclear power could never have started, let alone continued, under equitable economic conditions. It is the most subsidized industry in history. Also the most secretive, the most poorly regulated (it's mostly self-regulated, which is to say, utterly UNregulated), the dirtiest (even compared to coal), and the most environmentally invasive, too -- it's radioactive byproducts get into EVERYTHING.

Nuke power plants are vulnerable to human error, and catastrophic natural events such as earthquakes, tornados, or even meteors from space. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? Absolutely not. Statistical calculations of the probability of a catastrophic accident at a nuclear power plant caused by it being hit by a meteor are complex and unreliable. No matter what number someone comes up with, a group of bright scientists will undoubtedly be able to argue that the estimate is off by several orders of magnitude one way or the other!

But NO MISTAKES are ever made when calculating the chance of a catastrophic accident caused by a meteor knocking over a bunch of windmills. The chance is zero. Such an accident would be tragic for those under the meteor's fireball, but it would not effect one millionth as many people as if a meteor hit a nuclear power plant, or if the power plant's radiation was released for any other reason. Since there are safe alternatives which are cheaper and more reliable, I believe that even the small (some might call it "remote") chance of a meteor strike on a nuclear power facility or its waste is enough reason to reject nuclear power for humanity. Look at the moon. Those craters you see are meteor strikes. Our planet's dirt and wind and rain covers the evidence of these strikes, but the Earth is regularly hit by meteors, too.

And there are at least 1000 other reasons to reject nuclear power, all of them at least as good as the argument that meteors can and DO strike earth with some regularity, and no containment dome can seriously be thought to protect the power plant from such strikes (noting that the domes are not very thick on the top, anyway -- only the BASE of the walls is 8 feet to 12 feet thick, and also noting that most of the radioactive waste is stored outside the containment domes).

Assuming you've managed to operate your reactor successfully for 20 to 60 years (a big if), then there is STILL the problem of what to do with the radioactive waste. You have to keep it away from humans for about 20 times the half-lives of the elements. Before settling on Yucca Mountain, a government-appointed scientific team looked at, and then eliminated, every other possible solution, including deep-sea burial, sending the waste into outer space, and even just grinding it up and releasing the fission products into the environment (like what they do in France and England). After rejecting every other possible solution ANYONE could come up with, they were forced to ASSUME that Yucca Mountain was going to be the actual solution, even if it wasn't a very good one, which it isn't for many reasons, including the following:

* Yucca Mountain is located in an earthquake-prone area. It's one thing to risk your own life by living in an earthquake region, or a tornado region, or a tsunami region, but to risk the health and safety of the whole planet by storing all your waste in such a place is another matter entirely.

* Water runs through the Yucca Mountain site more quickly and in greater volume than originally expected. Water degrades the metals, or can cause a steam explosion -- releasing a planet-killing quantity of radioactive waste into the atmosphere, perhaps thousands of years from now, perhaps sooner, and perhaps not at all (if we're lucky; but do we want an energy plan which REQUIRES us to be lucky?).

* The metals that were expected to be used to hold the waste have been corroding and degrading much more rapidly than anticipated -- this happens over and over in the nuclear industry, probably in part because the industry refuses to properly account for the destructive effects of the radiation itself! Sound's silly, but historically, they keep not realizing the extent to which radiation accelerates embrittlement. (Google "Davis Besse 2002" for a nearly-catastrophic example of the industry ignoring the warning signs of severe corrosion problems, also known as "Wigner's disease," "rust," and many other terms.)

* Transporting the nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain is not easy, safe, or cheap, but keeping the waste at nearly 40 separate sites around the country is ALSO extremely hazardous -- AND violates the promise made to the public when the plants were opened, which was that no waste older than about five years (the minimum amount of time needed for the waste to cool enough to be moved) would be kept on-site at the nuclear power plants. Instead, more than half a century into the nuclear age, the used reactor cores all remain onsite and very, very vulnerable.

* Perhaps the biggest problem for nuclear waste management is that the scientific community is becoming more and more aware of the extreme dangers of radioactive particles inside the human body. Permitted exposures continue to drop, and this author believes they will drop much, much more as the public realizes how bad a little polonium-210, or plutonium-239, or whatever, really is for you (especially for children). The EPA ruled that the Yucca Mountain team's plan to create a massive radioactive blob, which, in 10,000 years (if not sooner), would begin escaping the mountain and contaminating the groundwater in Nevada for the next million years or so, was not adequate. EPA told the scientists and engineers that they have to extend the predictions out to at least a million years, which is just that much more impossible to do considering that the average nuclear engineer cannot accurately predict corrosion even a few MONTHS in advance (see "Davis Besse 2002" again, or consider the many problems with steam generator corrosion throughout the nuclear industry).

Most of this year's Presidential candidates proclaim their opposition to "Yucca Mountain" but it's just a political football they are tossing around to each other, and have been for about 20 years. Yucca Mountain is a scientific boondoggle for the reasons given above and many, many others. But the presidential candidates talk about it as if we could just abandon Yucca Mountain and come up with something better. Yucca Mountain ALREADY is a "last resort," so if you oppose Yucca Mountain, you really should oppose nuclear power too, since there is no other solution to the waste problem on the horizon. And even if Yucca Mountain is built and filled, the following day each nuclear power plant would have a dangerous amount of waste on hand which would need to be guarded, protected, etc. for millions of years. So being FOR Yucca Mountain doesn't mean you've actually solved anything!

But tell that to six Republican senators who recently introduced legislation to relax the safety requirements for Yucca Mountain. The bill would eliminate ALL safety requirements for the facility after 300 years -- in order to take advantage of (imagined) future technological breakthroughs! In announcing the proposed legislation, Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) made the specious claim that opposition to Yucca Mountain was based on "politics, not sound science."

It is not "sound science" to base the nation's energy policy on completely uninvented future technological breakthroughs -- especially ones that we've already been looking for intensely for more than 60 years, and have already put tens of billions of dollars into trying to find.

The only real politics involved in nuclear power is the combined politics of greed and ignorance. Congressional and White House promoters of nuclear power have NEVER studied the facts -- they've always let nuclear industry insiders tell them the "facts."

Shutting all the nuclear power plants down now would save lives, money, and global storage space. There is no time to wait -- every day, another 50 tons of spent reactor cores becomes waste -- deadly, solidified poisonous gas.

There is no time to debate, and nothing left TO debate -- the facts are clear, including the fact that radiation is as much as 100 to 1000 times MORE dangerous (especially to fetuses and infants) than the current standards admit to -- standards specifically designed to ALLOW THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY TO OPERATE, NOT TO PROTECT YOUR LIFE!

There is no place to hide, the world is finite and crowded.

Nuclear power plant executives quiver at only one thing: The truth getting out to the public.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
(Images added 2025)

The author, an award-winning educational software developer and programmer, has interviewed hundreds of nuclear physicists and other scientists on nuke-related topics. He has a personal collection of several hundred books, videos, and government reports on nuclear issues, dating to the mid-1940s.


Quotes collected by Ace Hoffman:
"Nuclear war must be the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in the contemporary world. People are not curious about the details." -- Paul Brians (author; quote is from: Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction)
"When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." -- Sinclair Lewis (first American Nobel Prize winner in Literature, 2.7.1885 - 1.10.1951)
"There is no such thing as a pro-nuclear environmentalist." -- Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa, 1992)
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." -- Sun Tzu (Chinese general b.500 BC)
"The most intolerable reactor of all may be one which comes successfully to the end of its planned life having produced mountains of radioactive waste for which there is no disposal safe from earthquake damage or sabotage." -- A. Stanley Thompson (a pioneer nuclear physicist who later realized the whole situation)
"Any dose is an overdose." -- Dr. John W. Gofman (another pioneer nuclear physicist who saw the light (9.21.1918 - 8.15.2007))
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery." -- Octavia Butler (science fiction writer, 7.22.1947 - 2.24.2006)
"If you want real welfare reform, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.

If you want to reduce poverty, you focus on a good education, good healthcare, and a good job.

If you want a stable middle class, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.

If you want to have citizens who can participate in democracy, you focus on a good education, good health care, and a good job.

And if you want to end the violence, you could build a million new prisons and you could fill them up, but you never end this cycle of violence unless you invest in the health and the skill and the intellect and the character of our children. You focus on a good education, good health care and a good job.

And other than that, I don't feel strongly about anything."

-- Paul Wellstone (US Senator, D-Minnesota, 7.21.1944 - 10.25.2002)


"There are no warlike peoples - just warlike leaders." -- Ralph Bunche (8.7.1903 - 12.9.1971)
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Please send this to everyone you know!" -- Ace Hoffman (original collector of the above quotes, January, 2008)


Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company