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2012 is the Year to Finally Bury Nuke Power

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X  Local resistance to reactor projects has raged wherever reactors operate or are proposed, and has been extremely effective.  Richard Nixon promised 1000 US reactors by the year 2000, but the operable number was 104.  Those nearly 900 reactors that went missing were mostly stopped by local grassroots movements.  Every proposed or operating reactor not killed financially can be ultimately stopped by local opposition movements geared toward a long, hard struggle against "impossible" odds that ultimately prove beatable.

X As it has been from the start, nuclear power is a ward of the state.  Nowhere on Earth are the builders held fully responsible for their mess.  The Japanese government has just coughed up a tip-of-the-iceberg $13 billion bailout for Fukushima's owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company.  Hundreds of billions are yet to come.  Either the company goes bankrupt, or the government takes it over beforehand.  Either way, the public pays financially, and with its health and that of its children ( http://nukefree.org/arnie-gundersen-tepco-says-mission-accomplished-fukushima ).  So it will be everywhere nukes are built, including the US, where the 1957 Price-Anderson Act still limits owner liability in the wake of a catastrophe.  

X  Cost estimates for new reactors have already soared 200-300% and more over original prices just a few years ago, and will continue go ever higher.  By contrast, renewable technology prices continue their rapid, steep decline.  

X  France's nuclear industry has all but given up on the US market ( http://nukefree.org/edf-may-drop-nuke-plans-maryland-all-us ).  A reactor under construction in Finland is years behind schedule and billions of Euros over budget, as is another at Flamanville, in France itself.  French public opinion has turned strongly toward renewables.    

X US war hawks now want an attack on Iran for allegedly using commercial technology to build a Bomb.  But it's instructive to remember that the west once tried to sell 36 reactors to the Shah, who was overthrown by religious fundamentalists in 1979, leading to the current crisis.  Does the "Renaissance" blueprint mean pushing reactors everywhere, then launching preemptive wars following the inevitable regime changes?

X  After more than 50 years, the radioactive waste problem has been nowhere solved.  Nevada's Yucca Mountain is not revivable, and there are no usable high-level storage sites anywhere else on the planet.

X  Nuclear power makes global warming worse.  Greenhouse gases pour out of the mining, milling, enrichment and waste management process.  Massive quantities of direct heat threaten our rivers, lakes and oceans.  Thus more and more reactors must shut during hot summer months, when they are supposedly fighting global warming.  

X  The calculations on how much climate changing heat and steam have spewed into the atmosphere during the explosions at Chernobyl and Fukushima remain to be done.  Likewise the heat impacts of the liquid emissions into the ocean at Fukushima remain unknown.  

X  By wasting huge amounts of social capital, nuclear construction slows the conversion to renewables, which at the real core of defeating global warming.

X  Fukushima is not over.  Three melted cores remain problematic, and the entire complex is vulnerable to aftershocks which could bring spent fuel pools crashing to the ground and cause other disasters impossible to foresee.

X  Nuclear power is killing people in ever-greater numbers.  The industry continues to mount its usual personal assaults on those who prove that.  But the killing power of radiation has been known since "mountain sickness"---lung cancer---began surfacing among Czech uranium miners in the 1500s.  The continuum is unbroken through the introduction of x-rays, the work of the Curies, radium watch dial painting, definitive links to childhood leukemia, and more (http://nuclearfreeplanet.org/killing-our-own-the-disaster-of-america's-experience-with-atomic-radiation--harvey-wasserman--norman-solomon-with-robert-alvarez--eleanor-walters.html ).  The Hiroshima-based "science" used to establish a "safe" dose of radiation has been thoroughly debunked.  The medical consensus that there is no such thing is quite firm.    

X  The nuclear industry never accepted the burden proving this technology to be safe before being deployed amidst a civilian population.  For a half-century reactor backers have done a superb job of simply refusing to maintain or study reliable epidemiological data bases around commercial reactors (as well as weapons production facilities).  But as early as 1970 the chief medical officer of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. John Gofman, branded commercial atomic power as a form of "premeditated mass murder."

X  The largest study so far of the health impacts of Chernobyl, conducted by three Russian scientists, indicates upwards of a million casualties over the past quarter-century.  That first study of the US health impacts from Fukushima, indicates that many thousands more deaths are likely to be suffered in the US above what's already apparent.

Does all this add up to the end of nuke power?  

Worldwide, the industry is crumbling.  The collapse of its private investment base, and the shutdowns in Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Mexico, Israel and elsewhere are rapidly shrinking the technology's credible reach.

In the US, we can cut off all subsidies for new reactors.  Fierce no nukes campaigns in the UK, India and even China, as massive demonstrations there are starting to erupt.  None of these fights will be easy, but all are winnable, especially as the full impacts of Fukushima become known, and as the Solartopian green power revolution renders the nuclear option increasingly uneconomic.

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Harvey is a lifelong activist who speaks, writes and organizes widely on energy, the environment, election protection, social justice, grass-roots politics and natural healing, personal and planetary.He hosts "California Solartopia" at KPFK-Pacifica and "Green Power & Wellness" atprn.fm. (more...)
 

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