NEWS & LETTERS, March-April 2010
Obama greenwashes nukes
There was celebration and relief in Vermont on Feb. 24 when the State Senate voted to close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant owned by Entergy. Citizens' outrage had overcome a concerted industry campaign of deception, with pro-nuclear propaganda repeated by the media and politicians all the way up to the President. What is telling is that there could be any question of granting Entergy's request to renew the license of this plant for another 20 years--as it approaches the end of the 40 years it was designed to last, it is falling apart. In 2007 one of its cooling towers collapsed. This year, radioactive tritium from the plant was found in groundwater. It will inevitably end up in the Connecticut River and in drinking water.
TRITIUM LEAKS COMMON
For a year Entergy had told Vermont regulators and legislators under oath that it had no underground pipes carrying radioactive material. This year, they were forced to admit that it does have such pipes, that they are the likely leak source, and that they had even found a leak of tritium from an underground pipe in 2005! This kind of cover-up is completely typical of the nuclear establishment since its birth.
The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has quietly stated that at least 27 of the nation's 104 reactor units--more than one quarter--have leaked tritium. That does not count the "normal" tritium releases that are a routine part of every nuclear plant's operation. The nuclear establishment--industry, regulators and their kept scientists--blandly reassures the public that the levels are too low to be dangerous. But there is no proven safe level. Tritium is a cancer-causing substance that becomes a part of the water we drink and is incorporated into the environment and our food, effectively lasting for over a century.
OBAMA TURNS TO NUKES
In the run-up to the Vermont decision, President Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to build the first nuclear reactors in three decades. That is only one of the subsidies for adding two more nuclear reactors to Plant Vogtle, located in the majority African-American Burke County, Georgia. This is one part of Obama's plan to expand available loan guarantees for new nuclear plants from $18.5 billion to $54 billion.
The President, following the coal/oil/nuclear company line, portrayed nuclear expansion as a "green jobs" initiative. Pretending to be part of the solution instead of the biggest part of the problem, these industries have launched a slick "All of the above" campaign to hoodwink people into thinking that, since the problem of climate change is so huge, we can't rely only on solar and wind power and had better keep burning coal, now baptized as "clean"; drill here, drill now; and keep the radiation glowing.
The anti-nuclear movement once again pointed out to Obama that "All of the above" means taking resources away from the most viable technical solutions: energy conservation, efficiency and renewable energy. They would provide more jobs faster, and would do more to limit global warming without producing mountains of radioactive waste and risking catastrophic accidents and proliferation of nuclear weapons.
What neither the entrenched industries, nor Obama, nor much of the anti-nuclear movement acknowledge is that humanity cannot be saved through technical solutions alone. But tying us down to continually expanding energy production, especially through use of fossil fuels and nuclear power, only increases the obstacles to social transformation that would anchor production and consumption in real human needs, not capital's endless drive to accumulate.
There is vocal opposition in the majority-Black area near the plant, as was heard at a hearing held in February by the anti-nuclear Georgia Women's Action for New Directions. Claude Howard, an African American from Shell Bluff, said, "My brother died with cancer about a year ago. We have all been healthy in this area until recently when the plant came down there, and I know the rise of cancer has been more prevalent."
In nearby 59% Black Fairfield County, S.C., the state of South Carolina recently approved the expansion of the Summer nuclear power station. Activists have long fought the environmental racism of the nuclear chain, which extends from its cradle--very high rates of cancer among uranium miners, many of them Native American, and on the Navajo reservation as a whole--to its grave, nuclear waste sites. The country's primary radioactive waste dump is in Barnwell, S.C., a poor, rural 48% African-American community.
The battle is on. It is by no means certain that the administration will break the 30-year blockage of nuclear plant construction. If it did, what would be the human cost?
--Franklin Dmitryev
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