Is Nuclear Power Suddenly Clean and Safe?
Feb. 3, 2010
When did nuclear power suddenly and miraculously become “safe and clean,” as President Obama said in his recent State of the Union address? Or has it merely become miraculously “spun,” as the nuclear industry once again takes taxpayers, citizens, and government regulators for a ride. Wisconsin is considering easing the consumer and environmental protections so new nuclear power plants can be built in Wisconsin. Please join the Carbon-Free, Nuclear Free Lobby Day! The lobby day will take place February 23rd at the Wisconsin State Capitol, and will start at 9:00am. (see call to action at the end of this article and the notice of a Monday, Feb. 15, hearing, also in Madison).
Wisconsin common-sense safeguards on new nuclear plants are coming under multiple attacks. Assembly Bill 516 would entirely remove the safeguards on new nuclear reactors. The bill was co-sponsored by twenty five Representatives and 10 State Senators, the most support a safeguard repeal measure has ever received. The Governor’s proposed Clean Energy Act would remove the language requiring a federally-licensed facility for the radioactive nuclear waste. This would open up Wisconsin to more stockpiles of radioactive waste at nuclear power plants. It also increases the risk that the Wolf River batholith (granite bedrock) would once again be high on the list for a new national repository for radioactive nuclear waste.
No part of the nuclear production process is safe, as Winona LaDuke (Anishinabe environmentalist) and many other citizen activists have warned. Uranium mining contaminates mine workers and the environment (with 70% of the uranium in production comes from indigenous land around the world). The worst toxic waste disaster in U.S. history was the on July 16, 1979, at Church Rock, New Mexico, on the Navajo Reservation (Dine homeland). A uranium mining company tailings-pond dam of ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst and spilled into the Rio Puerco, known to traditional Dine’ as To’ Nizhoni (beautiful water).
It doesn’t take an accident for a nuclear power plant to release radioactivity into our air, water and soil. During everyday routine operation, federal regulations permit these radioactive releases. Radioactive water is allowed to be released into the environment containing “permissible” levels of contamination. (Permissible does not mean safe.) …Some gases leak into plant interiors and are released during periodic “purges” and “ventings” into the atmosphere. [Nuclear Information and Resource Service, "Routine Radioactive Releases from Nuclear Reactors,” quoted on www.texasradiation.org/nukesfilth.html]
Worker contamination is part of U.S. nuclear history. Remember Karen Silkwood (the Kerr-McGee union activist) who was killed on November 13, 1974, at 28 years of age while driving to meet a reporter from the New York Times with documentation about plutonium fuel rod tampering at the Kerr-McGee uranium and plutonium plants in Cimarron, Oklahoma. She had been exposed to radiation in the plant and was killed in a suspicious auto accident. In a later lawsuit filed by Silkwood’s father, Kerr-McGee paid $1.38 million for her plutonium-contamination (but the company did not admit to any liability in settling the case).
Wendell Berry (Kentucky farmer and author) said in his famous essay, “The Reactor and the Garden:”
1. Nuclear power is extremely dangerous. For this, the elaborate safety devices and backup systems of the plants themselves are evidence enough. Radioactive wastes, moreover, remain dangerous for many of thousands of years, and there is apparently no foreseeable safe way to dispose of them. [Over 2000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste are currently produced annually in the U.S.]
2. Dangerous accidents do happen in nuclear power plants. Officials and experts claim that accidents can be foreseen and prevented, but accidents are surprises by definition. [In 2002 it was discovered that boric acid had eaten a hole in a reactor vessel’s steel lid at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio. Unnoticed for several years, it could have caused a nuclear meltdown.]
3. Nuclear experts and plant employees do not always act competently in dealing with these accidents. Nuclear power requires people to act with perfect competence if it is to be used safely. But people in nuclear power plants are just as likely to blunder or panic or miscalculate as people anywhere else.
4. Public officials do not always act responsibly…
(1979, republished in The Gift of Good Land, 1981)
Nuclear waste storage is currently handled on-site or shipped away, often to Indian land: Prairie Island, Minnesota, now, or slated for the long-proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada, site in the heart of the Western Shoshone Nation. But the storage of radioactive nuclear waste, dangerous to life-forms for 100,000 years, is not welcome on Western Shoshone or Mescalero Apache land (New Mexico) or in northern Wisconsin.
Political conservatives who claim to support local control have opposed local control when in comes to the spraying of toxins near schools and homes (for example, Wisconsin’s 1993 Pesticide Preemption Law circumvented the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court support for this local prerogative in the Town of Casey), when it comes to the attempts to site a medical waste incinerator in family neighborhoods (Kenosha, 1989)—these two thanks to then-Gov. Tommy Thompson—and when it comes to the plans, begun in 1986 (Chernobyl was 1986; don’t they get it?), to use northern Wisconsin as nuke waste site.
Call to Action: Wisconsin value conservatives and environmental justice activists, including those who saved the Wolf River from the Crandon mine, are called to speak out again for communities and rivers of our state.
Speak Out Against Nuclear Power!
sponsored by Peace Action Wisconsin
Tell The Wisconsin Legislature:
No New Nuclear Power in Wisconsin!
Are you worried about the possibility of new nuclear power plants being built in Wisconsin? If so, please join us for the next important upcoming hearing (February 15th) and a lobby day, Feb. 23! We need your help to make a difference!
The new state climate bill (The Clean Energy Jobs Act) includes a provision that would remove common-sense restrictions on the building of new nuclear power plants (often called the “nuclear moratorium”). This would pave the way for the construction of new nuclear power plants in Wisconsin and would open Wisconsin (especially the Wolf River Batholith region) up to the possibility of becoming a national radioactive waste repository site. Please join us in asking the Wisconsin Legislature to remove this provision! There are three ways you can help:
Attend a Hearing! There are two hearings scheduled before the Assembly Special Committee on Clean Energy Jobs in February: Tuesday, February 2nd at 10:00am and Monday, February 15th at 10:00am. We need to pack these hearing rooms! For more information, or if you are interested in carpooling with others to these hearings, please contact lizk@peaceactionwi.org.
Contact your state legislators! We especially need people whose representatives are on the Senate or Assembly committees working on these bills. These legislators include: Representatives Spencer Black, James Soletski, John Steinbrink, Josh Zepnick, Joe Parisi, Ann Hraychuck, Cory Mason, Michael Huebsch, Phil Montgomery and Scott Gunderson. Senators Mark Miller, Jeff Plale, Bob Wirch, Dave Hansen, Bob Jauch, Glenn Grothman, Ted Kanavas and Mary Lazich. To find out if you are in one of their districts, and for contact information, try this link click here. Urge your legislators to remove the pro-nuclear measures!
Join us for our Carbon-Free, Nuclear Free Lobby Day! The lobby day will take place February 23rd at the State Capitol, and will start at 9:00am. You will receive training on lobbying your legislators and working with the media and will get information that will assist you in your lobbying. This is a great way to get a chance to interact with your legislators directly and really make a difference! The nuclear industry has lobbyists, we need them too! And who better than actual constituents?! For more information, e-mail lizk@peaceactionwi.org.
See also Wisconsin Resources Protection Council site (Al Gedicks articles…) and the Green Energy Alternative at Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice via wnpj.org/cfnf and on the Worldwatch Institute’s website.
The easing of nuclear plant licensing is another government bailout waiting to happen (this time for the nuclear industry), “given the 1.6 trillion dollars in risk exposure, which is why both industry and Wall Street consider nuclear power plants too risky to finance.” (www.worldwatch.org “Brave Nuclear World,” part 2).
Rick Whaley for theoggblog.com