popular logistics

Janet Tauro, of the NJ Environmental Federation, raises a disturbing question - is the NRC as incompetant as FEMA?

The NRC’s mission is to protect citizens, not put up roadblocks to a full and open airing of safety concerns, but as Janet Tauro writes in the Asbury Park Press,

“It should not have been citizens who made public the safety problems at Oyster Creek. It should have been the NRC.

It took a whistleblower who took pictures of a bunch of sleeping guards at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania to wake up Congress about NRC’s lackadaisical approach to citizens’ safety concerns. Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, announced recently that an investigation by the Office of Inspector General that found “questionable decisions by the commission with respect to nuclear power plant relicensing” also will be under review.

Some of these Questionable Decisions:

• The NRC’s refusal to evaluate the terrorist risk of elevated fuel pools jam-packed with thousands of pounds of highly radioactive fuel rods,
• The lack of a workable evacuation plan,
• The transfer of the state’s most senior nuclear expert after he publicly chastised NRC officials for not imposing penalties on Exelon after the department discovered safety commitments were not being honored,
• The discovery of radioactive Cesium in soil samples outside of the plant,
• Massive fish kills in Barnegat Bay, and
• The mysterious emptying of water collection buckets shortly before NRC and state inspectors arrived to draw samples to try to determine the source of leaks within the drywell, the reactor’s steel containment vessel.

In addition, Rep. Dingell’s committee might review:

• Transcripts from our precedent-setting hearing before the Atomic Safety Licensing Board and decide whether preferential treatment was given to Exelon and the NRC, while NJ Environmental Federation’s attorney and expert were badgered and interrupted.
  
• Judge Anthony J. Baratta’s minority opinion that affirmed our coalition’s contention that there is no analytical proof that the drywell meets current safety standards, and that those standards must be met as a condition of relicensing.
• The NRC’s attempt to change the basis of Exelon’s current licensing, which stipulates adherence to accepted engineering standards for safety. When an NRC inspector affirmed that the drywell did not meet minimum safety standards for thickness, the NRC tried at the last minute to change its rules, saying that it wasn’t necessary, just preferable, to meet those standards.

The NRC must regulate nuclear power, to guarantee that nuclear power plants are operated safely. Or the NRC should be shut down, and every nuclear power plant as well.

This Letter to the Editor, written by Larry, was published in the Asbury Park Press, Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 (Click Here). The full text is reproduced below.

Nuclear power too dangerous.

Nuclear power is not green or cheap. It is a security nightmare.

When you look at mining, milling and transporting nuclear fuel, nuclear power emits four to five times as much carbon dioxide as wind and solar. The fuel cycle also creates massive amounts of radioactive waste — 100,000 metric tons per plant per year. Thermal pollution from Oyster Creek kills fish, shellfish and amphibians. And radioactive wastes must be isolated from the environment for a long time.

No new nuclear power plants were built in the United States after electricity was deregulated. That’s not because of the Three Mile Island accident or the Chernobyl disaster, and not because of the protests against nuclear power or rational fears of the technology, but because of the time and expense to build new nuclear power plants. When you look at the capital costs of building nuclear plants, and add the costs of insurance, evacuation plans, security systems and government regulation, nuclear power becomes too expensive to compete.

So in 2005, the federal government mandated $125 million in tax breaks for each new nuclear power plant and provided loan guarantees of 80 percent of a plant’s cost, including overruns. Taxpayers pay for those tax breaks and loan guarantees. That does not make it cost-effective; it just shifts the burden.

Nuclear power is a security nightmare. If the Sept. 11 killers had crashed one of the hijacked planes into Oyster Creek rather than the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, much of the Jersey Shore would be like the area around Chernobyl — condemned, abandoned and uninhabitable.

If we were smart, we would move forward quickly on offshore wind, photovoltaic solar, geothermal, ocean current turbines and conservation.

Larry Furman

Where do we go from here? How can we transition from fuel based energy systems to sustainable 21st Century technologies?

Where do we install various systems? How much they cost? How quickly do they pay for themselves? How might the technology evolve? And what are the logistical challenges of nuclear power? How do we manage radioactive waste? What about evacuation plans for the areas near nuclear power plants? A large percentage of the US population lives within 100 miles of the Indian Point reactor - everyone in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx. Everyone in Northern NJ and Westchester. If nuclear power is so great, why then have no new nuclear power plants been built since the early 1980’s? Why are we so upset about Iran’s plans to build a nuclear facility? Why do nuclear plants require tremendous government subsidies?

Sunpower Corp, which trades using the symbol SPWR, makes photovoltaic “modules” that turn sunlight into electricity. These can be small enough to power a calculator and large enough, when linked together, to power homes, stores, warehouses and office buildings. Johnson & Johnson uses solar power at its Cordis facility in Warren, NJ. As does Whole Foods in Princeton, NJ. and Timberland in various factories around the world.

Sunpower, through its Powerlight subsidiary ‘designs, deploys, operates and maintains the largest solar power systems in the world.’ Other publicly traded solar energy companies include Akeena, Evergreen Solar, First Solar, World Water and Power. They compete with BP Solar, a subsidiary of British Petroleum, Kyocera, Nanosolar, Sanyo, Sharp. Home Depot sells BP Solar’s best panels.

Microsoft Corp, which trades using the symbol MSFT, is a software company. It writes computer programs such as Microsoft Windows, Office, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.

The question is not will Sunpower start writing software, but will Sunpower’s stock price, or that of any of their competitors, follow a tragectory like Microsoft’s. What trajectory? A $3 Thousand investment in Microsoft stock at their IPO March 1986, would be worth something like $1 Million today. Each share of stock purchased in 1986 is worth 288 shares today, after splitting 9 times. (Click Here and Here) Because Microsoft, along with Intel, Apple, Sun, Oracle, Compaq, and other companies, changed the way we work, play, learn, and, think. They shifted the paridigm.
Solar panels turn sunlight into electricity without pollution, toxic wastes, radioactive wastes, mercury, greenhouse gases. There is no fuel, so there are no fuel costs, fuel spills, etc. There are no greenhouse gases as there are with fossil fuels and no security ramifications, as with nuclear power.
And Clean Energy costs less. Solar power costs about $7 per watt not counting any tax breaks or government subsidies. Wind is $3 per watt for offshore turbines, less for land based turbines, altho the maintenance costs are higher. Nuclear is hard to price because it relies so heavily on government subisdies. When you factor in the “externalities,” the time required to build, the fuel costs, nuclear power is probably on the order of $20 to $50 per watt.

So as Otis said, ‘Sittin in the mornin’ sun. …’ I can feel the paradigm shifting.

*
In the intrests of disclosure,. I am not a licensed financial advisor and I do not currently work in the financial industry. I do, however, own stock in some of these and other companies.

The March 12 issue of The New Yorker contains an article by Steve Coll, discussing the present risk(s) of nuclear terrorism and the adequacy of the Administration’s responses.

THE UNTHINKABLE: Can the United States be made safe from nuclear terrorism  is an education in the complexity of the issue, and points out, inter alia, the variety of fissile and “dirty” materials, their ubiquity in everyday commercial and industrial enterprises (e.g. denture cleaner, which generates false positive results in government radiation detection equipment).