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The Washington Post chose Earth day to pose the question: Can the world fight global warming without nuclear power? In fact, we can do just that, as Greenpeace’s Energy Revolution scenario has shown. Let’s keep the nuclear reactors on the drawing board; they don’t meltdown there, like they do in real life. Continue reading
Fukushima. Greenpeace activists during the Global Day of action to commemorate the first anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. 03/05/2012
Greenpeace activists in 19 countries took action today to remind their governments that the next Fukushima disaster will be their fault.
The nuclear disaster at Fukushima has shown us once again that nuclear reactors are fundamentally unsafe. That’s why Greenpeace activists are staging flash mobs, hanging banners on prominent buildings, holding events in public squares and at busy intersections and delivering messages to governments. Continue reading
I will never forget the sleepless nights that began for me on March 11, 2011, endless hours organizing the Greenpeace response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
While looking for any piece of information that could give better clues to what was really happening at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, my mind was in Japan. I worried about everyone in the country but of course most of all those immediately affected by the tsunami. And I could not stop thinking about the heroic efforts of plant work-ers who risked their lives and fought against time to avoid the worst-case situation under which we knew even Tokyo would have to evacuate. Continue reading
By: Justin McKeating
One of the many odd qualities of the nuclear industry is its seemingly boundless optimism: “everything’s going to be just fine, folks.”
Apparently, there’s no need to worry about terrorists attacking nuclear reactors. Which is why Greenpeace activists could peacefully walk into two French nuclear power plants – Nogent-sur-Seine and Cruas – this morning without being challenged by any security measures whatsoever should be absolutely no cause for alarm, according to the authorities. The two activists who entered the Cruas plant were able to avoid detection for 14 hours. Our team that entered the Nogent-sur-Seine power plant, just 95 kilometres from Paris, were even able to scale the dome of one of the reactors and paint a pretty picture on it.
By: Ike Teuling, Greenpeace Radiation Expert
While walking through the highly contaminated outskirts of Fukushima City last week, I suddenly realized that this capital of the prefecture is as far from the Fukushima nuclear disaster site as my hometown is from Borssele where the only Dutch nuclear power plant in the Netherlands is located —about 60 km. While people in the 20 km exclusion zone around the Fukushima disaster site have been evacuated, the residents of this densely populated city have already waited nine months for decontamination of their houses, gardens and parks without getting any official government support for relocation, not even for children and pregnant women.
We spent four days in Fukushima City doing a radiation survey in the neighbourhoods of Watari and Onami. People there have been left to cope alone in a highly contaminated environment by both the local and national governments. Our radiation experts found hot spots of up to 37 microSieverts per hour in a garden only a few meters away from a house and an accumulation of radioactivity in drainage systems, puddles and ditches. Overall, the radiation levels in these neighbourhoods are so high that people receive an exposure to radiation just from external sources that is ten times the annual allowed dose. How high their internal exposure is from eating contaminated food and inhaling or ingesting radioactive particles remains unknown, since no government program is keeping track of this.
Parks are the most contaminated areas in Fukushima City. Some are marked with signs: “Due to radioactive contamination, don’t spend more than one hour per day in this park.” Even on sunny days last week, the parks where empty. Mothers are smart enough to not let their children play on the playgrounds in these parks, not even for an hour. Even inside their houses, they have to worry about radiation. We measured the rooms of an elderly lady’s house who is expecting her grandchildren for Christmas. She wanted to know what the safest place was for her grandchildren to sleep.
People in Fukushima City are worried about their health, especially families with children and pregnant women. We walked around with dosimeters and radiation detection equipment and were aware of what we are exposed to and of the risk we were taking. The residents of Fukushima City had one government survey at their house last July, if any at all. Detected hotspots where left unmarked, no instructions were given on how to behave in a radioactive environment. Since then, only 35 of the thousands of houses that need to be decontaminated have been cleaned by the government.
The decontamination done by the local authorities is both uncoordinated and thoroughly inadequate. The subcontractors they are using are badly instructed, risking their own health and spreading the radioactive contamination instead of removing it. We found radioactive run-off water from a decontamination process leaking directly into the environment. And because there is no storage site for radioactive waste from decontamination work, the waste is buried directly on people’s property, sometimes only a few meters away from their houses.
The Japanese government doesn’t know how to deal with the massive contamination caused by the nuclear disaster. Instead of protecting people from radiation, they are downplaying the risks by increasing the allowed radiation levels far above international standards. And professors like Dr. Yamashita, who make statements like ‘If you smile, the radiation will not affect you’ are being employed as official advisors on radiation health risk.
In short, it is clear that the situation in Fukushima is rapidly spinning out of control, and if the national government does not take full responsibility for the protection of its population, the people affected by the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi will continue to suffer for a long time to come.
Ike Teuling is a Greenpeace radiation expert
Photo: Greenpeace radiation monitoring team members Ike Teuling and Daisuke Miyachi check contamination levels in downtown Fukushima city, approximately 60km from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. © Noriko Hayashi / Greenpeace
By: Justin McKeating
The debate on the future nuclear power is back on in earnest in France, and many other countries. That’s thanks to our activists paying surprise visits to two French nuclear power plants this week. The news that they could so easily get through the security around the nuclear plants has taken off, rekindling the debate about the safety of nuclear power right across the world. News of the embarrassment of the French nuclear industry over its weak security system has reached Russia, Japan, Brazil, China and many points in between. Is the nuclear industry and media finally waking up to how vulnerable nuclear reactors are? We hope so.
In an attempt to deflect criticism from his beloved nuclear industry, France’s President Sarkozy called our action “rather irresponsible”. Mr Sarkozy – we would say that security at nuclear reactors that is so weak that people walk in and out as they please is a great deal more irresponsible.
Dominique Miniere, the head of French nuclear reactors for the plant’s owner EDF, tried very hard to put a positive spin on things by saying the Greenpeace teams at the Cruas and Nogent-sur-Seine nuclear plants were caught by security “much faster this time than in the past”. That might be true but our people still managed to evade security at Nogent-sur-Seine for four hours and for a much longer 14 hours at Cruas. If that’s “much faster” we’d hate to think how slow those security guys were before.
No amount of spin from the French government or EDF can hide the fact that our action this week is big news in France and across the world. Nor is this a unique problem, a one-off event or a concern just in France. In 2002, our activists scaled the dome of the now closed Jose Cabrera reactor in Spain, gained access to South Africa’s Koeberg nuclear power plant, and infiltrated the Doel plant in Belgium. In 2003, we entered the UK’s Sizewell B nuclear power plant. In 2005, we visited the Borselle plant in the Netherlands. The following year saw an activist fly his paraplane within 300 metres of the reactors at the Flamanville plant in France. The country’s Belleville plant was Greenpeace’s destination in 2007. We painted a skull on the dome of Germany’s Unterweser reactor in 2009. Then there was Forsmark in Sweden in 2010.
Need we go on? Maybe the nuclear industry should hire Greenpeace as security consultants because whoever’s been responsible for protecting nuclear reactors up until now clearly isn’t earning their money. Nuclear reactors, wherever they are in the world, are vulnerable. They always have been and remain so right now.
French Industry Minister Eric Besson said in response to our latest action this week: “We will have to take measures to ensure it doesn’t happen again”. Emergency meetings are apparently being held. “There will be lessons learned,” says Dominique Miniere. They’ve certainly failed to learn the lessons of previous infiltrations so we can only hope that they will this time. The motives of the next people to walk into a nuclear power might not be as pure as Greenpeace’s. The world is now watching.
Meanwhile, in Texas, the San Antonio city council’s deliberations over building two new reactors has disintegrated into recriminations, resignations and firings over a multi-billion-dollar price jump in projected cost estimates, a furor that could doom reactor construction there as well. And in Vermont, Entergy has threatened to shut its Yankee reactor if the legislature does not approve a complex maneuver that would allow its owners to escape certain financial liabilities.
Throughout the US, while the corporate media hypes a “renaissance” of new nukes, facts on the ground say the opposite is happening. The longer that trend continues, the more likely we are to win a world powered by the Solartopian technologies that really work, including wind, solar, geothermal, sustainable bio-fuels, increased efficiency/conservation, and more.
The Oswego postponement stems from the successful national grassroots campaign sparked by NukeFree.org and others dating to late 2007. When the Bush Administration asked for $50 billion in loan guarantees to build new reactors, a well coordinated campaign rose up, complete with a music video from Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, K’eb Mo and Ben Harper (www.nukefree.org). With help from key Congressional Democrats, a wide range of organizations and individuals rallied to get the $50 billion package out of proposed energy legislation. Grassroots opposition has since beaten the proposed guarantees two more times.
It is as yet unclear what new reactor funding will come from Washington in the near future. There is still an $18.5 billion loan guarantee fund left over from the Bush Era. But the Department of Energy has run into serious political and procedural problems in administering the money. It may soon announce one or more new reactor projects designated to get the money, possibly including one in Georgia, where ratepayers have been put on the line to underwrite construction even if the plant never opens.
Republican proposals for virtually unlimited future loan guarantees are now being targeted for a Climate Bill and other legislation that may or may not make it through Congress in the coming months. Sen. John McCain(R-AZ) and other industry supporters are pushing hard for major federal financing. The Obama Administration has made some pro-nuclear rumblings, but remains elusive in terms of firm commitments.
Because the reactor industry cannot get private financing for new reactors, all the pro-nuke rhetoric in the world will mean nothing without federal subsidies. After 50 years, the industry doesn’t have Wall Street’s backing. Nor can it get private liability insurance in case of a major disaster. And it still lacks a solution for its radioactive waste problem.
Most critically of all, the longer new construction is delayed the less competitive the industry becomes. Cost estimates are literally all over the map, with $7-9 billion for a 1000 megawatt reactor being current used as a benchmark.
But even that is not expected to last. The Oswego project involves a design financed by the French government. This latest setback indicates even they may not be as bullish on reactors as they hype would indicate. As Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service puts it, “Unistar’s postponement is just another indicator that new reactors will not be built unless American taxpayers are forced to take the financial risk.”
Thus as the dust settles from the failures in Copenhagen, the US might look to the conference’s host country. In the 1970s a powerful Green movement stopped the Danes from going nuclear.
Instead, as even the New York Times’s pro-nuclear Thomas Friedman has recently acknowledged, Denmark successfully focussed on wind power. Today the wind industry is one of Denmakr’s top employers, and is a major source of both clean green energy and significant financial profit.
Throughout the world, the cost of renewables is plummeting while reactor prices soar. So if America’s thus-far successful grassroots campaign against massive federal loan guarantees and other nuclear bailouts can continue, we just might find ourselves on a parallel path to a green-powered Earth.
Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.harveywasserman.com, as is HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE US. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace US, and senior editor of www.freepress.org.
earlier this year to talk to Vermonters about nuclear power and the future of energy in their state.)
I had the pleasure of spending the last two weeks with a terrific crew of Greenpeace activists, our GOT students, and volunteers from around Vermont. We organized events in Montpelier, Rutland and Burlington with our One World hot-air balloon. We had state representatives, business leaders, other environmental groups and community members come out to the events to address the crowds. The best quote came from State Representative Paul Poirier who said something like: “I’m no nuclear engineer, just a regular guy, but know that we can’t have Vermont Yankee around any longer.”
The balloon tour highlighted the fact that Vermont doesn’t need nuclear power. We have local renewable companies that could replace the plant’s energy, which would put our money into the hands of our friends and neighbors rather than in Entergy’s pockets. Vermonters are standing up across the state to call for a clean energy future, and we hope you are too.
No nukes in Vermont!
-Jarred
Published on Thursday, June 11, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
By Harvey Wasserman
As the prospective price of new reactors continues to soar, and as the first “new generation” construction projects sink in French and Finish soil, Republicans are introducing a bill to Congress demanding 100 new nuclear reactors in the US within twenty years. It explicitly welcomes “alternatives” such as oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and “clean coal.” Though it endorses some renewables such as solar and wind power, it calls for no cap on carbon emissions.
According to the New York Times, this is the defining GOP alternative to a Democratic energy plan headed for a House vote later this month.
But niggling questions like who will pay for these reactors, who will insure them, where will the fuel come from, where will waste go and who will protect them from terrorists are not on the agenda. Given recent certain-to-prove-optimistic estimates of approximately $10 billion per reactor, the plan envisions a trillion-plus dollar commitment to a newly nuke-centered nation.
With this proposed legislation the GOP makes atomic energy the centerpiece of its strategy to deal with climate change.
Nuclear power requires energy-intensive activities such as uranium mining, milling, fuel enrichment, plus other carbon expenditures for plant construction, waste management and more. Reactors also convert buried uranium ore into huge quantities of heat, much of which becomes hot water and steam emitted into the environment. Reactors in France and elsewhere have been forced to shut because adjacent rivers have been taken to 90 degrees Farenheit by hot water dumped from reactor cooling systems.
None of this troubled GOP hearings this week on the future of atomic energy. There were no answers to how new reactors would be insured. Since 1957 the federal treasury has been the underwriter of last resort for potential reactor disasters. Renewed in the 2005 Bush energy plan, the commitment applies to all new reactors.
So reactors licensed to operate through 2057—as would be virtually certain under the GOP plan—would extend to a full century the atomic industry’s inability to cover its own risks. Neither the Obama Administration nor the GOP has presented detailed plans for dealing with such disasters, or explained how they would be paid for.
Despite the GOP’s endless focus on the terror attacks of 9/11/2001, no significant structural upgrades have been made to protect the currently licensed 104 US reactors from an air attack. The new reactors will be required to demonstrate an ability to resist a jet crash, but testing that requirement remains an open issue.
The ability to fuel this new fleet of reactors remains questionable. Reprocessing used fuel into re-usable Mixed Oxide rods has proven dirty, expensive and dangerous.
The initial experience with building new reactors runs parallel. As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, French-financed construction projects at Flamanville, France, and at Okiluoto in Finland have soared hugely over budget and behind schedule. Much of the economically catastrophic experience endured by utilities and rate payers in building the first generation of reactors in the 1960s-1990s appears to be repeating itself with even bigger deficits. The French government’s front-group Areva, which is building the new plants, has sunk into serious financial and political chaos, with potentially devastating implications for this much-touted “new generation” technology.
Recent radioactive leaks in Vermont and Illinois have underscored bitter disputes over re-licensing the 104 “first generation” US reactors. Some could now operate past the 60-year mark, even though most were originally designed to operate just 30, and all have serious issues ranging from frequent leaks to structural decay, unworkable evacuation plans and much more.
Meanwhile, with the apparent cancellation of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, the industry is no closer to dealing with its radioactive waste than it was 50 years ago.
None of which seems to daunt the industry or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has yet to turn down a proposed re-licensing. Two states—Florida and Georgia—have now passed rate hikes aimed at funding new reactor construction. And Obama’s Department of Energy may soon dole out $18.5 billion in construction loan guarantees put in place by the Bush 2005 Energy Plan. The DOE has identified four prime candidates for the money.
Nonetheless, since 2007 reactor opponents have three times defeated proposals for $50 billion in loan guarantees for new reactor construction. There is no indication from Wall Street and what’s left of the private banking community that without heavy government guarantees, investments in nuclear power plants are at all attractive.
But while billing itself as the party of free enterprise—especially when it comes to health care—the GOP has made itself the unabashed champion of a technology that can’t raise private capital without taxpayer backing, can’t get private insurance, can’t manage its wastes, and shows no sign of offering a meaningful solution to the problem of carbon emissions.
What the nuclear power industry does seem to have, however, is unlimited funding to push its product in the corporate media and Congress. This latest GOP proposal for 100 new nukes may not fly in this House session.
Sadly, Democratic-sponsored legislation is not nuke-free. The situation in Congress remains fluid and unpredictable, often changing from day to day. Various aspects of bills supported by various Democrats include hidden subsidies, disguised loan guarantees, counting nuclear power as “green” in proposed renewable portfolio standards, backdoor handouts and more. Sometimes the boosts are buried in obscure corners of sub-clauses that border on the indecipherable.
But surface they do, again and again. Thus far the anti-nuclear movement has done a remarkable job of blocking the worst of them. Continuing to do that will require eternal vigilance, endless grassroots action and the steadfast belief that in the long run, our species has the will and foresight to somehow avoid radioactive self-extinction.
Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.
Greenpeace.org, Nirs.org, BeyondNuclear.org and nukefree.org are among the websites to consult for further action.