NRC, POGO, and Worker Fatigue

The NRC has proposed implementing one of the few POGO recommendations I agree with: reducing hours for security guards at nuclear power plants. I'd like to take this opportunity to draw a distinction between watchdogs and attack groups. We don't like to engage either, since neither tend to know what they're doing, and the NRC's unwillingness to admit anyone to discussions who isn't a member of the good ol' boy network doesn't help, but I submit that there is a difference that we need to be aware of.

We're used to being under attack; there hasn't been a moment in the last 40 years when we weren't. We are used to ignorant arguments coming from groups that are trying to shut down the industry, and accordingly have gotten used to taking any ignorant argument as a threat to shut down the industry. This, I believe, is a mistake.

Greenpeace and NIRS are attack groups. They have campaigns, use words like "shut" and "stop," and have a stated aim of trying to destroy nuclear technology. They cannot be reasoned with; they must be exposed as fools in public, their sources of volunteers and money cut off, and the loons in charge marginalized. We are familiar with them, their message, their strategy, and their tactics.

POGO, on the other hand, suffers from exactly the same problem as the industry and NRC: nuclear exceptionalism. They are a watchdog group; they believe that the NRC and government in general are not doing the best possible job and are trying to expose problems so they can be fixed. We disagree with them a lot, but they're not out to get us. They aren't the problem. Don't attack them in the manner that Greenpeace and NIRS attack the industry.

Joe Six-Pack thinks nuclear power plants pollute, are unsafe, and produce piles of leaking, deadly waste. They want a good reason to think that nuclear power plants don't do any of those things, and we can provide it--if we act graciously and professionally, and not wimpy or suburban, and destroy these urban myths with real information. As I've said before, people are not dumb--they just have other things to worry about. Tell me an auto mechanic can't understand how a nuclear power plant works.
The key is, they can't figure it out on their own. We have to do what every other technology proponent does, and provide information and involvement. Whatever you want to say about how it should be, the public is the boss.

Vogtle PSC Hearing Coming Up

On June 12 at 10 AM in their hearing room at 244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta (via WAND).

As we saw with Shoreham, this is where a lot of decisions get made while we focus on NRC hearings. We really need a power structure analysis on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis if we are to organize effectively in support of new build.

GNEP Environmental Impact Statement Comments

I recently got my hands on an anti-nuclear activist's comment submitted to the Department of Energy on GNEP's environmental impact statement. It serves as an example of a few things to do when writing public comments, as well as some things not to do.

First, don't talk about morals and ethics; talk about the legal and public relations implications of the proposed action. Morals and ethics are nice, but being immoral or unethical doesn't have an immediate negative effect on the decision-makers. Being sued or inciting a riot does, and a comment must make clear that the proposed action is either illegal or will result in negative political consequences.
If the proposed action is legal and you still don't like it, you have two options. If you have enough money, lawyers are extremely creative and can concoct an admissible contention from almost anything, and trials/settlements cost the opponents money even if you lose. If you have no money and a lot of people, get about 1,000-1,500 of them to submit near-identical comments threatening protests and media activity. And above all, be prepared to follow through if they go ahead with the proposed action; you can't be caught bluffing. If you are, that's the end of your credibility.

Do not assume that they have received "expert analyses" and that you only have to second them. Know the most important points of those analyses and echo them as though you didn't know about the expert analyses--it's much more impressive to whatever bureaucrat reads the comment if they think that there's a huge groundswell of opposition for diverse, original reasons instead of three guys and their 1,500 foot soldiers.

Don't ask them to follow the procedure. They either will follow the procedure or won't, and the only thing you can do is threaten negative consequences if they don't (or do, if you don't want them to follow the procedure).

Don't include conspiracy theories. Preferably, don't originate them or subscribe to them, but don't try to analyze people's motives or do a power structure analysis, either. They don't care about that. Again, they care only about negative consequences to them politically, legally, and financially if they proceed. If you don't want them to do whatever they're doing, make it clear that your organization will inflict those negative consequences.

There are more subtle ways to threaten the DOE with legal action than to say "if you proceed with this program, we will be forced to pursue legal action." State what exactly is not legal about what they are proposing--they'll fill in the rather obvious blank if you identify yourself as a member of an organization explicitly formed to oppose the proposal. Likewise with publicity campaigns. This is only credible, however, if a large number of people from that organization write in and identify themselves as such, and it really works when that organization has an ongoing publicity campaign that has reached the decision-makers.
This is also different from the standard protest letter or letter to the editor in that the decision-makers actually receive the letter or a summary and are obligated to at least publish it. As such, speak as a negotiator and use negotiating tactics; this is not a place to do general-public-type PR.
Likewise, don't use personal attacks and don't try to tell them about what they've done. They know what they've done and using personal attacks lessens the probability that they'll accept a face-saving compromise. I'm not advocating for the further wussification of society, just differentiating between the approach needed for PR and the approach needed for negotiation. It is in fact fatal to weasel out, or to suggest solutions that don't involve the agency you're complaining about (like legislation).

Oh, and don't make grammatical and spelling errors, or do anything else that undermines your credibility. Do not feed the 'allegators'.

Anti-Nuclear Net.Activism

Anti-nuclear activists have started circulating an email alert (rather, an alert in the footer of every email they send) asking people to get a (they suggest) WordPress or MySpace blog and start blogging as a way to stop nuclear power. I see some good signs here.

First, a WordPress blog in its externally-hosted form is a technical challenge for people who aren't familiar with servers, and in its free form is not powerful enough to be effective in an actual campaign. You can't even change the HTML code. MySpace, however, is a joke. There's no point trying to use it; once you get past being a joke of a movement, you have to disassemble everything you did and start over on a real platform.
We didn't make that mistake, at least not that badly. Blogger, for all its faults, is extensible. And most importantly, we made our mistakes a while ago and are starting to recover while they dig themselves a hole. They don't know that it's easier to have a tech-savvy organization set up a community that activists can join than to try to make everything work together after six or seven incompatible systems are entrenched. It seems also that anti-nuclear pages are either sophisticated ASP jobs or hacks, with nothing in between; an anti-nuclear activist who is trying to do a good job faces an almost square learning curve with almost no help from their colleagues. They are forced to cut corners and further decrease compatibility (and thus interoperability--which is the whole point).

Second, they honestly think that NEI pays everyone off, and that we're all NEI employees. Wrong. They simply, honestly, and truly do not understand that there is a difference between the industry and the supporters of the technology. That leads them to think we aren't distributed and can be beaten easily by five or six dedicated people.

Third, they concentrate on RSS. Go chase RSS, guys. Nobody uses it. It's useful only as an aggregation tool for people with nothing else to do and when it is converted to an email alert system.

Fourth, they acknowledge that the anti-nuclear movement doesn't do blogging. The first three dedicated, sustained pro-nuclear blogs (NEI, Atomic Insights, and NIOF) started in a short period in 2005. Others came along later; a second wave came along in 2006 (Freedom for Fission, We Support Lee, Energy from Thorium, and ARDT), and a third wave came along in late 2006 to early 2007 (Pebble Bed Reactor, Idaho Samizdat, Left Atomics, Nuclear Australia, NNadir). I like the fact that that number is going up with each wave (and diversifying), and NIOF is working on making it easier for people to get started--and get started in an organization.
I don't see the anti-nuclear activists, who are new to this and learn tech more slowly, getting there any faster than we did. Accordingly, I (conservatively) conclude that the anti-nuclear activists are two years behind us.
We have a window, and we have to do something with it. This little smell of blood shouldn't lead us to believe that they're dead, but should inspire us to work even harder to kick their butts and make sure they don't get up again. We must do this by removing their base of support; using the internet's core competencies (as the UNIX-HATERS Handbook says of computers, "nitpickers with elephantine memories") as a tool (not a strategy) to accelerate the process of organizing college campuses. It is clear that to do that, we need a Nuclear Advocates' Declaration of Principles (or something else similar to the Port Huron Declaration; if nothing else, to put our opinions in writing to immunize us from allegations that we're being bought off), a web-based community platform, and an internal handbook that we can keep out of anti-nuclear activists' hands until they have their own equivalent (i.e., something we can keep close to our chest for two or three years). NIOF is actively working on the second part, after which we'll obviously do the third part, but pro-nuclear activists will need to call a conference to do the first part.

In short: they're a threat, but a foreseen threat. We know what timeline, roughly, they will be operating on. Our application of game theory to proliferation--and their disdain for doing so--helps us. We know exactly what to do to prevent this threat from materializing. We can do it, and I know we will. We must. Too much is at stake, environmentally and on a public health level, for us to not do anything about it, or to fail to do what we know we can do and operate at the high level we know we can operate at.

Get up and do something!

Browns Ferry Update

Anti-nuclear activist Frieda Berryhill has left no turn unstoned in a recently-published conspiracy theory about the Browns Ferry accident in 1975.

She describes the opposition to the Summit reactors, proposed in 1973 and canceled in 1975, for no reason other than the old they-don't-want-them-as-neighbors argument (which makes about as much sense as the identical argument made against racial integration in the 1960s). They were certainly safe (that type of reactor--a High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR)--cannot even melt down), would have produced less waste than the average American reactor (approaching Canadian efficiency), and pose zero proliferation threat. They could even have run off of Hope Creek and Salem's nuclear waste, with some minor processing to change its shape. The "excess capacity" argument doesn't really hold, either, since a lot of that was oil-fired (and becoming rapidly uneconomic with the 1973 Arab oil embargo), you need some excess capacity in case a major plant breaks down, and electricity demand was growing fast enough to quickly eliminate any cushion.

But here's where it gets interesting. She says that the Browns Ferry fire in 1975 was somehow covered up by a conspiracy involving the industry periodical Nucleonics Week (which she incorrectly refers to as "Nuclearonics Week"), the industry's trade association at the time (the Atomic Industrial Forum), and the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, because somebody at DuPont had not heard of the accident (she also gets 55 Crackpot Points for her use of all-caps, but I digress). Now, if that's not a damning charge, I don't know what is.

On top of that, she apparently thinks that Browns Ferry Unit 1's startup hiccups, which happen to any newly-restarted power plant of any type, mean that the unit will be permanently shut down and decommissioned, wasting $1.8 billion but allowing them to get a license renewal (which they got before the restart) and BILK THE TAXPAYER OF BILLIONS (no specifics on how that will happen). Or maybe they'll replace a hose and fix a pump, which is what they did.

"Are you on drugs?"

-Judge Chamberlain Haller, My Cousin Vinny

Sadly, this is representative of anti-nuclear opinion--which unfortunately doesn't get published a whole lot. I have a strong suspicion that we're rebutting arguments that people don't worry a lot about (such as the proliferation potential of PUREX) without covering most people's major concerns and certainly not going on the offensive. For example, most people probably think that there aren't any nuclear power plants any more, that uranium is a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide, and that global warming is caused by human activity per se instead of a physical process that humans are using (carbon combustion). They certainly think that nuclear reactors can explode like atomic bombs. I've said it before, but I think the best answer overall is to explain how a nuclear reactor works in conceptual terms (especially to young people, who basically "get" the engineering design process), so that the urban myths don't get started in the first place. There aren't a whole lot of urban myths about coal burning, because people understand it. They can't design a coal burning power plant, but people have internalized the concept of combustion. And I don't see any reason why somebody who can disassemble and reassemble a Volvo carburetor by memory can't understand the very simple mechanism behind a nuclear reactor. Again, they're not designing it; they don't have a master's degree in it, but they know how it works. I can (and have) explained to a group of 50% Green, 40% Democrat and 10% Republican students what the difference is between a PWR and RBMK, in 20 minutes, without using the word "moderator," such that they knew where I was going half-way through an explanation of Chernobyl's graphite-tipped-control-rods problem. And as those who know me will tell you, I am no master communicator. We just have to abandon our nuclear exceptionalist egos and tell it like it is in ordinary terms.
If we try to make nuclear energy seem impressive and use difficult-to-understand terminology, we're going to leave the door open for people to just make stuff up. But I know we can do better than that. I know we will do better than that.

Public Meetings on Palo Verde

Two are coming up:

1. There will be an observation-only meeting on June 6 from 6:30 PM until the cows come home, at the Saddle Mountain Unified School District Administration Building Board Room, 38201 W. Indian School Road, Tonopah, Arizona, to discuss performance improvements that the NRC wants.

2. On June 7th at 6:30 PM, there will be a town hall meeting in the cafeteria at Ruth Fisher Elementary School (same address) to discuss the plan.

Get out and hellraise!

Link.

Online Petitions

A reminder and update to the recent post about an anti-nuclear petition to start a politically-motivated investigation of the NRC: they're using an online petition. Legislators ignore online petitions, because a bot could easily be programmed to sign it a million times with random names (e.g., Geraldo Lubczynski) and no verification. They pay attention to letters from their constituents, and to a certain extent, written petitions that have been the subject of media campaigns. They pay a lot of attention to petitions to get a referendum on the ballot, in states where this is possible.

Plus, think about it: how is it going to get delivered? Isn't it a lot easier to provide people with an email form and writing tips?

The only conceivable use for an online petition is to "test the waters" about what ideas can find support on the internet. There is little use for such an exercise; any idea can find support on the internet, and the blogosphere in peer-review mode (much as Ruth Sponsler and I did a while back w.r.t campus organizing) is much faster at evaluating soundbites. Blogs combine quick response with thoroughness; webrings and link lists, while they basically create echo chambers, remove much of the requirement for physical meetings to discuss strategy. The disadvantage is that they're public, but their limited readership provides the internet equivalent of a focus group. Online petitions, on the other hand, only provide a yes/no option--and you never hear from the "no" people.

Don't use online petitions; use a letter-writing campaign, or a ballot item, with the internet as an organizing tool (i.e., as a substitute for the phone tree). These facts have been known since about 2000, but the anti-nuclear activists are showing how new they are to net.activism by using online petitions. Let them shoot themselves in the foot.

Working at the State Level

Open thread: ideas for more effectively working on state restrictions.

Anti-Nukes to Monitor Part Failures

According to this email alert, they're looking into a database to keep track of each reactor trip. That doesn't sound like it would be too hard to counter as a pro-nuclear group; a blog would work even better as a way to analyze it.

Guardian Blog on Nuclear Power

Nuclear Policy? No Thanks. Apparently there shouldn't even be a policy about it.

The comment thread is about 85%-90% pro-nuclear. It points out the need to develop an effective rhetoric of opposition to the economics argument (read: nuclear power should be banned because it's expensive) and the need to have support on the Left. We have to get something out of this opportunity and do something with this support, however contingent and/or ephemeral.

Buy Paul Newman

Anti-nuclear activists are orchestrating a boycott over his recent endorsement of nuclear power (and the Indian Point nuclear power plant near New York City in particular). I don't know how much impact this will have, but let's try to offset it anyway.

If the option comes up on any upcoming grocery trips, lean towards Paul Newman.

More at Know_Nukes.

NRC Application Timeline

They've released a timeline for evaluating expected applications; we're hosting it here, plus a list of expected applications here. My FTP connection (not Blogger's, just mine) is down again, so the above links will be changed in a couple of days.

The important part to remember here is that this is reinforcing the anti-nuclear conspiracy theory that the NRC is the one doing the planning for new build. If we put out documents like this without explaining what they're for (who has signed a letter of intent with the regulator), people seriously think that the NRC is building nuclear power plants. Remember, people do not know everything we do and should not be expected to learn it all; they have their own jobs and lives to worry about. Communication is our job.

"Nuclear Waste Per Capita"

I didn't know it was this easy to get press. Maybe we should pour orange juice into a vacuum breaker and get the NRC's response on video, or make an inflatable of a polar bear hugging a containment structure, or something like that.

How to turn a five-minute calculation into a "major, startling new report":

1. Figure out how much nuclear waste was produced by nuclear power plants in each state from publicly-available numbers. Inflate this figure by a factor of 20-30 by ignoring the unused fuel still left in the fuel rods that are in storage.
2. Get population data.
3. Divide.
4. Give it to your state groups to make a hullabaloo, even if the number is all of two pounds.

That's right. The most nuclear waste that anyone has accumulated per capita around the country is 2.15 pounds. That's something to be proud of--how much carbon dioxide has accumulated in the atmosphere from coal burning, per capita, and how much particulate matter is in people's lungs from coal burning, per capita? And how much of that nuclear waste is in the environment?

Zero.

Perversely, this is being used to justify a subsidy for fossil fuels, paid for by the operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. In Anti-Nuke World, climate scientists have it all wrong: carbon dioxide doesn't cause global warming; nuclear power plants do. Sure.

Talk about social responsibility. Yes, nuclear waste is going to be around for a while; a lot longer if we don't reuse the half-used fuel that poses the biggest part of the waste problem. But so are the Pyramids; the Pyramids have no conceivable use to the generations that have had to live alongside them. Like the Pyramids, there's no way for it to magically disperse itself into the environment. Like the Pyramids, it doesn't require any nannying. Like the Pyramids--and unlike chemical toxins from coal burners--it has a finite lifetime. Like the Pyramids, people regard it as magical and not the physical entity that it is.

Let's cite this study in the future. It looks very useful, not just from the data, but from the source.

More from We Support Lee (plus background on the subsidy here).

Link.

Learning from the GE Fuel Fabrication Facility Hearing

There was a public hearing (hat tip: Know_Nukes) on May 15 on a plan to allow GE's CANDU fuel fabrication facility to use 0.9% uranium-235 in its fuel instead of 0.71% (natural levels).

Who cares?

People will care if you make it seem important. Don't pooh-pooh it, but explain in the most down-to-earth and accessible language possible what is physically being done and why, and what the implications are; explain why it is unimportant. Don't expect instant results (depending on the audience) because people have been taught for 60 years that nuclear technology is exempt from the laws of physics, but if we start communicating this point, we might turn some people around, especially young people.
Unfortunately, the GE rep used reassuring PR platitudes ("fluffed it off" in the words of a local resident who was not fooled, should not have been, and shame on GE for trying), and made this non-event seem important. After all, it must involve a real risk if a public hearing is called, right? No--the nuclear industry would call a public hearing to discuss whether they should clip their toenails--but the answer is "yes" for every other industry. The public doesn't expect trivialities at public hearings. The linked article contains several urban myths, at least some of which were probably made up on the spot. They will take months if not years to address, and for what?

This lack of a sense of audience or context misleads the public. Period. Stop it.

ACRS to Meet on June 6-8

It will be held in Room T-2B3 of the NRC headquarters: Two White Flint North, 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland, from 8:30 AM to 7:00 PM on June 6-7 and 8:30 AM to 1:30 PM on June 8th. The topics will include new fire protection rules (Shearon Harris supporters take note).

Contact Sam Duraiswamy at 301-415-7364 if you want to make a statement during the meeting.

Link.

New NIRS Transportation Report

This one is a set of maps showing how YOU WILL BE VICTIMIZED under GNEP, assuming a facility at the Savannah River Site. It's apparently going to come out tomorrow; if we had a PR organization to speak of, maybe we could have done something about it.

Link to email alert.

Davis-Besse Rises Again

FirstEnergy commissioned a report saying that the corrosion ocurred in four months instead of four years; the NRC isn't buying it. I ask why it is necessary to promote Davis-Besse in a way that makes it difficult for a member of the public to draw any other conclusion than "we were two months from a meltdown that would have destroyed Ohio and given all our children cancer." The industry and NRC--who obviously dominate the discussion--have no sense of audience. They're so afraid of being viewed as spinmeisters that they think it's a violation of professional ethics to talk to people.

Davis-Besse is a prime example of the need for proper and full disclosure. Excessive RPV head corrosion is to be avoided because it's expensive to fix; it's not going to result in a threat to public health and safety even if the head fails. Presenting it to the public in raw engineering jargon without explaining it or even how a nuclear power plant works is not honest; it is misleading. Presenting it as a criminal case is even worse; this is one of the few times I agree with the Underground Cabal of Stoners.
I see no trend among either industry or regulators away from this approach.

I guess if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Gish Gallop: What to Do?

First: the Gish Gallop for the unfamiliar.

Second: an example of a Gish Gallop.

"Real Global Warming Solutions Are Being Nuked by the Bush/Cheney Agenda Even if there is very slight chance that the seriousness of global warming has been exaggerated, taking steps to reduce it, is a win win proposition. We can cleanse the
environment, reduce health costs, reduce inflation, ease world tensions, bolster our economy, save Americans trillions of dollars in fuel and electrical costs and put an army of people to work in jobs that cannot be moved offshore. This was reported in “America’s Energy Choices” by the highly credible Union of Concerned Scientists. (Cambridge, Mass.). Most Republicans march in lock step, following the disastrous lead of George W. Bush. Bush wants everlasting war and everlasting radioactivity for us. As a speaker for the UCS I lectured about how renewables are ready right now, fifteen years ago.

W’s s claim that Nuclear power does not pollute the atmosphere and that nuclear power is renewable energy is as false as his other claims. Poisonous radioactive gases from uranium tailings blow across the country. The harm they cause has been suppressed along with the fact that enormous amounts of coal from dirty generators have been burned to make nuclear fuel.

Decades after the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident in the Soviet Union, only 20% of the childrenborn in Belraus are healthy. Ghastly birth defects abound there and beyond. Despite whitewashing, there were thousands of victims from our own Three Mile Island partial meltdown. The routine operation of nuclear plants, allow so-called “safe” emissions of radioactivity. They are not safe. Leaks of Radioactive waste debunk claims about health and safety reliability.

There is a hidden issue of low net energy yield from the nuclear power. Years ago, the General Accounting Office reported that our energy agencies have not issued a single credible analysis of net energy yield. They said that because of unreliability, net energy yield has never been used for energy planning. Unreliability came from dishonesty. A key NRC official was caught giving false sworn testimony.


The Wall Street Journal quoted the late Dr. Carl Sagan when he said that our government has been spending about as much money each year on non-nuclear alternatives to fossil fuel as we spent during one hour of our first war with Iraq.

We have been saddled with irresponsible energy policies.

…Energy efficiency can give us four times more energy than all our nuclear plants at one-twentieth the cost of building and operating them. This is according to the Rocky Mountain Institute (Snowmass, CO), a prestigious energy-consulting firm.
...Our government reviewed the thousands of small and medium size dams built for flood and irrigation control. If available turbines were plugged into them, they would provide about as much energy as eighty percent of our nuclear plants. Reagan and Bush opposed this opportunity.
…Decades ago, the U.S. Army laboratory in Natick Massachusetts made automotive fuel from vegetation. They called it “grassoline”. It was more expensive than the gasoline at that time. Today, it would be a bargain.
...There are thousands of generating stations at small dams, in disrepair. They can be fixed.
...Cogeneration (a conservation method) could yield much of NJ's future energy costs at less than half the cost of nuclear plants, a Princeton study concluded.
...The vast sunny American Southwest can harvest immense amounts of solar energy.
...Solar energy for heat and hot water works.
...If solar cells for electricity were mass-produced, they would be cost competitive with conventional energy. Millions of small mass produced solar cells have been cheaply put in wristwatches and pocket calculators.
...Wind power is effective. We need more wind generators.
...We can make as much super clean hydrogen fuel as we want from solar energy, wind power, or biomass. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel for generating electricity, fueling fuel cells, and powering cars. I spent about three years designing fuel cells. We need a hydrogen economy, rather than the hideous plutonium economy that the Bush wants. BMW produced a fleet of hydrogen-powered cars.
…We should use natural gas as a fuel for cars, trucks and buses. There are fleets of natural gas buses in operation in NYC, NJ, California, China, and other places. They produce less pollution and less greenhouse gases than oil or coal.
…We can make instant solar gas using bio-digesters. There are millions of small bio-digesters in China and India. They put greenery in tanks and let the tanks cook in the sun. This makes methane, a fuel that burns cleaner than coal or oil.
…California adopted a “feebate” bill, which taxed the purchase of gas guzzling cars with a fee that was given as a rebate to fuel-efficient cars. Oil companies killed this bill.
…New Diesel engines are cleaner. The first Diesel engine operated on vegetable oil. Making biodiesel fuel from soy beans is a growing industry.
…The Rocky Mountain Institute calculated that a fuel economy of 150 miles per gallon could be accomplished for hybrid cars. Ford claims one of their developmental cars can do just that.
...Existing hydroelectric facilities can deliver more energy from each gallon of water going through them by increasing efficiency.
...The geothermal resource in this nation has not been fully used. In addition to electrical generators, heat pumps can heat homes. The Canadian Standards Association urged wider use of heat pumps, saying they are effective in the dead of the Canadian winter.
…The list of more energy opportunities, for a better world. is too long to fit
in this article.

The Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Atomic Energy Commission once testified to Congress. He said that nuclear power creates poisons which are a million to a billion times worse than other chemicals. Human error and equipment defects must not be tolerated he insisted. Famous last words!

Energy efficiency and renewable solutions can give us a golden age of environmental and economic benefits. Political leaders (mostly Republicans) have given 300 times more support for dangerous and poisonous energy sources. The latest Bush energy plan continues this tragedy. Change this.

P.S.
The low net energy yield of nuclear power

An independent audit with the power of subpoena by the General Accounting Office using the method developed by Morgan Gurdon Huntington will prove that nuclear power has never delivered what has been claimed. Details are in my book, “Asleep at the Geiger Counter”. Years ago, the GAO reported that our energy agencies have not issued a single credible analysis of net energy yield. They said that because of unreliability, net energy yield has never been used for energy planning. Unreliability came from dishonesty. A key NRC official was caught giving false sworn testimony. Nuclear power is not renewable. The overall efficiency of the nuclear power is arguably less than 4%. Deducing this involves very simple arithmetic using summary data from a key government document. The data, references, and the arithmetic are in my book.

The repeated claim that nuclear power is safe because its poisons are concentrated means that a bomb in this concentration will scatter death and disease far and wide. Nuclear pioneer Dr. John W. Gofman estimated that a bomb could release the radioactivity of 192,000 atom bombs from Barnwell. The transportation of nuclear waste scatters concentrated shipments through our most densely populated areas. One terrorist attack can cause a multi-billion dollar disaster.

Violating the most elementary principles of physics, engineering, and common sense A basic thermodynamic principle (the Carnot principle) is that if you know the temperature of the steam going into a generating turbine, and the temperature of the steam leaving, A simple subtraction of two numbers and division by one number gives the ideal efficiency of a power source. Anyone who claims efficiencies greater than this ideal is a liar. The nuclear industry lies big time about this.

The elementary law of conservation of energy has one of the simplest equations in engineering. Applying this equation means the nuclear industry is satisfied with designing casks carrying high-level nuclear waste for an impact at between ten to 30 miles per hour. These casks travel on super highways, over high bridges, which cross earthquake prone areas.

The poisons from Chernobyl traveled thousands of miles. The poisons from Three Mile Island traveled hundreds of miles. The industry is smugly satisfied with a mere ten-mile evacuation zone, even though evacuation within those ten miles is not practical in many cases.

The industry is satisfied with siting nuclear plants and nuclear facilities near or on top of earthquake faults, and even near volcanoes.

Some of the topmost scientists were persecuted and blackballed when they blew the whistle on bad policy and fraudulent claims.

There are more design flaws and more cases of negligence by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission than a garbage dump dog has fleas.

Outrageous Risk
The industry is afraid to operate nuclear plants without their shield of the Price Anderson Act. This is a federal law that excuses nuclear operators from almost all the damage and cost they can cause. A disaster at Indian Point could easily cause a trillion dollars damage. It would seriously harm people hundreds of miles away. This law abolishes everyone’s property rights in order to protect the property rights of a nuclear utility. If this egregiously unfair law were abolished, all nuclear plants would be shut down. The industry has threatened to do just that every time the renewal of the Act came up for a vote in Congress. No other source of energy requires a Price Anderson Act."

-Link.

Every single contention made in the above is wrong; you'll find a rebuttal using the search box in the upper right corner of the blog home page. But it would take a book to debunk it in one sitting, and they can claim they've won a debate by simply saying these things over and over.

What do we do on a PR level?

More on Indian Point from The Journal News

Well, what is a spent fuel pool?

Most people's experience of "fuel" is gasoline. Thus, the image that comes into most people's heads when you say "spent fuel pool" is somebody draining spent nuclear gasoline from the reactor and pouring it into a spent fuel pool. Unsurprisingly, this image is far enough from the reality of what a spent fuel pool is that the general public does not understand how we can say that a leak from a spent fuel pool is irrelevant.
Spent fuel pools look very much like swimming pools, but with a rack at the bottom. That rack is used to store fuel rods that have already been through the reactor and are awaiting long-term storage, disposal, or the recovery of unused energy. Hence, a spent fuel pool.
The term "spent fuel pool" does not accurately describe what it is. It is more correctly described as an "underwater rack"--so why can't we call it one?
Easy. Because we don't. We always do what we always have done, simply because we always have done it; accordingly, we haven't changed our approach and the industry hasn't changed its products since about 1975. If someone had decided in 1975 that it was a violation of professional ethics to speak languages other than Romanian, nuclear engineers all would have said "OK," learned Romanian, and conducted every meeting, hearing, and public briefing in Romanian. When the public shows up to an NRC hearing and listens to two hours of rapid-fire Romanian, they (a) don't understand anything and (b) start throwing eggs at those onstage.
We can't please the loons. But we can communicate to the public in a way that they can understand; the packaging is independent of the content and there is nothing more ethical than transparency.

More important, I suppose, is "why does the industry insist on calling it a spent fuel pool?"

I agree with the article in that leaks aren't convincing. They're a lot less convincing when we're unwittingly misleading people about what's leaking.

As usual with The Journal News articles, the comments section is more encouraging; the article is a better barometer.

Link.

Upcoming NRC Meetings

1. May 22: Ohio State University South Centers Training Room 160, 1864 Shyville Road in Piketon, Ohio to discuss the licensing of the American Centrifuge Plant. There will be "informal discussions" from 7:00 PM to 7:30 PM, with the meeting from 7:30 to 9:30. Show up if you can and counterbalance the inevitable anti-nuclear activist presence.

2. May 22: NRC headquarters (11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland) in the Commissioners' Hearing Room from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM to discuss limited work authorizations--the NRC's way of sticking their nose into not-too-critical civil engineering and construction work. Show up if you can and counterbalance the NRC's mission creep.

3. May 24: The NRC's inspection results for the Vermont Yankee relicensing will be presented to Entergy at a public meeting at the Latchis Theatre at 50 Main St. in Brattleboro, Vermont from 7:00 PM until the cows come home. There will apparently be a short Q&A session afterward. Show up if you can and counterbalance the NRC's Spanish Inquisition.

4. May 31: The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board is soliciting comments from citizens (note: NOT organizations) on the Oyster Creek relicensing in Room 119 of the Ocean County Administration Building, 101 Hooper Avenue, Toms River, New Jersey. There's a special procedure in this case; to quote the press release:

Persons wishing to make an oral statement who have submitted a timely written request and who are present when their names are called will be given priority over those who have not filed such a request. To be considered timely, a written request to make an oral statement must be mailed, faxed or sent by e-mail so as to be received by 5 p.m. on Friday, May 25, 2007. The request must specify the requestor’s name and the session (afternoon or evening) during which he or she wishes to make an oral statement. Written requests to make an oral statement should be mailed to: Office of the Secretary, Rulemakings and Adjudication Staff, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001; faxed to (301) 415-1101; or e-mailed to: hearingdocket@nrc.gov. Copies of requests should be mailed to: Administrative Law Judge E. Roy Hawkens, c/o: Debra Wolf, Esq., Law Clerk, Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, Mail Stop T-3 F-23, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001; faxed to: (301) 415-5599; or e-mailed to: daw1@nrc.gov.

Remember: you also have to register when you get there.

More from We Support Lee.

Coal Power Restrictions?

John Kerry has introduced a bill to require all new coal burners to have state of the art pollution controls as determined by the head of the EPA.

I'll never forgive him for what he did to the IFR, single-handedly spreading lies about the most successful reactor research and development program anywhere, ever, that was 40 years ahead of its time, but this is something to support.

NNadir is against it because he wants coal banned. Hey, I want coal banned, too; most of us do. Anything to make killing people with coal fumes more expensive is a good thing. If sequestration were required, utilities would run to nukes faster than the winds of a global-warming-enhanced hurricane. And when one of those carbon dioxide reservoirs goes Lake Nyos on an American city, the outrage will be more than the coal industry can smother away. We need every restriction possible on coal, oil, and gas, so that as few new ones are built as possible (given that they will probably be grandfathered into any CO2 regulations).

Now, there are places for combustion. If it's a choice between venting methane (natural gas) to the atmosphere or burning it, burn it--the global warming impact of the combustion products is lower than the methane. And it has been known for 100 years how much energy density in batteries will be required to have a viable electric car; we aren't there yet, so let's get fossil fuels out of places where there are alternatives to them (electricity), make as many things electric as possible, and start developing electric cars (at first, plug-in hybrids). There are problems with plug-in hybrids--mainly political problems with seasonal gasoline blends that can be fixed with a national standard--but they would also benefit most from electricity that doesn't need to be metered. That doesn't mean nuclear electricity is free, but only that it can be paid for by a flat fee (long story short: nuclear power plants are just as expensive to keep shut down as they are to operate; thus, it makes no sense to pay for the amount of electricity that you use instead of for the guarantee of always having a certain amount on hand).

Link.

IPCC Quasi-Endorsement Implications

Late news, but I've been thinking about what the IPCC's "endorsement" of nuclear power means to efforts to organize a pro-nuclear activist movement.

Compared to some early projections of the political fallout, the text was very mild and had next to no effect on public opinion. Few people apparently read the stories about it, and many of those stories (Financial Times, for instance) did not include the nuclear angle: they said that the answer that the IPCC had found was renewables. Friends of the Earth noticed, however--and sent out a press release condemning the IPCC report for this exceedingly mild endorsement of nuclear power. I get the feeling that the general public is thinking something along the lines of "oh, those goofy little eggheads--they don't know that nuclear power causes global warming." Obviously, it doesn't, but the fact that it is apparently being received that way raises some concerns for me.

1. Is that really what people think?
2. Would this have been solved by a prominent pro-nuclear organization that was not connected to the industry and which could have been more pro-active in sending out press releases etc. or is this a signal to change something?

My gut feeling tells me that this means we should change something, but I can't figure out what we're doing wrong. Should we try to force the issue of global warming being caused by a well-understood physical phenomenon instead of the impact of humans per se, hoping that the environmental movement will react and alienate those in the climate science community who have warmed up to allowing them to promote their findings? Is DUPIC worth it any more, given that it's a way to start a debate that apparently already has moved on? Has the debate started yet?

To be perfectly frank, I'm lost. I don't have a clue about where this fits into a general strategy, other than as an amusing little footnote somewhere. In the 70s, we did tend to use these things as amusing little footnotes, and with a tone that made us sound more like bitter right-wingers instead of environmentalists. You can see how far that got us. What do we do with this, and how, and where? Can we do anything with it now, or has its soundbite value passed?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Seldom mentioned is that [nuclear advocate Patrick] Moore is paid to espouse those views on behalf of the industry. Through Greenspirit Strategies, Ltd., a Canadian company Moore chairs, Moore also lobbies and consults with other polluting industries."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

1. Why shouldn't he be paid to say what he was going to say anyway?
2. It's a company because it's a corporation? Public Citizen, Ralph Nader's group, is a corporation too. So are Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, and any other organization that has finances separate from those of its members. "Company" implies he's selling a product to make money instead of trying to help humanity.
3. They're clearly implying that he's corrupt. That's close to being libel, unless they can prove a quid pro quo, which they of course can't.
4. Does "polluting" mean "polluting a society that doesn't want them with their presence?" Ah, might as well; "polluter" in this context means only "somebody we don't like."
5. This is what happens to you when you accept a debate challenge on their terms. Don't do it.

Anti-Nuclear Activists Finally Hear About AEHI

Link. "Targeted" my foot, but anyway...

They used to be so much faster; they used to make the news, not react to it. Now is the time to go on the offensive!