Tell Your Senators to Oppose Dirty Perry! NIRS

Tell Your Senators to Oppose Dirty Perry! NOW is the time. Call and write to your Senator TODAY to VOTE NO to Rick Perry for DOE Secretary!

Tell Your Senators: Please vote NO against Rick Perry for Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary. Keep Nuclear Waste off our Roads, Waterways, Rails—Stop Perry from heading US DOE!

VOTE NO to Rick Perry for Department of Energy Secretary because:

1)  He is a Climate Change Denier

2)  He has strong Conflicts of Interest with nuclear and fossil fuel companies. Perry only recently stepped off the Board of Dakota Access pipeline owners and has a long history of supporting the WCS nuclear dump.

3)  His support for Waste Control Specialists (WCS) nuclear waste company (whose owner, the late Harold Simmons, was one of Perry’s biggest contributors) and his connections to AFCI (another hopeful dump company) could trigger thousands of shipments of intensely radioactive waste on our roads, rails and waterways, through cities and breadbasket farmlands, putting much of the nation at unnecessary risk for decades, without solving the nuclear waste problem. He is likely to support the private companies’ efforts to profit from moving high level waste across the country, exposing communities and travelers, putting the public at unnecessary risk. US taxpayers would be liable while companies friendly to Perry profit.

4)  Perry has shown that special interests weigh more than the well-being of American taxpayers and environmental justice concerns.

Perry's longstanding ties to WCS would present a conflict of interest in his role as Energy Secretary, and would require that recuse himself from involvement in both that project and development of legislation that may benefit WCS or other proposed Texas nuclear waste storage sites. We cannot have a DOE Secretary whose integrity in developing nuclear waste policy and management programs could be so compromised, the independence of whose judgment on matters of such national importance would constantly be in question, or who would have to abstain altogether from major activities of the agency of which he is supposed to be in charge.

Perry would be the father of the largest hazardous shipping campaign ever: thousands of radioactive trucks and railcars traveling through most of the continental US states, and by barge on rivers, ocean and Great Lakes coasts through some of our largest cities to a site that is supposedly temporary. That is bad policy; it is bad planning and I ask you to hold the Department of Energy to a higher standard. Do not support Dirty Perry for Secretary of Energy.

SIGN NOW

via Nuclear Information and Resource Service

3.11 Fifth Anniversary of Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Events and Actions Worldwide

A COLLECTION OF 311 EVENTS AND ACTIONS WORLDWIDE –

March 11 marks five years of ongoing radiation releases to the air and water, five years of mismanagement and lies from Tepco, five years of a news blackout on the effects of Daiichi's radioactive contamination. We decry the damage to the environment, to the children, to the people everywhere whose lives are being changed forever, for the worse. Make your voice heard this anniversary, remember and support the victims of Fukushima, and expose the lies of the nuclear industry.

GO: 3.11 Fifth Anniversary of Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Events and Actions Worldwide

No bliss in this ignorance: the great Fukushima cover-up - The Ecologist

Linda Pentz Gunter

20th February 2016

The Japanese were kept in the dark from the start of the Fukushima disaster about high radiation levels and their dangers to health, writes Linda Pentz Gunter. In order to proclaim the Fukushima area 'safe', the Government increased exposure limits to twenty times the international norm. Soon, many Fukushima refugees will be forced to return home to endure damaging levels of radiation...

read: No bliss in this ignorance: the great Fukushima cover-up - The Ecologist

2016 could be a transformative year | GreenWorld

If 2015 was the year that the ongoing global energy transition away from nuclear power and fossil fuels and toward a clean energy system based on renewables gained public notice, then 2016 naturally should be the year that the transition takes visible and meaningful steps forward.

Two critical steps that occurred in December ensure that the coming year is indeed likely to be that kind of pivotal, transformative period.

The first was, of course, the international COP 21 climate agreement, which–despite its flaws–will cause a global acceleration of the transition. The second factor, here in the U.S., was the five-year extension (and eventual phase-out) of tax credits for solar and wind power deployment. Both will combine to enable 2016, and the years immediately following, to attain milestone after milestone in the development of a nuclear-free, carbon-free energy system.

A third factor, by the way, also limited to the U.S. but related to the ability to achieve the COP 21 agreement, is President Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

But you don’t need to take my word for it; there are plenty of energy experts predicting the same–and also throwing out new ideas for how to make the transition even faster...

more: 2016 could be a transformative year | GreenWorld

Nuclear Energy Dangerous to Your Wallet, Not Only the Environment

The ongoing environmental disaster at Fukushima is a grim enough reminder of the dangers of nuclear power, but nuclear does not make sense economically, either. The entire industry would not exist without massive government subsidies.

Quite an insult: Subsidies prop up an industry that points a dagger at the heart of the communities where ever it operates. The building of nuclear power plants drastically slowed after the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, so it is at a minimum reckless that the latest attempt to resuscitate nuclear power pushes forward heedless of Fukushima’s discharge of radioactive materials into the air, soil and ocean.

There are no definitive statistics on the amount of subsidies enjoyed by nuclear power providers — in part because there so many different types of subsidies — but it amounts to a figure, whether we calculate in dollars, euros or pounds, in the hundreds of billions. Quite a result for an industry whose boosters, at its dawn a half-century ago, declared that it would provide energy “too cheap to meter.”

Taxpayers are not finished footing the bill for the industry, however. There is the matter of disposing radioactive waste (often borne by governments rather than energy companies) and fresh subsidies being granted for new nuclear power plants. None of this is unprecedented — government handouts have the been the industry’s rule from its inception. A paper written by Mark Cooper, a senior economic analyst for the Vermont Law School Institute for Energy and the Environment, notes the lack of economic viability then:

“In the late 1950s the vendors of nuclear reactors knew that their technology was untested and that nuclear safety issues had not been resolved, so they made it clear to policymakers in Washington that they would not build reactors if the Federal government did not shield them from the full liability of accidents.” [page iv]

Nor have the economics of nuclear energy become rational today. A Union of Concerned Scientists paper, Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable Without Subsidies, states...

complete article: Nuclear Energy Dangerous to Your Wallet, Not Only the Environment

Olsen: Nuclear shouldn't be the future of energy | Journal Times

...New nuclear is prohibitively expensive. They are trying to finish two new reactors at Vogtle in Georgia. It will be at least $18 billion. Here is the real cost data from Vogtle. Vogtle will double or triple the cost ratepayers pay if the plant ever starts up, but since they are already billing ratepayers during construction, they are on the hook, even if it doesn't start up...

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...The $18 billion Vogtle plant could be replaced with solar PV for the cost of around $4 billion. Why have so many been blinded by science, the lure of the sexy science of nuclear, which was founded on lies out of the gate, and is even more so when we see the massive costs necessary to make new nuclear even "pretty safe?"

complete: Olsen: Nuclear shouldn't be the future of energy

Nuclear no match for renewables | Opinion & Analysis | BDlive

SA has an immediate crisis in supplying reliable electricity. The government’s curiously oblique solution: eight new nuclear reactors, costing about R1-trillion. The inherent complexity of procurement, financing and construction means no new nuclear power could flow for at least a decade, and then only at prices well above those many customers cannot afford today.

The country’s past two flirtations with modern nuclear power have not gone well. Plans for a home-grown "pebble bed" modular reactor were abandoned in 2010 after 12 years and R7bn was wasted. Now rarely mentioned, it found no customers or investors, but its advocates’ influence lives on. In 2008, the government rejected as "unaffordable" bids to build 3.2GW of conventional nuclear reactors.

Today, its ambition is three times bigger — 9.6GW — and each gigawatt will cost about three times more because real costs rose while the rand lost half its value. So, the total price tag has increased about nine-fold since 2008, while SA’s per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) has not risen a bit. With the national debt approaching junk-bond status, nuclear "affordability" has hardly improved...

more: Nuclear no match for renewables | Opinion & Analysis | BDlive

Wind Power Guru: Nukes Fail to Gain Traction in Monumental Paris Accord

via ECOWATCH
by Harvey Wasserman

Paul Gipe is one of the world’s great Solartopian pioneers. His early work on wind power helped make the industry possible. His website publishes some of the most up-to-date and reliable information on the wind and solar industry. His books form the basic library for the progress of wind energy. His newest book, Wind Energy for the Rest of Us: A Comprehensive Gide to Wind Power and How to Use It, will be available in mid-2016.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Based in Bakersfield, California, Gipe is known throughout the business as a brash, independent straight shooter with an incorruptible vision of a green-powered economy and how to best get there.

So when I interviewed him recently on my Solartopia radio show, I was curious to hear his reactions to the Paris accord, since some time has passed to let the dust settle.

But Gipe’s take on this landmark agreement comes from well outside the mainstream. Gipe is devoted to community-controlled energy and to the integrity of the green technologies that will take us there.

Gipe minces no words about the horrors of nuclear power. And recent reports of a rising death toll of “Nuclear Gypsies” being sacrificed at Fukushima have not made things any better.

But for Gipe, “Paris was a watershed event,” especially with the failure of the nuclear industry to gain real traction there.

Gipe said:

“The world, for the first time, agreed there is a problem with climate change and that we should do something about it. This occurred despite two decades of a sophisticated campaign to downplay and even deny that climate change was occurring.

“Further, several states, regions and provinces agreed for the need to put a price on carbon and numerous cities announced plans to meet 100 percent of their energy needs with renewables.

“There appeared to be a consensus that renewable energy’s time has come and that renewables are the future. Regardless of a massive lobbying effort by the nuclear industry there was a sentiment that nuclear is too little, too late and too expensive.

“Another indication of the success of Paris in drawing attention to climate change and need for action has been the shrill cry of right-wing shills for the fossil-fuel industry calling the event a ‘sham’ because COP 21 didn’t include binding targets. They know what happened in Paris and like cornered beasts are reacting with tooth and claw to slow or stop progress toward our renewable future.

“Of course, Paris could have done much more, but considering the opposition of the most powerful corporations on Earth and the nations that profit from the burning of fossil fuels reaching agreement on the need for action is historic.

“Quickly on the heels of Paris, the U.S. Congress, where the party in power in both chambers publicly denies climate change, voted overwhelmingly to renew and extend the subsidies for solar and wind energy. While the wrong policy, the vote revealed that the party’s rhetoric about its opposition to subsidies and subsidies particularly to renewable energy is simply a charade.”

Gipe concluded though that there’s ample room for skepticism. He said that there’s no doubting which way the future is going. The Koch Brothers with their fossil/nuclear investments have a lot of clout. But time is not on their side. And when the GOP sides with the renewable energy industry, it’s only because there’s sufficient financial clout to drive it there.

“There’s money to be made in renewables and a lot of it as the world moves toward renewable energy,” Gipe said. “Even the Republican party sees that.”

And if the Republican party is lining up even partially around renewables, the end for King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas) has surely drawn near.

Here’s my interview with Gipe:

Harvey Wasserman hosts the Solartopia Green Power & Wellness Show at www.prn.fm. He edits www.nukefree.org and his America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of U.S. History will be published soon.

Wind Power Guru: Nukes Fail to Gain Traction in Monumental Paris Accord

Why the Obama Administration Will Not Admit that #Fukushima #Radiation is Poisoning Americans

Why the Obama Administration Will Not Admit that Fukushima Radiation is Poisoning Americans

Why isn’t GE being held accountable?

By Chris Carrington

Global Research, February 15, 2014

thedailysheeple.com 21 January 2014

> Why the Obama Administration Will Not Admit that Fukushima Radiation is Poisoning Americans | Global Research