GAIA's GIFTING STONE

How Dangerous is Indian Point?

2007-05-22T00:01:00.000+06:00

Click on the picture, to see a larger version of it.

At the top you will see all the ways you can have an accident. Car crashes, Dam failures, airplane crashes, what have you. The fact they are at the top of the graph, means they happen often. The fact that their line extends to the right, means lots of people are getting hurt.

Now go down to the bottom, and see two lines at the lower left corner. The two are meteor strikes, and nuclear plant accidents. A nuclear plant meltdown is expected every 20,000 years of reactor operation. A big meltdown, that would involve public harm, is expected every ten billion years. That's once each 10,000,000,000 years. You are slightly more likely to be hit by a meteor.

(by the way, asteroid 2004 MN4 is approaching the earth, and is likely to hit on September 21, 2029. It is half a mile across, and may make the human race extinct when it hits.).....Original MN4 Article.....There is one chance in 233 that it will hit. There is one chance in 7,300,000 that Indian Point will have a meltdown. And while 2004 MN4 hurtles toward us, its doing nothing for us at all. Indian Point is running your air conditioners, and wide screen digital HDTV sets, as well as our air traffic control center computers.

Professor Bernard Cohen has compiled various dangers, by how many days of life expectancy they are taking off your life. He adds this up in days of life expectancy, which he calls LLE. Here are the numbers, which he compiled from general statistical tables-what insurance companies use.

LOSS OF LIFE EXPECTANCY (LLE) DUE TO VARIOUS RISKS

Activity or risk* ............ LLE (days)

Living in poverty ............ 3500

Being male (vs. female)............ 2800

Cigarettes (male) ............ 2300

Heart disease* ............ 2100

Being unmarried ............ 2000

Being black (vs. white) ............ 2000

Socioeconomic status low ............ 1500

Working as a coal miner ............ 1100

Cancer* ............ 980

30-lb overweight............ 900

Grade school dropout ............ 800

Sub-optimal medical care* ............ 550

Stroke*............ 520

15-lb overweight ............ 450

All accidents* ............ 400

Vietnam army service ............ 400

Living in Southeast (SC,MS,GA,LA,AL)............ 350

Mining construction (accidents only)............ 320

Alcohol* ............ 230

Motor vehicle accidents ............ 180

Pneumonia, influenza*............ 130

Drug abuse*............ 100

Suicide*............ 95

Homicide*............ 90

Air pollution*............ 80

Occupational accidents............ 74

AIDS*............ 70

Small cars (vs. midsize)............ 60

Married to smoker............ 50

Drowning*............ 40

Speed limit: 65 vs. 55 miles per hour*............ 40

Falls*............ 39

Poison + suffocation + asphyxiation*............ 37

Radon in homes*............ 35

Fire, burns*............ 27

Coffee: 2 cups/day............ 26

Radiation worker, age 18-65............ 25

Firearms*............ 11

Birth control pills............ 5

All electricity nuclear (UCS)*............ 1.5

Peanut butter (1 Tbsp./day)............ 1.1

Hurricanes, tornadoes*............ 1

Airline crashes*............ 1

Dam failures*............ 1

Living near nuclear plant............ 0.4

All electricity nuclear (NRC)*............ 0.04

*Asterisks indicate averages over total U.S. population; others refer to those exposed.

If we compare these risks, we see that having a full nuclear power program in this country would present the same added health risk (UCS estimates in brackets) as a regular smoker indulging in one extra cigarette every 15 years [every 3 months], or as an overweight person increasing her weight by 0.012 [0.8] ounces, or as in raising the U.S. highway speed limit from 55 miles per hour to 55.006 [55.4] miles per hour, and it is 2,000 [30] times less of a danger than switching from midsize to small cars. Note that these figures are not controversial, because I have given not only the estimates of Establishment scientists but also those of the leading nuclear power opposition group in this country, UCS, (Union of Concerned Scientists).

I have been presenting these risk comparisons at every opportunity for several years, but I get the impression that they are interpreted as the opinion of a nuclear advocate. Media reports have said "Dr. Cohen claims . . ." But there is no personal opinion involved here. Deriving these comparisons is simple and straightforward mathematics which no one can question. I have published them in scientific journals, and no scientist has objected to them. I have quoted them in debates with three different UCS leaders and they have never denied them. If anyone has any reason to believe that these comparisons are not valid, they have been awfully quiet about it.

When I started my investigations into the safety of nuclear energy in 1971, I had no preconceived notions and no "axes to grind." I was just trying to understand in my own way what the fuss was all about. Rather early in these efforts, I started to develop these risk comparisons. They convinced me that nuclear power is acceptably safe with lots of room to spare. If I am a nuclear advocate, it is because developing these comparisons has made me so.

To be certain that this all-important bottom line is not missed, let me review it. According to the best estimates of Establishment scientists, having a large nuclear power program in the United States would give the same risk to the average American as a regular smoker indulging in one extra cigarette every 15 years, as an overweight person increasing his or her weight by 0.012 ounces, or as raising the U.S. highway speed limit from 55 to 55.006 miles per hour, and it is 2,000 times less risky than switching from midsize to small cars. If you do not trust establishment scientists and prefer to accept the estimates of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the leading nuclear power opposition group in the United States and scientific advisor to Ralph Nader, then having all U.S. electricity nuclear would give the same risk as a regular smoker smoking one extra cigarette every 3 months, or of an overweight person increasing his weight by 0.8 of an ounce, or of raising the U.S. highway speed limit from 55 to 55.4 miles per hour, and it would still be 30 times less risky than switching from midsize to small cars.

News Blitz Aside, Read the Facts on Indian Point

2007-05-06T15:49:00.000+06:00

Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power

Your typical city dweller doesn’t know just how much coal and uranium he burns each year. On Lake Shore Drive in Chicago—where the numbers are fairly representative of urban America as a whole—the answer is (roughly): four tons and a few ounces. In round numbers, tons of coal generate about half of the typical city’s electric power; ounces of uranium, about 17 percent; natural gas and hydro take care of the rest. New York is a bit different: an apartment dweller on the Upper West Side substitutes two tons of oil (or the equivalent in natural gas) for Chicago’s four tons of coal. The oil-tons get burned at plants like the huge oil/gas unit in Astoria, Queens. The uranium ounces get split at Indian Point in Westchester, 35 miles north of the city, as well as at the Ginna, Fitzpatrick, and Nine Mile Point units upstate, and at additional plants in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New Hampshire.
That’s the stunning thing about nuclear power: tiny quantities of raw material can do so much. A bundle of enriched-uranium fuel-rods that could fit into a two-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen would power the city for a year: furnaces, espresso machines, subways, streetlights, stock tickers, Times Square, everything—even our cars and taxis, if we could conveniently plug them into the grid. True, you don’t want to stack fuel rods in midtown Manhattan; you don’t in fact want to stack them casually on top of one another anywhere. But in suitable reactors, situated, say, 50 miles from the city on a few hundred acres of suitably fortified and well-guarded real estate, two rooms’ worth of fuel could electrify it all.
Think of our solitary New Yorker on the Upper West Side as a 1,400-watt bulb that never sleeps—that’s the national per-capita average demand for electric power from homes, factories, businesses, the lot. Our average citizen burns about twice as bright at 4 PM in August, and a lot dimmer at 4 AM in December; grown-ups burn more than kids, the rich more than the poor; but it all averages out: 14 floor lamps per person, lit round the clock. Convert this same number back into a utility’s supply-side jargon, and a million people need roughly 1.4 “gigs” of power—1.4 gigawatts (GW). Running at peak power, Entergy’s two nuclear units at Indian Point generate just under 2 GW. So just four Indian Points could take care of New York City’s 7-GW round-the-clock average. Six could handle its peak load of about 11.5 GW. And if we had all-electric engines, machines, and heaters out at the receiving end, another ten or so could power all the cars, ovens, furnaces—everything else in the city that oil or gas currently fuels.
For such a nuclear-powered future to arrive, however, we’ll need to get beyond our nuclear-power past. In the now-standard histories, the beginning of the end of nuclear power arrived on March 28, 1979, with the meltdown of the uranium core at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The Chernobyl disaster seven years later drove the final nail into the nuclear coffin. It didn’t matter that the Three Mile Island containment vessel had done its job and prevented any significant release of radioactivity, or that Soviet reactors operated within a system that couldn’t build a safe toaster oven. Uranium was finished.
Three Mile Island came on the heels of the first great energy shock to hit America. On October 19, 1973, King Faisal ordered a 25 percent reduction in Saudi Arabia’s oil shipments to the United States, launching the Arab oil embargo. Oil supplies would tighten and prices would rise from then on, experts predicted. It would take some time, but oil was finished, too.
Five months after Three Mile Island, the nation’s first energy secretary summed up our predicament: “The energy future is bleak,” James R. Schlesinger declared, “and is likely to grow bleaker in the decade ahead. We must rapidly adjust our economics to a condition of chronic stringency in traditional energy supplies.” Fortunately, some argued, the U.S. could manage on less—much less. Smaller, more fuel-efficient cars were gaining favor, and rising gas prices would curb demand. The nation certainly didn’t need any new giant electric power plants—efficiency and the development of renewable sources of power would suffice. “The long-run supply curve for electricity is as flat as the Kansas horizon,” noted one right-thinking energy sage.
In the ensuing decades, however, American oil consumption rose 15 percent and electricity use almost doubled. Many people aren’t happy about it. Protecting our oil-supply lines entangles us with feudal theocracies and the fanatical sects that they spawn. The coal that we burn to generate so much of our electricity pollutes the air and may warm the planet. What to do? All sober and thoughtful energy pundits at the New York Times, Greenpeace, and the Harvard Divinity School agree: the answer to both problems is . . . efficiency and the development of renewable sources of power. Nevertheless, the secretary of energy, his boss (now a Texas oilman, not a Georgia peanut farmer), and the rest of the country should look elsewhere.
The U.S. today consumes about 100 quads—100 quadrillion BTUs—of raw thermal energy per year. We do three basic things with it: generate electricity (about 40 percent of the raw energy consumed), move vehicles (30 percent), and produce heat (30 percent). Oil is the fuel of transportation, of course. We principally use natural gas to supply raw heat, though it’s now making steady inroads into electric power generation. Fueling electric power plants are mainly (in descending order) coal, uranium, natural gas, and rainfall, by way of hydroelectricity.
This sharp segmentation emerged relatively recently, and there’s no reason to think it’s permanent. After all, developing economies use trees and pasture as fuel for heat and transportation, and don’t generate much electricity at all. A century ago, coal was the all-purpose fuel of industrial economies: coal furnaces provided heat, and coal-fired steam engines powered trains, factories, and the early electric power plants. From the 1930s until well into the 1970s, oil fueled not just cars but many electric power plants, too. And by 2020, electricity almost certainly will have become the new cross-cutting “fuel” in both stationary and mobile applications.
That shift is already under way. About 60 percent of the fuel we use today isn’t oil but coal, uranium, natural gas, and gravity—all making electricity. Electricity has met almost all of the growth in U.S. energy demand since the 1980s. About 60 percent of our GDP now comes from industries and services that use electricity as their front-end “fuel”—in 1950, the figure was only 20 percent. The fastest growth sectors of the economy—information technology and telecom, notably—depend entirely on electricity for fuel, almost none of it oil-generated. Electrically powered information technology accounts for some 60 percent of new capital spending.
Electricity is taking over ever more of the thermal sector, too. A microwave oven displaces much of what a gas stove once did in a kitchen. So, too, lasers, magnetic fields, microwaves, and other forms of high-intensity photon power provide more precise, calibrated heating than do conventional ovens in manufacturing and the industrial processing of materials. These electric cookers (broadly defined) are now replacing conventional furnaces, ovens, dryers, and welders to heat air, water, foods, and chemicals, to cure paints and glues, to forge steel, and to weld ships. Over the next two decades, such trends will move another 15 percent or so of our energy economy from conventional thermal to electrically powered processes. And that will shift about 15 percent of our oil-and-gas demand to whatever primary fuels we’ll then be using to generate electricity.
Electricity is also taking over the power train in transportation—not the engine itself, but the system that drives power throughout the car. Running in confined tunnels as they do, subways had to be all-electric from the get-go. More recently, diesel-electric locomotives and many of the monster trucks used in mining have made the transition to electric drive trains. Though the oil-fired combustion engine is still there, it’s now just an onboard electric generator that propels only electrons.
Most significantly, the next couple of decades will see us convert to the hybrid gasoline-and-electric car. A steadily rising fraction of the power produced under the hood of a car already is used to generate electricity: electrical modules are replacing components that belts, gears, pulleys, and shafts once drove. Steering, suspension, brakes, fans, pumps, and valves will eventually go electric; in the end, electricity will drive the wheels, too. Gas prices and environmental mandates have little to do with this changeover. The electric drive train simply delivers better performance, lower cost, and less weight.
The policy implications are enormous. Outfitted with a fully electric power train, most of the car—everything but its prime mover—looks like a giant electrical appliance. This appliance won’t run any great distance on batteries alone, given today’s battery technology. But a substantial battery pack on board will provide surges of power when needed. And that makes possible at least some “refueling” of the car from the electricity grid. As cars get more electric, an infrastructure of battery-recharging stations will grow apace, probably in driveways and parking lots, where most cars spend most of their time.
Once you’ve got the wheels themselves running on electricity, the basic economics strongly favor getting that electricity from the grid if you can. Burning $2-a-gallon gasoline, the power generated by current hybrid-car engines costs about 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. Many utilities, though, sell off-peak power for much less: 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. The nationwide residential price is still only 8.5 cents or so. (Peak rates in Manhattan are higher because of the city’s heavy dependence on oil and gas, but not enough to change the basic arithmetic.) Grid kilowatts are cheaper because cheaper fuels generate them and because utility power plants run a lot more efficiently than car engines.
The gas tank and combustion engine won’t disappear anytime soon, but in the imminent future, grid power will (in effect) begin to top off the tank in between the short trips that account for most driving. All-electric vehicles flopped in the 1990s because batteries can’t store sufficient power for long weekend trips. But plug-in hybrids do have a gasoline tank for the long trips. And the vast majority of the most fuel-hungry trips are under six miles—within the range of the 2 to 5 kWh capacity of the onboard nickel-metal-hydride batteries in hybrids already on the road, and easily within the range of emerging automotive-class lithium batteries. Nationally, some 10 percent of hybrid cars could end up running almost entirely on the grid, as they travel less than six miles per day. Stick an extra 90 pounds—$800 worth—of nickel-metal-hydride batteries in a hybrid, recharge in garages and parking lots, and you can shift roughly 25 percent of a typical driver’s fuel-hungriest miles to the grid. Urban drivers could go long stretches without going near a gas station. The technology for replacing (roughly) one pint of gasoline with one pound of coal or under one ounce of uranium to feed one kilowatt-hour of power to the wheels is now close at hand.
So today we use 40 percent of our fuel to power the plug, and the plug powers 60 percent of GDP. And with the ascent of microwaves, lasers, hybrid wheels, and such, we’re moving to 60 and 80 percent, respectively, soon. And then, in due course, 100/100. We’re turning to electricity as fuel because it can do more, faster, in much less space—indeed, it’s by far the fastest and purest form of power yet tamed for ubiquitous use. Small wonder that demand for it keeps growing.
We’ve been meeting half of that new demand by burning an extra 400 million tons of coal a year, with coal continuing to supply half of our wired power. Natural gas, the fossil fuel grudgingly favored by most environmentalists, has helped meet the new demand, too: it’s back at 16 percent of electricity generated, where it was two decades ago, after dropping sharply for a time. Astonishingly, over this same period, uranium’s share of U.S. electricity has also risen—from 11 percent to its current 20 percent. Part of the explanation is more nuclear power plants. Even though Three Mile Island put an end to the commissioning of new facilities, some already under construction at the time later opened, with the plant count peaking at 112 in 1990. Three Mile Island also impelled plant operators to develop systematic procedures for sharing information and expertise, and plants that used to run seven months per year now run almost eleven. Uranium has thus displaced about eight percentage points of oil, and five points of hydroelectric, in the expanding electricity market.
Renewable fuels, by contrast, made no visible dent in energy supplies, despite the hopes of Greens and the benefits of government-funded research, subsidies, and tax breaks. About a half billion kWh of electricity came from solar power in 2002—roughly 0.013 percent of the U.S. total. Wind power contributed another 0.27 percent. Fossil and nuclear fuels still completely dominate the U.S. energy supply, as in all industrialized economies.
The other great hope of environmentalists, efficiency, did improve over the last couple of decades—very considerably, in fact. Air conditioners, car engines, industrial machines, lightbulbs, refrigerator motors—without exception, all do much more, with much less, than they used to. Yet in aggregate, they burn more fuel, too. Boosting efficiency actually raises consumption, as counterintuitive as that sounds. The more efficient a car, the cheaper the miles; the more efficient a refrigerator, the cheaper the ice; and at the end of the day, we use more efficient technology so much more that total energy consumption goes up, not down.
We’re burning our 40 quads of raw fuel to generate about 3.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year; if the automotive plug-and-play future does unfold on schedule, we’ll need as much as 7 trillion kWh per year by 2025. How should we generate the extra trillions of kilowatt-hours?
With hydrogen, the most optimistic Green visionaries reply—produced by solar cells or windmills. But it’s not possible to take such proposals seriously. New York City consumes so much energy that you’d need, at a minimum, to cover two cities with solar cells to power a single city (see “How Cities Green the Planet,” Winter 2000). No conceivable mix of solar and wind could come close to supplying the trillions of additional kilowatt-hours of power we’ll soon need.
Nuclear power could do it—easily. In all key technical respects, it is the antithesis of solar power. A quad’s worth of solar-powered wood is a huge forest—beautiful to behold, but bulky and heavy. Pound for pound, coal stores about twice as much heat. Oil beats coal by about twice as much again. And an ounce of enriched-uranium fuel equals about 4 tons of coal, or 15 barrels of oil. That’s why minuscule quantities contained in relatively tiny reactors can power a metropolis.
What’s more, North America has vast deposits of uranium ore, and scooping it up is no real challenge. Enrichment accounts for about half of the fuel’s cost, and enrichment technologies keep improving. Proponents of solar and wind power maintain—correctly—that the underlying technologies for these energy sources keep getting cheaper, but so do those that squeeze power out of conventional fuels. The lasers coming out of the same semiconductor fabs that build solar cells could enrich uranium a thousand times more efficiently than the gaseous-diffusion processes currently used.
And we also know this: left to its own devices, the market has not pursued thin, low-energy-density fuels, however cheap, but has instead paid steep premiums for fuels that pack more energy into less weight and space, and for power plants that pump greater power out of smaller engines, furnaces, generators, reactors, and turbines. Until the 1970s, engineering and economic imperatives had been pushing the fuel mix inexorably up the power-density curve, from wood to coal to oil to uranium. And the same held true on the demand side, with consumers steadily shifting toward fuels carrying more power, delivered faster, in less space.
Then King Faisal and Three Mile Island shattered our confidence and convinced regulators, secretaries of energy, and even a president that just about everything that the economists and engineers thought they knew about energy was wrong. So wrong that we had to reverse completely the extraordinarily successful power policies of the past.
New York has certainly felt the effects of that reversal. In 1965, the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) announced plans to build a $75 million nuclear plant in Suffolk County, to come on line by 1973; soon after, it purchased a 455-acre site between Shoreham and Wading River. A bit later, LILCO decided to increase Shoreham’s size and said it wanted to build several other nuclear plants in the area. Public resistance and federal regulators delayed Shoreham’s completion. Then Three Mile Island happened. In the aftermath, regulators required plant operators to devise evacuation plans in coordination with state and local governments. In early 1983, newly elected governor Mario Cuomo and the Suffolk County legislature both declared that no evacuation plan would ever be feasible and safe. That was that. By the time the state fully decommissioned Shoreham in 1994, its price tag had reached $6 billion—and the plant had never started full-power commercial operation. To pay for it all, Long Island electric rates skyrocketed.
What scared many New Yorkers—and thus many politicians—away from nuclear power was what had originally attracted the engineers and the utility economists to it: nuclear facilities use a unique fuel, burned, in its fashion, in relatively tiny reactors, to generate gargantuan amounts of power. Do it all just right, end to end, and you get cheap, abundant power, and King Faisal can’t do a thing about it. But the raw material itself, packing so much power into so little material, is inherently dangerous. Sufficiently bad engineering can result in a Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl. And these days, there’s the fear that poor security might enable terrorists to pull off something even worse.
How worried should we really be in 2005 that accidents or attacks might release and disperse a nuclear power plant’s radioactive fuel? Not very. Our civilian nuclear industry has dramatically improved its procedures and safety-related hardware since 1979. Several thousand reactor-years of statistics since Three Mile Island clearly show that these power plants are extraordinarily reliable in normal operation.
And uranium’s combination of power and super-density makes the fuel less of a terror risk, not more, at least from an engineering standpoint. It’s easy to “overbuild” the protective walls and containment systems of nuclear facilities, since—like the pyramids—the payload they’re built to shield is so small. Protecting skyscrapers is hard; no builder can afford to erect a hundred times more wall than usable space. Guaranteeing the integrity of a jumbo jet’s fuel tanks is impossible; the tanks have to fly. Shielding a nuclear plant’s tiny payload is easy—just erect more steel, pour more concrete, and build tougher perimeters.
In fact, it’s a safety challenge that we have already met. Today’s plants split atoms behind super-thick layers of steel and concrete; future plants would boast thicker protection still. All the numbers, and the strong consensus in the technical community, reinforce the projections made two decades ago: it is extremely unlikely that there will ever be a serious release of nuclear materials from a U.S. reactor.
What about the economic cost of nuclear power? Wind and sun are free, of course. But if the cost of fuel were all that mattered, the day of too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power would now be here—nearer, certainly, than too-cheap-to-meter solar power. Raw fuel accounts for over half the delivered cost of electricity generated in gas-fired turbines, about one-third of coal-fired power, and just a tenth of nuclear electricity. Factor in the cost of capital equipment, and the cheapest electrons come from uranium and coal, not sun and wind. What we pay for at our electric meter is increasingly like what we pay for at fancy restaurants: not the raw calories, but the fine linen, the service, and the chef’s ineffable artistry. In our overall energy accounts, the sophisticated power-conversion hardware matters more every year, and the cost of raw fuel matters less.
This in itself is great news for America. We’re good at large-scale hardware; we build it ourselves and keep building it cheaper. The average price of U.S. electricity fell throughout the twentieth century, and it has kept falling since, except in egregiously mismanaged markets such as California’s.
The cheap, plentiful power does terrific things for labor productivity and overall employment. As Lewis E. Lehrman notes, rising employment strongly correlates with rising supplies of low-cost energy. It takes energy to get the increasingly mobile worker to the increasingly distant workplace, and energy to process materials and power the increasingly advanced machines that shape and assemble those materials.
Most of the world, Europe aside, now recognizes this point. Workers in Asia and India are swiftly gaining access to the powered machines that steadily boosted the productivity of the American factory worker throughout the twentieth century. And the electricity driving those machines comes from power plants designed—and often built—by U.S. vendors. The power is a lot less expensive than ours, though, since it is generated the old-fashioned forget-the-environment way. There is little bother about protecting the river or scrubbing the smoke. China’s answer to the 2-gigawatt Hoover Dam on the Colorado River is the Three Gorges project, an 18-gigawatt dam on the Yangtze River. Combine cheaper supplies of energy with ready access to heavy industrial machines, and it’s hard to see how foreign laborers cannot close the productivity gap that has historically enabled American workers to remain competitive at considerably higher wages. Unless, that is, the United States keeps on pushing the productivity of its own workforce out ahead of its competitors. That—inevitably—means expanding our power supply and keeping it affordable, and deploying even more advanced technologies of powered production. Nuclear power would help keep the twenty-first-century U.S. economy globally competitive.
Greens don’t want to hear it, but nuclear power makes the most environmental sense, too. Nuclear wastes pose no serious engineering problems. Uranium is such an energy-rich fuel that the actual volume of waste is tiny compared with that of other fuels, and is easily converted from its already-stable ceramic form as a fuel into an even more stable glass-like compound, and just as easily deposited in deep geological formations, themselves stable for tens of millions of years. And what has Green antinuclear activism achieved since the seventies? Not the reduction in demand for energy that it had hoped for but a massive increase in the use of coal, which burns less clean than uranium.
Many Greens think that they have a good grip on the likely trajectory of the planet’s climate over the next 100 years. If we keep burning fossil fuels at current rates, their climate models tell them, we’ll face a meltdown on a much larger scale than Chernobyl’s, beginning with the polar ice caps. Saving an extra 400 million tons of coal here and there—roughly the amount of carbon that the United States would have to stop burning to comply with the Kyoto Protocol today—would make quite a difference, we’re told.
But serious Greens must face reality. Short of some convulsion that drastically shrinks the economy, demand for electricity will go on rising. Total U.S. electricity consumption will increase another 20 to 30 percent, at least, over the next ten years. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, moreover, will let the grid go cold—not even if that means burning yet another 400 million more tons of coal. Not even if that means melting the ice caps and putting much of Bangladesh under water. No governor or president wants to be the next Gray Davis, recalled from office when the lights go out.
The power has to come from somewhere. Sun and wind will never come close to supplying it. Earnest though they are, the people who argue otherwise are the folks who brought us 400 million extra tons of coal a year. The one practical technology that could decisively shift U.S. carbon emissions in the near term would displace coal with uranium, since uranium burns emission-free. It’s time even for Greens to embrace the atom.
It must surely be clear by now, too, that the political costs of depending so heavily on oil from the Middle East are just too great. We need to find a way to stop funneling $25 billion a year (or so) of our energy dollars into churning cauldrons of hate and violence. By sharply curtailing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, we would greatly expand the range of feasible political and military options in dealing with the countries that breed the terrorists.
The best thing we can do to decrease the Middle East’s hold on us is to turn off the spigot ourselves. For economic, ecological, and geopolitical reasons, U.S. policymakers ought to promote electrification on the demand side, and nuclear fuel on the supply side, wherever they reasonably can.

Tags Indian Point, American Survival, Global Warming, High Tech Energy

Skewing the Facts for Gannett....

2007-04-26T19:51:00.001+06:00

Yellow Journalism on the Hudson (?)

In an amazingling brassy and overt display of journalistic delinquency, Gannett Journal News reporter Jorge FitzGibbon manages to read a clearly worded Manhattanville poll, where 67 percent of local residents say they have judged IP as posing little or no risk, versus 33 percent wanting it closed, and somehow produce the blatantly deceptive banner headline:

"POLL: PUBLIC WORRIED ABOUT INDIAN POINT"

Are you kidding Mr. Fitzgibbon? I have a copy of the Gannett Code of Journalistic Ethics here on my desk, and I can see at a glance , that you have skewed the facts.

Digging deeper than the headline, we see FitzGibbon intentionally blurring the two opposing sides, coming up with an untrue, unscientific description barely mentioning the pro-nuclear landslide, and claiming deceptively "residents still have worries" Oh yeah, Jorge? Maybe the 33 % on the anti side worry, but the wording of the survey question specifically asks if respondents have concerns, and the 67% majority specifically state that do not have any concerns.

What malicious alchemical formula can you use to turn gold back into non-factual lead, as you have done in taking the facts ....67% for, only 33% against, and coming up with this huge blunder of journalistic arrogance:

"Poll: Public worried" ?

Imagine a 67 to 33 landslide in any election. Let's say--- Obama 67%, Palin 33% in 2012, for instance (or the reverse). Piles of books would be written about the greatest landslide in modern electoral history. Robert F Kennedy would be out of a job---you can't electronically hack a fake 34% discrepancy in Ohio or anywhere else--- the gap is just too large.

And.... add to that 34% gap, the fact that it occurs after seven long years of feverish organizing, letter writing, blogging, and furious emailing, by mock-local groups covertly paid to spread fear by the G.R.A.C.E. foundation, Tamarind foundation, and the antinuke Helene Heilbrunn Lerner foundation, as well as Riverkeeper, Wespac, Ipsec and their duped contributors --- all for naught. Or rather .....all for a very clear minus 34.

Shame, Fitzgibbon.... Shame on you. And shame on Gannett for abetting such malicious unethical "journalism."

Actually journalism is the wrong word. Faux journalism maybe. Agendist Propaganda is coming closer. Maybe it would be more accurate to simply say:

Yellow Journalism.

I expect Mr. FitzGibbon to launch into a huffy retort tomorrow, perhaps telling us how corrupt the good nuns over at Manhattanville have become, shilling for Entergy , and publishing false survey reports. It's no more than I would expect from a Goebbels-on-the-Hudson.

Yes, I kind of like that .....

Goebbels-on-the-Hudson....

has a Gannett-type ring to it!

Kind of FitzGibbon-esqe !!

NEWS...OUT OF IPEC

2007-04-23T01:28:00.001+06:00

Imagine what it might be like to hold in your hand, the viability of the lifestyles of 20 million people. People you will never meet, but people dependent on your conscientious actions 24 hours every day, forever. Our American Civilization itself, riding on your shoulders. There are those who try to imagine this connection irresponsibly, without ever having the actual power delegated to them, and the actual moral obligation. Whatever they may fantasize, is fine, if they can begin to approach that state of connectedness that your invisible energy providers take for granted 24-7-365. Your energy providers, including those at IPEC, are aware of your needs. They know, individually, that their every single action in any day, upholds the health, prosperity and the happiness of some neighbor-- of every neighbor, every second of every day, forever. We think of you all the time.

If all goes well, we hope you will never notice us. We want you to have all the benefit, and none of the concern. We want you to prosper, and forget about the politics. We want your life to flow, uninterrupted, from minute first to minute last, unfettered by activist bantering, celebrity career posturing, political fear mongering, and outright deception on behalf of advertising aimed to raise the fame prospects of faux Jeremiahs, "mock-sure" of impending doom, a doom which somehow never seems to materialize, except on those weeks when a collection campaign is held, to pay for further nonsense worries, for yet one more unsettled year of unfulfilled predictions..

Mankind is not god. No way of living is ordained by almighty fiat as unarguable, perfect, sinless, and totally beneficial. For every home built, some forest is lost. For every mile driven, some CO2 is released.There is not, and cannot ever be "a perfect society". We know that, regrettably, as sure as sunrise, sunset, death & taxes.

So... reams of Jeremiad bluster about imperfection, about doom, about deceit, and human fallibility, are fine insofar as they remain personal revelations of personal angst, but fail utterly in making a world, in exciting, in motivating, in reassuring, and in actually DOING anything at all, for any of us.

More than a Feeling.

As the pop rock anthem of 1970 sang to us, we need more than a feeling, in order to reach full potential, to help each other, and to change reality and the world for the good. The daily efforts of the 1600+ conscientious expert local power-makers working for Entergy at IPEC, do this for you constantly, do it caringly, and do not harrass you, do not ask for strained belief in wild scenarios, or strained requests for moneys never returned, or give empty promises never intended to be kept.

Nor do we frighten you with scenes of what will never be, maliciously deeming it "what might be", when , in fact, it never has happened, and in truth, never will happen. If America is to remain a viable entity, supporting its people, it cannot fear every imaginary mouse dreamt up by overly creative movie writers, or overly creative movie writers falsely calling themselves "watchdogs" or "activists".

A true activist empowers his society as it really is. Thus the working folks at IPEC are the true activists, lighting your nights, powering your schools and hospitals, silently & reliably always present in your life , --not to frighten, warn, change, or dun you for donations, but to allow you be great,... each in your own way.

Malicious destroyers, casting doubt on every viable alternative society might try, are not activists, but rather deluded egomaniacs, hawking "perfection or nothing", and thus, in the way of all things real, ensuring nothingness prevails. Their impossible dreams are not worth our common undoing, to prove some sentence they uttered was more than idle argument. We need IPEC. We want IPEC. IPEC wants us. We get along. We agree. There is no problem.

Let those who invent false problems out of activist arrogance watch the rest of us succeed, bow their heads, and follow.

HELEN CALDICOTT'S SICK "PHILOSOPHY"

2007-04-17T20:15:00.002+06:00

BULIMIA IS NOT THE ANSWER

A note to the backward-looking, anal-obsessive Dr.Helen Caldicott

What we perceive as life, is a thermodynamic process. It has a front end, a reactive gut, and a back end. At the front end it seeks or takes in local energy, in its gut it "uses" the energy, and at the back it releases processed, depleted material. In short it eats, it respirates, and it defecates. Because this is the innate nature of all life, there cannot be any life which leaves no waste. In terms of individual creatures, or individual species, waste can be either innocuous, distasteful, or eventually poisonous, when enough has accumulated. However in planetary terms, there is no place for the concept of waste.The accretion of various processed and/or depleted materials by one species, simply sets the stage for Darwin's evolutionary laws to result in another more parsimonious species that lives on the richly deposited life-resources, once viewed as useless, by the older, obsolete life form making them.

The methane-breathing hordes of the pre-Cambrian left their oxygen "waste" for today's species to savor as the essence of life itself. The guano-producing creatures who gave us our phosphate deposits provided rich fertilizer for our farms. The numberless shelled creatures of long ago have given us our limestone continents, and even more numerous bacteria, our fossil fuels. Coral reefs are an ongoing depositing, visible to our eyes, but typical of the wider pattern of life itself.

In planetary terms, therefore, there can never be an ideal steady state. The planet's essence is not static. Change is paramount. Whatever exists now, is a moment's flicker in an eons-old fire, a fire that consumes the planet eternally, or until the sun burns out and goes cold. A species, like coral, that inhabits, uses, and forever changes the place it inhabits, is not committing a "sin of pollution".The birds or bats who "foul" their islands or their caves with guano are not guilty of malicious "bad housekeeping". Bird species, and bat species need not apologize to Gaia for their guano. In fact it is their gift to Gaia, to make of it a new beginning, which Gaia always has done. By giving back their gift of evolved, changed Gaian essence, these creatures have both embodied Gaia, and done her good work for her. In fact it is their planetary duty to process what they find, and leave it changed. If it were not Gaia's wish that these species exist, they would not have arisen. The evolutionary path trod by their ancestor and precursor species led to their existence, by the self same process they engage in now, it has never changed, and if we think it has been "good" in the past, we are forced to accept the long vision that it is also "good" now, as it happens before our eyes.

So then why do many among us view the "man-guano" we produce as evil? Why, uniquely among all creatures that ever existed, or ever could exist, why must homo sapiens sapiens leave exactly zero evidence of ever having lived as a Gaian creation, breathing in, but not breathing out, eating but never defecating, living, but never leaving any gift behind for future species? As a nest-builder, mankind leaves his version of a coral reef in his infrastructure, his cities, his dams, his huge garbage middens, sources of great archaeological richness. Is the coral itself now to dismantle each reef, at the end of each creature's tiny life, to leave the ocean "just as they found it"? ( What might be an efficient policy for a public hiking trail can be a monstrous crime, when applied to humanity as a whole).

It is a delusion. It is a futile wish, a desire for false one-ended perfection, an effort to assuage a self-invented guilt by penitent abstention, self-denial, species-denial, history-denial, and finally life-denial. It is born in an ignorance of just what living species are, and thus what they are constrained to do. It is an imaginary delusion that mankind is a god, and therefore not subject to the eternal scientific, thermodynamic , and Gaian rules that determine planetary evolution. At its lowest and most embarrassing level, it is a simple wish to not have any anus. Were mankind changeable into the "perfected" creature many greenists propose as our ethical next step, it would be a creature that would simply never leave any waste. We would breathe in oxygen, but never breathe out CO2.... We might eat food (Vegan, as they would advise us).... but we would use it entirely, and thus never emit any urine, feces, buildings, or other lasting evidence of having processed the Gaian surround. It's a crock.

In a sustainability framework, this new anus-free human race would be ideal. Free of the guilt of "fouling" our planet, we could simply grow less in numbers on a continual basis, until we were rightly seen once again as food for other species, who would then eat us, and deposit us as THEIR waste, in the end.

So-- sustainability,... far from being a high moral concept, a way to successfully find our "true station" on the planet, is none of these things, but in fact is an ill-conceived self-mutilation. Stasis is not only an impossibility in a living thermodynamic surround, to seek it eventually stunts the expansive impulse describing the host creature as vital, current, and processing on behalf of the planet, and twists current existence into a refusal to process on behalf of Gaia, a delinquent posture of false altruism, never giving back, and thus interrupting evolution itself, in a megalomanic desire to preserve humankind's flickering instant as an eternal "sustainable" set- piece, and the races to come after be damned.....

Sustainability is therefore a monstrous hubris, born of self-deification, and over-mentalization. In point of fact there is a single sustainable condition, well known to all. That condition is death. By pathological mentalization, some young women imagine their bodies to need constant reduction, and so they abstain from food, or purge when they do eat, in an effort to achieve an unreachable, delusive "perfect" state, a state that in the end, untreated, will very certainly turn out to be their own death. In exactly analogous fashion, "Sustainability" is preached as an end to the very techniques that have led to mankind's current flourishing condition, a state of great health and vitality the world over, overrunning new habitats at every turn , an obviously successful adaptive episode, processing the planet's heritage fully and joyously, urging us instead to take up new, less fruitful, less expansive, less responsive, more isolating strategies---- for what purpose? That the planet may be denied our existence as who we truly are, as who the planet itself has evolved us to be, and be given a wan, mentalized, mutilated, bulimic ideal in its stead?

It stems from the bipolar nature of human thinking. In ancient languages, the words for up, & down, or for hot & cold are the same word. Only their use denotes which of the paired concepts is meant each time it is spoken. Thus we dream in opposites, always opposing. Since we seem successful, and happiness is reachable now for billions, unhappiness must also exist, in exactly equal measure. Maybe it does, or maybe it does not. Reality is not the issue. Perception of "balance" in the human mind is the great quest, and in this mentalization, greenists seek what is unfindable. They seek balance in an unbalanced , dynamic, evolving reality, and it is not to be found. In fact, the only true "balanced" condition vis-a-vis life, is the absence of life, either non-existence, or death. That a mentalization seeks balance and finds death, is a great human conundrum, dealt with in differing ways by Buddha, Christ, and the pagans. Buddha urges each to seek his own mental death, Christ invites us to worship his proxy death, and the pagans simply kill each other for the honor and the blood thrill.

Thus sustainability, as a philosophy, mines the same human quirk as Buddhism, much in vogue in the West, and infects media with invitations to mass bulimic purgings on all sides. The West, rejecting its worn-out Christianity, heartily embraces its new crypto-buddhist task, and purges en-masse, still forced to attain great individual freedom & wealth, but guilt-ridden about it unless it is bought off by some visible self-mutilation, be it a piercing, declasse clothes, or the refusal to eat meat. These mutilations must occur under the gaze of the less fortunate, to have best emotional effect. As an internal reactive mentalization, it can be viewed as a superstition, or a comforting delusion. Since it works against the very success tactics used by 99% of the human race, it is false, and if pursued relentlessly, it is evil. Muslims correctly regard it as an end-stage pathology, a sin, and thus a need for conversion to Islam.

Thus those who tell us coal use emits CO2, and nuclear power results in spent fuel are spouting a banality, as if it were big news, simply for the way it makes them feel. Forgetting to look forward, where our destiny lies, they turn back, to decry our own back-end, our waste-depositing apparatus, and, focused tightly on the anus-of-mankind to the exclusion of all else, they catalog the droppings, with great and obsessive fascination, urging the entire species to fear their own leavings, never realizing that the race, and the planet, are done with it, and need to move on, despite it.

This article proposes no new strategy to move forward, except that full acceptance of all aspects of human endeavor will be required, barring nothing, in order to fully process our Gaian surround,
and that looking back has been taught to us from ancient times as a mistake, one that turned Lot's wife to a pillar of salt.

tags: Indian Point, nuclear, helen caldicott, bulimia is not the answer

TO FEAR, OR NOT TO FEAR..(?)

2007-04-14T23:01:00.001+06:00

What kind of danger surrounds us here, in Westchester, in our ordinary lives?

As I pumped gas yesterday, I turned my face away to avoid the stink, and inadvertently glanced up at the posted message stating that gasoline fumes cause cancer, ingestion of gasoline is fatal, touching of gasoline has caused cancer in lab animals, gasoline is dangerous, highly flammable, and may ignite from static sparks, cell phone transmissions, or radio playing, or the ignition of the car you are pumping it into, and that it is oxygenated to reduce its potent greenhouse gasses, and I realized that right there, at the pump, with that scent still curling my nostrils, and nauseating me, and the excess dripping off the nozzle onto both the car & the sidewalk, that I was casually standing next to a dangerous machine (the gas pump) connected underground to hundreds of thousands of gallons of explosive chemicals, capable of exploding with such force and heat as to end my life immediately in the most horrible way, and the lives of all those around me on route 6 in Cortlandt.

I got in the car, and drove away. I did not call the Journal News. I did not write letters to Congresspeople complaining that I am forced to definitely risk my health, and possibly risk my life, and certainly offend my nose, lungs, and feelings of wellbeing in a direct, intimate highly personal way, with the stink staying on my hands for an hour afterwards, and possibly inducing a cancerous DNA change in one or two of the skin cells on my hands at least, and maybe on the lining of my nostrils, too.

I made no mention of the fact that the gasoline was purveyed by an untended, unguarded robot pump, capable of being misused in dozens of malicious ways, and I recalled the tragic night club fires started by disgruntled boyfriends in just that way, at least half a dozen times in recent memory.

I did not complain to authorities that the uneducated truck driver carting this noxious and highly deadly cargo was completely unsupervised, probably a low paid disgruntled man, possibly subject to odd notions of revenge against society for his lousy job, with its stinks and dangers, and lack of status.

I don't know if Phil Musegaas drives a car, or pumps his own gas, but if he DOES........ I want to know why he remains so taciturn about his daily encounter with cancer, nausea, & explosions, and I want to know why he continues to use a dangerous tankful of the stuff directly beneath his rump each day as he barrels along at 80 MPH, tempting fate, with nary a concern for who might be protecting him, and the 100 million others who come in direct mano-a-mano contact
with a noxious and death-causing substance, and then, after risking his health & his life that way, a couple of times a day, for a lifetime, he thinks he needs to go to NRC meetings, to figure out who is protecting him from his electric company,
all the while blithely ignoring the highly trained, psychologically screened, drug-and-alcohol-tested & highly dedicated professionals who ARE protecting him 24 hours aday 365 days a year, very unlike the careless 18 year old who takes his cash at the gas station, and maybe leaves his gascap off, and he doesn't give a hoot.

It's a striking comparison, and it's factually and logically true. It's not some strained spin. This guy is not behaving consistently. Actually I know why, and now I'm going to tell you why.

People get promoted. They get hustled. To gain the attention of a passionate in-crowd, it grants them romance, too. You have to be "caring" to make friends these days. People want to be responsible, to make a difference. They look for a way to help, but maybe joining the Volunteer Fire Department is too strenuous, too physical for them.

So they search around in a more armchair space,
in computer space maybe,
and get hustled by waiting sharks.

Being mere vicarious participants, which means they don't really see or know anything other than what they are told, they are put in a position of somebody "helping" them find out what truth is.

In "Truth-Seeking Space", ...
I've found "spiritual masters" who channel 10,000 year old angels via crystal pyramids on their earlobes asking me to join up, and give them my bank accounts.

I've found people who "know" the Air Force is using huge patterns of jet contrails to steer radio waves from the HAARP radar site in Alaska to areas that secret USA black operations wants to have a drought so Dick Cheney can conquer the world. (check out the Jeff Rense site).

I've found people who "know" that George Bush senior, in cahoots with Nixon and the CIA, killed JFK, and RFK, and MLK, and continue to take out witnesses to this day.

AND.....

I've found Blogsites and pamphleteers, who have consistently over-exaggerated everything nuclear for 25 years, because they've made a career out of misleading folks on the issue, actually becoming (without any degree, training or experience) supposed "experts".

Also.... there are the nice Green Careers available to enviro-interns. Like Lisa Van Suntum, and Phil Musegaas (or even John Hall). To work, you have to either believe, or pretend to believe, a whole lot of exaggerated concern issues,
issues marked "PC" on your grant foundation's list.

And THAT's why Mr. Musegaas fears his lightbulbs, but not his gastank.

Alice Slater, his Paymistress at G.R.A.C.E. foundation,
told him to.

Nuclear Georeactor

2007-04-01T21:23:00.002+06:00

For those who have not yet learned of the oceanic research leading to the discovery of a large uranium reactor in the earth's core, here is a little search info to get you started

Enjoy!

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0437778100v1

vast uranium field serves as natural reactor
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, November 29, 2004

Researchers are preparing to prove the discoveries of San Diego geologist, J. Marvin Herndon, who has found a huge, natural nuclear reactor or "georeactor" -- a vast deposit of uranium several miles wide -- at Earth's core, thousands of miles beneath our feet. Herndon and many others believe it explains otherwise puzzling phenomena of planetary science, such as fluctuations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field. "Herndon's idea about (a reactor) located at the center of the Earth, has opened a new era in planetary physics," said four Russian scientists at Moscow's Institute for Nuclear Research and Kurchatov Institute in a Jan. 28 paper published online.
It might sound bizarre, the very idea of a "natural" nuclear reactor -- a geological version of commercial nuclear power plants such as Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s Diablo Canyon plant near San Luis Obispo. The reactor at the Earth's core is just a much bigger and deeper version of an extinct natural nuclear reactor that scientists discovered in a uranium mine in Gabon, Africa, in 1972.
The Gabon reactor consists of geological deposits of uranium that, being radioactive, naturally emit subatomic particles called neutrons. These neutrons split the nuclei in adjacent uranium atoms, causing them to emit more neutrons and, thus, to split even more uranium atoms -- in effect, it's a slow-speed chain reaction. Research in the 1970s revealed that the Gabon reactor operated intermittently for a few million years about 2 billion years ago.
Scientists have long known the planet's core is divided into a solid and liquid part composed largely of iron, the liquid circulation of which powers Earth's magnetic field. They have not thought of the core as a repository for uranium, because uranium was not understood until 1945. Although the inevitability of uranium in the core was proposed in 1939 by scientist Walter Elsasser, on the basis that it is the heaviest naturally occurring element, so it would migrate to the core via gravity.
Herndon has demonstrated how a uranium georeactor in Earth's core explains reality better than older scientific ideas, by providing more convincing ways to:
-- Explain the ratios of helium isotopes emitted from volcanoes in Iceland and Hawaii. Those ratios are consistent with the ratios of helium isotopes emitted by a nuclear reactor.
-- Explain why planets such as Jupiter emit far more heat than they absorb from the sun. Herndon thinks they, too, have natural nuclear reactors at their cores. (Because heat is continually generated by the decay of radioactive elements in Earth's crust and mantle -- the regions above the core -- scientists are uncertain whether Earth emits more heat than it receives from the sun.)
-- Explain variations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field, which fluctuates over time. Herndon has shown that in the core, the georeactor drives the motions of the liquid iron that creates the magnetic field. But the georeactor varies in activity levels over time. Those activity variations, he believes, might explain intensity variations in Earth's magnetic field.
Now, Rob de Meijer and associates at the Nuclear Physics Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands, are planning to demonstrate Herndon's proposals. They're drawing blueprints for a large device that could detect ghostly particles called antineutrinos that have escaped from Earth's core. When put into operation, it will capture antineutrinos that would fly through the roughly 4,000 miles of solid rock and emerge at the Earth's surface.
The European scientists have proposed drilling a shaft more than 1,000 feet deep into the island of Curacao in the Caribbean. They hope to lower into the shaft devices called photomultipliers, which could detect particles from the hypothetical deep-Earth georeactor.
The estimated cost: $80 million. In an e-mail to The Chronicle, de Meijer said he is seeking funding from the Dutch government and industrial consortiums. He and his team plan to visit Curacao in January to take the geological samples needed to design the subterranean antineutrino "antenna," as they call it.
Curacao is a good location for the antineutrino detector because "the island's rocks have relatively few natural radionuclides that could mask the (antineutrino) signal from the Earth's core," the journal Physics World noted in September. The detector could be confused by antineutrinos emitted by commercial nuclear reactors, but Curacao is far enough from the southeastern United States that reactors in Florida won't affect it.
"Dr. Herndon is a brilliant and original thinker. I agree with his proposal" said geoscientist David Deming of the University of Oklahoma.
"The problem with most scientists working today is that they have no knowledge of the history of science," Deming adds. "As late as 1955, continental drift was regarded as the equivalent of alien abductions, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. By 1970, continental drift was an accepted part of the new theory of plate tectonics."
Richard Muller, a noted physicist and author at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. Since the 1970s, Muller has done pioneering research in diverse fields, including cosmology and planetary sciences.
"Herndon's discovery is a very positive contribution to deep Earth science. He raises issues that are worth exploring at some length. " Muller adds. "I consider his work to be 'out of the box' thinking, and as such, it is valuable as a step forward in our understanding of reality."
On a side note, in case you're wondering: Unlike the planet-busting reactor of Superman lore, neither the Gabon reactor nor Herndon's hypothetical deep-Earth reactors could explode like atomic bombs. A-bombs require highly concentrated amounts of fissionable materials that are explosively compressed together in a fraction of a second -- far faster than the snail's-pace processes that would be characteristic of the natural reactors.
Herndon received his bachelor's degree in physics at UC San Diego in 1970. He studied nuclear chemistry and meteorites in graduate school at Texas A&M, where he received his doctoral degree for a thesis on meteorites. Operating as an independent scientist, over the years, he has published papers in prestigious journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. His main allies are non-Americans, like the de Meijer team. On Dec. 16, Herndon is scheduled to deliver the prestigious annual "Christmas Lecture" at the European Commission's Institute for Transuranium Elements in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is felt that the huge antinuclear bias in American society is preventing other U.S. academics from getting on board, as they might lose tenure positions or funding by bucking the strong academic antinuke culture on this issue. Had his two sons -- now physicians -- planned to become scientists, he says, "I would have steered them away from it because you can't make a living and do legitimate science; you have to 'howl with the wolves' or you don't survive. This is a sad testament to our times. There's something very wrong in American science."
Herndon’s proposal
According to traditional theory, the core of Earth consists of iron. The SanDiego scientist J. Marvin Herndon has argued that a large deposit of uranium also exists in the core, where it powers a natural nuclear reactor or “georeactor.” Herndon believes the nuclear process is responsible for variations in the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field.
During the radioactive decays, the georeactor releases ghostly particles called antineutrinos, which fly through thousands of miles of solid rock to Earth’s surface. Scientists will test Herndon’s georeactor by using special instruments to detect the antineutrinos as they pass through the outer crust.
Sources: nuclearplanet.com; www.ansto.gov.au/edu/about/about_neutron.htm;
Other scientists have expanded Herndon's proposal to include Thorium and Potassium.
nasa
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/29/MNGPIA17BL45.DTL

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000B2C71-BCF0-1C71-9EB7809EC588F2D7
Why is the earth's core so hot? And how do scientists measure its temperature?

Jeff Atwell
Mount Vernon, Ohio

Quentin Williams, associate professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz offers this explanation:
There are three main sources of heat in the deep earth: (1) heat from when the planet formed and accreted, which has not yet been lost; (2) frictional heating, caused by denser core material sinking to the center of the planet; and (3) heat from the decay of radioactive elements.
It takes a rather long time for heat to move out of the earth. This occurs through both "convective" transport of heat within the earth's liquid outer core and solid mantle and slower "conductive" transport of heat through nonconvecting boundary layers, such as the earth's plates at the surface. As a result, much of the planet's primordial heat, from when the earth first accreted and developed its core, has been retained.
The amount of heat that can arise through simple accretionary processes, bringing small bodies together to form the proto-earth, is large: on the order of 10,000 kelvins (about 18,000 degrees Farhenheit). The crucial issue is how much of that energy was deposited into the growing earth and how much was reradiated into space. Indeed, the currently accepted idea for how the moon was formed involves the impact or accretion of a Mars-size object with or by the proto-earth. When two objects of this size collide, large amounts of heat are generated, of which quite a lot is retained. This single episode could have largely melted the outermost several thousand kilometers of the planet.
Additionally, descent of the dense iron-rich material that makes up the core of the planet to the center would produce heating on the order of 2,000 kelvins (about 3,000 degrees F). The magnitude of the third main source of heat--radioactive heating--is large, but quantitatively uncertain. The precise abundances of radioactive elements (primarily potassium, uranium and thorium) are is poorly known in the deep earth.
In sum, there was no shortage of heat in the early earth, and the planet's inability to cool off quickly results in the continued high temperatures of the Earth's interior. In effect, not only do the earth's plates act as a blanket on the interior, but not even convective heat transport in the solid mantle provides a particularly efficient mechanism for heat loss. The planet does lose some heat through the processes that drive plate tectonics, especially at mid-ocean ridges. For comparison, smaller bodies such as Mars and the Moon show little evidence for recent tectonic activity or volcanism.
We derive our primary estimate of the temperature of the deep earth from the melting behavior of iron at ultrahigh pressures. We know that the earth's core depths from 2,886 kilometers to the center at 6,371 kilometers (1,794 to 3,960 miles), is predominantly iron, with some contaminants. How? The speed of sound through the core (as measured from the velocity at which seismic waves travel across it) and the density of the core are quite similar to those seen in of iron at high pressures and temperatures, as measured in the laboratory. Iron is the only element that closely matches the seismic properties of the earth's core and is also sufficiently abundant present in sufficient abundance in the universe to make up the approximately 35 percent of the mass of the planet present in the core.
The earth's core is divided into two separate regions: the liquid outer core and the solid inner core, with the transition between the two lying at a depth of 5,156 kilometers (3,204 miles). Therefore, If we can measure the melting temperature of iron at the extreme pressure of the boundary between the inner and outer cores, then this lab temperature should reasonably closely approximate the real temperature at this liquid-solid interface. Scientists in mineral physics laboratories use lasers and high-pressure devices called diamond-anvil cells to re-create these hellish pressures and temperatures as closely as possible.

http://www.physlink.com/News/121103PotassiumCore.cfm

Radioactive material may be primary heat source in Earth's core

Radioactive potassium, common enough on Earth to make potassium-rich bananas one of the "hottest" foods around, appears also to be a substantial source of heat in the Earth's core, according to recent experiments by University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists.
Radioactive potassium, uranium and thorium are thought to be the three main sources of heat in the Earth's interior, aside from that generated by the formation of the planet. Together, the heat keeps the mantle actively churning and the core generating a protective magnetic field.
But geophysicists have found much less potassium in the Earth's crust and mantle than would be expected based on the composition of rocky meteors that supposedly formed the Earth. If, as some have proposed, the missing potassium resides in the Earth's iron core, how did an element as light as potassium get there, especially since iron and potassium don't mix?
Kanani Lee, who recently earned her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science Raymond Jeanloz have discovered a possible answer. They've shown that at the high pressures and temperatures in the Earth's interior, potassium can form an alloy with iron never before observed. During the planet's formation, this potassium-iron alloy could have sunk to the core, depleting potassium in the overlying mantle and crust and providing a radioactive potassium heat source in addition to that supplied by uranium and thorium in the core.
Lee created the new alloy by squeezing iron and potassium between the tips of two diamonds to temperatures and pressures characteristic of 600-700 kilometers below the surface - 2,500 degrees Celsius and nearly 4 million pounds per square inch, or a quarter of a million times atmospheric pressure.
"Our new findings indicate that the core may contain as much as 1,200 parts per million potassium -just over one tenth of one percent," Lee said. "This amount may seem small, and is comparable to the concentration of radioactive potassium naturally present in bananas. Combined over the entire mass of the Earth's core, however, it can be enough to provide one-fifth of the heat given off by the Earth."
Lee and Jeanloz will report their findings on Dec. 10, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, and in an article accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.
"With one experiment, Lee and Jeanloz demonstrated that potassium may be an important heat source for the geodynamo, provided a way out of some troublesome aspects of the core's thermal evolution, and further demonstrated that modern computational mineral physics not only complements experimental work, but that it can provide guidance to fruitful experimental explorations," said Mark Bukowinski, professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, who predicted the unusual alloy in the mid-1970s.
Geophysicist Bruce Buffett of the University of Chicago cautions that more experiments need to be done to show that iron can actually pull potassium away from the silicate rocks that dominate in the Earth's mantle.
"They proved it would be possible to dissolve potassium into liquid iron," Buffet said. "Modelers need heat, so this is one source, because the radiogenic isotope of potassium can produce heat and that can help power convection in the core and drive the magnetic field. They proved it could go in. What's important is how much is pulled out of the silicate. There's still work to be done "
If a significant amount of potassium does reside in the Earth's core, this would clear up a lingering question - why the ratio of potassium to uranium in stony meteorites (chondrites), which presumably coalesced to form the Earth, is eight times greater than the observed ratio in the Earth's crust. Though some geologists have asserted that the missing potassium resides in the core, there was no mechanism by which it could have reached the core. Other elements like oxygen and carbon form compounds or alloys with iron and presumably were dragged down by iron as it sank to the core. But at normal temperature and pressure, potassium does not associate with iron.
Others have argued that the missing potassium boiled away during the early, molten stage of Earth's evolution.
The demonstration by Lee and Jeanloz that potassium can dissolve in iron to form an alloy provides an explanation for the missing potassium.
"Early in Earth's history, the interior temperature and pressure would not have been high enough to make this alloy," Lee said. "But as more and more meteorites piled on, the pressure and temperature would have increased to the point where this alloy could form."
The existence of this high-pressure alloy was predicted by Bukowinski in the mid-1970s. Using quantum mechanical arguments, he suggested that high pressure would squeeze potassium's lone outer electron into a lower shell, making the atom resemble iron and thus more likely to alloy with iron.
More recent quantum mechanical calculations using improved techniques, conducted with Gerd Steinle-Neumann at the Universität Bayreuth's Bayerisches Geoinstitüt, confirmed the new experimental measurements.
"This really replicates and verifies the earlier calculations 26 years ago and provides a physical explanation for our experimental results," Jeanloz said.
The Earth is thought to have formed from the collision of many rocky asteroids, perhaps hundreds of kilometers in diameter, in the early solar system. As the proto-Earth gradually bulked up, continuing asteroid collisions and gravitational collapse kept the planet molten. Heavier elements – in particular iron - would have sunk to the core in 10 to 100 million years' time, carrying with it other elements that bind to iron.
Gradually, however, the Earth would have cooled off and become a dead rocky globe with a cold iron ball at the core if not for the continued release of heat by the decay of radioactive elements like potassium-40, uranium-238 and thorium-232, which have half-lives of 1.25 billion, 4 billion and 14 billion years, respectively. About one in every thousand potassium atoms is radioactive.
The heat generated in the core turns the iron into a convecting dynamo that maintains a magnetic field strong enough to shield the planet from the solar wind. This heat leaks out into the mantle, causing convection in the rock that moves crustal plates and fuels volcanoes.
Balancing the heat generated in the core with the known concentrations of radiogenic isotopes has been difficult, however, and the missing potassium has been a big part of the problem. One researcher proposed earlier this year that sulfur could help potassium associate with iron and provide a means by which potassium could reach the core.
The experiment by Lee and Jeanloz shows that sulfur is not necessary. Lee combined pure iron and pure potassium in a diamond anvil cell and squeezed the small sample to 26 gigapascals of pressure while heating the sample with a laser above 2,500 Kelvin (4,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which is above the melting points of both potassium and iron. She conducted this experiment six times in the high-intensity X-ray beams of two different accelerators - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory - to obtain X-ray diffraction images of the samples' internal structure. The images confirmed that potassium and iron had mixed evenly to form an alloy, much as iron and carbon mix to form steel alloy.
In the theoretical magma ocean of a proto-Earth, the pressure at a depth of 400-1,000 kilometers (270-670 miles) would be between 15 and 35 gigapascals and the temperature would be 2,200-3,000 Kelvin, Jeanloz said.
"At these temperatures and pressures, the underlying physics changes and the electron density shifts, making potassium look more like iron," Jeanloz said. "At high pressure, the periodic table looks totally different."
"The work by Lee and Jeanloz provides the first proof that potassium is indeed miscible in iron at high pressures and, perhaps as significantly, it further vindicates the computational physics that underlies the original prediction," Bukowinski said. "If it can be further demonstrated that potassium would enter iron in significant amounts in the presence of silicate minerals, conditions representative of likely core formation processes, then potassium could provide the extra heat needed to explain why the Earth's inner core hasn't frozen to as large a size as the thermal history of the core suggests it should."
Jeanloz is excited by the fact that theoretical calculations are now not only explaining experimental findings at high pressure, but also predicting structures.
"We need theorists to identify interesting problems, not only check our results after the experiment," he said. "That's happening now. In the past half a dozen years, theorists have been making predictions that experimentalists are willing to spend a few years to demonstrate."
The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

2007-03-31T20:03:00.000+06:00

White Nuclear Snowflake is a privately conceived, totally unfunded volunteer effort undertaken to inform the public about certain issues in a deeper and more revealing way, exposing truths beyond the ordinary journalistic level. White Nuclear Snowflake has no corporate , governmental, or organizational affiliations whatsoever. White Nuclear Snowflake has never once been guided, influenced, steered, or remunerated in any way by anyone, except its own authors. White Nuclear Snowflake is 100% independent, a public service done in a spirit of truth and common understanding. The individual words of the name have particular implications, and were chosen creatively, because of those implications. White means pure, 100% unsullied. Nuclear means graced with the unlimited power of the earth itself, and Snowflake means arising spontaneously, out of the surround, a crystal embodiment of reality....... White Nuclear Snowflake.

Our deepest hope, is to live up to all three of the themes, in each post written.

Our suspicion, is that the human race has only just begun to awaken.

Our mission, is to bring it a cup of coffee, once it wakes up, and decide where to go from here.

All sojourners are cordially invited along for the ride.

White Nuclear Snowflake will never ask anyone for a donation, ever.

There's nothing to join. There will be no rallies. No exhortations. No meetings.

THE LEFTIST FALLACY

2007-03-23T01:11:00.001+06:00

THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE ANNOUNCED

Socially, there will never be a perfected system. Therefore, any argument from a social ideal is an argument based on delusion.
The empirical, the factual, tell us that multiple modalities interact moment to moment, and their intent is as unknowable as the inner content of all humans, taken as a single data instance. It is orders of magnitude too large to compute. It cannot be summed up, shortened, or simplified, unless absolute freedom and absolute human rights are to be quashed. Therefore the greater good is to always have an imperfect, mixed system. In such a system family, tribe, ethnos, religion, philosophy, commerce and raw passion must all have a place, for it is to be a best fit for the human animal, who resonates to all these modes. As far as science, there can never be a social science, for the reasons exposed above. All social science is tyrrany.
All knowing implications that assign value to certain acts, certain interactions, and proscription to other acts, other interactions are pleadings to mold the innately paramount human spirit into an innately inferior single modality. This is cultural imprisonment, with a pseudo-science delusive theory as its nightstick.

Therefore the very stance of the left, that there is a form to human interaction, and that the form can be studied, improved, or perfected, is a defacto wish to truncate the human spirit, foisted as a projected curse outward on to the vibrant chaotic amalgam which is all human life. It is a cult of false knowingness. It is a church without a god. It is a studious delusion, and a neurotic avoidance of the basic human duty---full engagement with all humans, equally.

Were progress to be possible, it could not be planned. It must of needs be struggled for. The new model will emerge only from the full engagement of all, energized even through conspiracies, criminalities, fixes, arrangements, and all the multitude of steering techniques outside the dry planner's board room. The one proscription which is valid, stems not from social science, but from deep inner human craving-- there must be no hate. But in the imperfect, hate will exist, so we may say-- let many work to the elimination of hate at all times. Other than this, all must be tolerated. All must be glorified. Spirit in Man is Godhood emerging. For Godhood to manifest, the full complement of living humanity must be in the mix. Therefore, no classes, no aristocracy, no intelligentsia, no hubris-of-the-word, no ethnic cleansing, no mass eliminations, no great wars, no barriers, no boundaries, no limit on the meeting, spirit to spirit, human to human, all to all.

The man has not been born , who could understand this, and engineer its coming. But every mind alive can make it come.
If a step forward can be made, it will be accidental, or seem so. It will be over before it is known about. Omega will not be announced.

THE NEXT FIRE IS FOUND

2007-03-19T19:32:00.000+06:00

It's a funny thing about physics. There is basically one, single, unitary physics, that has been true from the first picosecond of existence, and will remain true until the end of time. Therefore, there is no such thing as "nineteenth century physics", or "twentieth century physics". What was true in 1837, is still true today, 100% unchanged.

Which brings up a further realization. Any knowlege unearthed by Bohr, Fermi, Einstein and others in the 1930's, was as true in the time of the pharaos as it will be in the year 9595. We just remained ignorant until WWII. It existed just the same, all along. Also, the process of U235 fission,the so-called nuclear process, is the process which heats the earth's core, and has continually heated the earth's core for 14 billion years. So we see that nuclear science is not "twentieth century science". It is the way nature itself is arranged, forever. There is no possibility of an alternative system. Physics is not swayed by politics. Whether it is the Iranians doing nuclear engineering, or the North Koreans, or the Chinese, or the South Africans, or the Israelis, or the Pakistani's, or the Indians, or the Brazilians, or the Russians, or the French, or even the Americans, the discovery of nature's eternal truths is not an evil plot hatched by Dr. Strangelove to provide Helen Caldicott with a lecture career, it is the inevitable compilation of knowlege upon former knowlege that has made man unique among the animals, the first animal destined, it would seem, to eventually penetrate every hidden secret the universe has embedded within it, for some grand racial or planetary destiny as yet unknown. ( For more on that note, read the works of Teilhard de Chardin, or the Koran.)

I myself truly hate fire.

I loath its destructive properties. I shudder at the thought of the WWII Tokyo firebombings, and the Hamburg & Dresden firestorms, literal maelstroms which killed far, far more than all the atomic explosions that have ever happened. I hate the witchburnings of Massachusetts, and the middle ages, I hate the christmas tree fires related to be by my fire-chief father, telling of entire families wiped out in a few minutes. I hate the branding of slaves by the Romans, I hate Nero's burning of Rome, I hate the crude witless fire religions of Baal and the wicker-man druids. I hate the fire that claims the lives of thousands of poor people each year in kerosene heater mishaps, eradicating entire families in horrific scenes of pain and loss. I hate the intentional east Indian kitchen fires, which horribly take the lives of lower caste brides once their dowrys have been paid. I hate the huge industrial fires which now choke our atmosphere, and kill 1,000,000 people per year, mainly the very young and the very old. I hate the cleverly constrained fire knowlegeably packed into each bullet, each artillery shell, each improvised explosive device, and maliciously packed within each rocket propelled grenade shot at our young people in harm's way, maiming, killing, reducing their humanity to cooked, torn, useless meat.

But fire, a natural reaction of heat, air, and fuel, does not care that I hate it.

As historical evidence will show us, fire has been here without man, before man, and not requiring man, to burn entire continents in repeat forest fires, and prairie fires whose imprint remains today in carbon layers unearthed by archaeologists.

So mankind, it seems, as mankind now exists, cannot be imagined in the absence of fire. Without cookfires and hearthfires, how can man inhabit anything but the fruit-laden tropics? Man without fire cannot live in Canada, Germany, Poland, Russia, Manchuria, Japan, most of North America, all of Scandinavia, and vast stretches of lower south America. Man cannot exist above 1000 feet elevation, without fire at his side, and so is further constrained to just the bottomland.

Since I loathe the destruction attached to fire,.... must I now condemn humanity to retreat from Europe and Asia, back into the tropical bottomland of Africa's rift valley, to cringe in fear without metal, without adequate tools or weaponry? Should I orchestrate a vast removal of all things human from the Americas, from all the mountain areas, a vast voyage of revulsion back to the paleolithic haunts of our distant forebears? Would all fire's evil be left behind by this tactic?

Could all future witch burnings, slave brandings, and bride burnings be prevented by making this move? Could all the evil done by steel weapons, swords, guns, hatchets, maces, lances & daggers be forever prevented because without fire, we have no means to smelt the evil equipment of death?

And without steel, and bronze, and fire, will the "New Humanity" become a sainted race, living in harmony by nurturing Christian Science principles and eating a vegan diet, somehow overcoming our defenselessness by close cooperation, perhaps selecting a few victims to throw to the hyenas , appeasing them each time they appear , rather than using the old, crude, failed and disproven masculine method, of fashioning weapons, and thus eating hyena, rather than the other way around?

And what about "The Next Fire"?
What about the next physical truth discovered that unleashes great energies into man's use? With 98% of all the academic study ever done in all of history being done today, and 98% of all scientists who ever lived being alive right now, and 98% of all high energy-producing equipment ever fashioned being built even as we speak, there is a very high likelihood that a new craft, a "Power-Beyond-Nuclear" is glimmering right now in the first data taken by CERN's new Atlas device, just constructed high in the frigid uplands at the French-Swiss border.

Should we "Take the Moral Course" , and immediately shut Atlas down , before something so problematical comes leaping out of its data streams, that all the innate competitiveness in the human race finds even more powerful ways to kill hyenas, and lower caste dowry brides? How many child care centers can be built within its 20 mile circular annulus? How many homeless shelters? How many refugee intake compounds, instead of a single megalomaniacal atom smasher, doomed to start a new round of proliferation, and a hateful arms race?

But thinking a bit more calmly, the question arises---- Yes, once we have shut Atlas down, and built all the nurture centers in its shell..... How do we heat the place? How do we feed the refugees? How do we transport them there? How do we enforce order, and prevent cliques turning into gangs? How do we weed out the malicious "Jihad Refugees" taking advantage just to kill kaffirs when the opportunity arises? How do we power simple waste removal? What about bears?

For that, we are going to need fire.(and thus all that comes with it).

So despite my noble hopes, and my millennial aspirations, ..... it seems we are doomed.
Doomed to a hostile world, where fire makes steel, which kills. Doomed to a world where men defend themselves, and think, and experiment, trying to approach heaven via knowlege, seeking always "The Next Fire".

And if we reject that fate, and seek to return to being hyena-bait, as of old... those proposing the move should remember full well, that giving up all fire's bad attachments means giving up all of fire's good attachments along with it, and choosing a child or old person each day, to throw to the hyenas, who were here before us, and who rightly view us , in full environmental justice, only as food.

If you are skilled in handling analogy as a learning tool, it might have occurred to you by now that each thing I write here about the phenomenon of fire, is also applicable to the equally neutral physical phenomenon of U235 fission.

Have a nice day.

AL GORE-ISM AT ITS FINEST (?)

2007-03-16T19:59:00.000+06:00

Considering John Hall's Hydro Plan
(Al-Gore-Two-Faces-NIMBY-Trickle-Down-Award-of-the-year)

Because I'm priced and taxed out of the Hudson Valley in considering housing for my retirement years, I've developed an affinity for Windows Live Local, which has a wonderful "Bird's Eye View" feature, letting you view major portions of the USA, from about 1000 feet up. It beats Terraserver's satellite views, and Google Earth's false perspective views, by letting you actually see that chicken farm right down the road from your Arkansas dream house, or that huge car body dump just behind that bargain priced Vermont farmhouse. I've noticed a lot of active sand & gravel quarries throughout western Massachusetts, in fairly close proximity to new upscale development, and it started me thinking about Saint Lawrence Cement, Scenic Hudson, and low-head hydropower.

I have duly sent in my contributions to Scenic Hudson every year for decades, and a "Stop the Plant" sign graced my front lawn until the rain turned it to paste on a stick. I considered an open-pit cement mine with a 500 foot stack to be an unneeded monstrosity on the Hudson, seeing as it would have only brought about 60 jobs to the region.

But low head hydropower, on a scale to meet the expected 5000 new megawatt demand, (or the shortfall from closing IPEC), would require concrete production on a scale to match the construction of the New York State Thruway 50 years ago, (the event that originally brought the St Lawrence cement plant to the area). The clearing of all the damsites, the terraforming, the actual construction, and the re-gridding of the area with hundreds of new transformer step-up stations, towers, high tension poles, and, ultimately, the new widely-dispersed electric power maintenance operation, one that will have the effect of taking the now-invisible prime mover generation assets sequestered in Indian Point, Bowline, & other brownfield campuses, and scattering them willy nilly in everybody's backyard, all this could very easily transform the region negatively, in ways not yet envisioned by those dreaming only of a forest paradise, and not realizing that a forest paradise generates no electricity.

For one thing, a multiplicity of generating stations, is a multiplicity of terrorist targets, or even just vandalism targets, and is also a multiplicity of workers' trucks, paved parking lots, trash collection, maintenance spills, stacking yards, restricted razor wired compounds, dangerous high voltage high energy-containing structures by their hundreds, or even thousands, of necessity respecting no neighborhood, no mountainside, no trout stream, and bringing opportunistic eminent domain landgrabs by the hundreds for sure, industrializing the very woods we love so much, because that's where the water flows.

So my pristine hike, with my springer spaniel Murphy, just might find us waving to those hydro guys in their truck, (as they toss their coffee cups by the road), smelling the waft from the maintanance crew's Port-O-San, just as we are blocked by that razor wire and its armed guard, right near that pile of pipes, under that transmission tower that didn't used to be there, before New York's 2800 new low head hydro generating stations were built.

Moreover the concrete for the dams has to come from somewhere. So if we blocked St Lawrence Cement at Greenport, and patted ourselves on the back for it, immediately prior to requiring twice the amount of cement the place would have produced, thus dooming some folks in Massachusetts to bear the dust, the smoke, the trucks, and the scarring above and beyond their existing ugly gravel quarries, wouldn't we then qualify in spades for the "Al-Gore-Two-Faces-NIMBY-Trickle-Down-Award-of-the-year", for screwing everybody in Pittsfield, to make Beacon's concrete for them?

I don't know. I can't say for sure. But it does give me pause.

DID JOHN HALL READ THIS THING?

2007-03-08T21:22:00.000+06:00

HAVEN'T YOU READ YOUR OWN GAO REPORT?

In response to Several Democrats' call for an Independent Safety Assessment at Indian Point, I decided to see what resources were out there, if I were a congressperson, and just wanted to know how well NRC was managing Indian Point, without passing a special law, or holding a lot of wasteful press conferences.

And Whaddya know! I didn't have to believe NRC. I didn't have to ask Entergy. And I didn't have to pass a new law, either! The GAO, Congress' own investigative arm, had already published a report in September, 2006, describing just how well NRC was doing, managing the oversight of Indian Point.

I couldn't believe it! Had the anti-nuclear staffers of these Democrats hidden the GAO report from them? Probably, is my own conclusion.

Anyway, the report contains tables, showing Indian Point's safety rating improving continuously, since 2001. (2001 was the year that Entergy bought the place, by the way). The same charts show Indian Point firmly "In the Green". I guess that ought to reassure Hillary, and Mr Hall, Schumer & Hinchey.

All they have to do is read this post, or link to:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d061029.pdf
They don't have to even bother Congress with a useless new brouhaha, attracting a lot of attention, and wasting $20 million doing it! Of course, you don't get any media coverage, reading a report!

GAO-06-1029
September 2006

NUCLEAR
REGULATORY
COMMISSION
Oversight of Nuclear
Power Plant Safety
Much Improved

(these are exerpts, the whole report is much longer).

NRC provides an overall assessment of each plant’s performance through assessment letters issued to plants at the end of each 6-month period describing their specific performance and the level of oversight that will result. In addition, NRC has mechanisms to make available its oversight results, such as an Internet Web site devoted to the ROP that provides detailed summaries of each plant’s performance.

In the area of performance indicators, there were 156 instances out of more than 30,000 reports, or less than 1 percent, in which data reported for individual indicators were outside of NRC’s acceptable performance category. NRC assesses overall plant performance and communicates the results to licensees and the public on a semiannual basis.

Since 2001, the ROP has resulted in more than 4,000 inspection findings concerning nuclear power plant licensees’ failure to fully comply with NRC regulations and industry standards for safe plant operation, and NRC has subjected more than 75 percent (79) of the 103 operating plants to increased oversight for varying periods.

In addition, the nuclear power industry formed an organization, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), whose mission is to “promote the highest levels of safety and reliability, to promote excellence, in the operation of nuclear electric generating plants.” INPO provides a system of personnel training and qualification for all key positions at nuclear power plants, and workers undergo both periodic training and assessment. INPO also conducts periodic evaluations of operating plants, focusing on plant safety and reliability, in the areas of operations, maintenance, engineering, radiological protection, chemistry, and training. Licensees make the results of these evaluations available to NRC for review, and NRC staff use the evaluations as a means to determine whether its oversight process has missed any performance issues.

NRC increased its inspection resources by 9 percent in 2004, and then by another 5 percent in 2005, and was able to fully implement its baseline inspection program at all plants for both years. NRC reports show that resources expended in 2005 were almost 20 percent higher than those expended in 2002.With its current resource levels, NRC program officials believe they will be able to continue to implement all program requirements.

Physical plant inspections are the main tool NRC uses to oversee plant safety performance. NRC defined specific inspection areas by developing a list of those elements most critical to meeting the overall agency mission of ensuring nuclear power plant safety. These safety elements—or key plant inspection areas—are known as cornerstones.

During fiscal year 2005, NRC reported that inspectors spent 411,490 hours on plant inspections, which consist of baseline, supplemental, and special inspections. About 73 percent of this time was devoted to baseline inspections, which are conducted on an almost continuous basis. Baseline inspections are conducted by the NRC inspectors located at each site and specialists who travel to each site from NRC’s regional offices. These inspections are designed to detect declining safety performance in each of the cornerstones, and to review licensee effectiveness at identifying and resolving its safety problems. There are more than 30 baseline inspection procedures conducted at intervals that range from quarterly to triennially. Each of the baseline procedures specify a range of sample activities to inspect. Inspectors then select the type and number of activities to review on the basis of factors such as the sample activities available; their risk significance; the amount of time since a particular system or component was last inspected; and the inspector’s judgment, which is based on information such as reviews of the licensee’s corrective action program, allegations, or plant employee interviews. Risk is factored into the baseline inspection procedures in the following four ways: (1) areas of inspection are included in the set of baseline procedures, in part, on the basis of their risk importance; (2) risk information is used to help determine the frequency and scope of inspections; (3) the selection of activities to inspect within each procedure is informed with plant-specific risk information; and (4) the inspectors are trained in the use of risk information in planning their inspections. In addition to the more than 30 baseline inspection procedures, inspectors spend an average of 750 to 1,100 hours per year, conducting plant status reviews. These reviews are to ensure that inspectors are aware of plant conditions on a routine basis and include such activities as reviewing control room activities and status, attending licensee meetings, and conducting walk-downs of various plant areas.

Whether NRC takes enforcement actions in response to plant performance problems depends on whether there is a violation of a specific regulatory requirement.

When NRC issues greater-than-green inspection findings at a plant, it conducts supplemental inspections. One plant was subject to NRC’s highest oversight level in 2001 & 2002 because of a red finding for the failure of a steam generator tube. NRC conducted its most intensive supplemental inspection 2 months after the red finding was determined The licensee prepared a plan to address its deficiencies, and determined that a multiyear effort was necessary to develop and implement all corrective actions. Once the corrective actions were in place, NRC inspectors conducted follow-up inspections to examine the adequacy of the licensee’s efforts. Supplemental inspections, performed by regional staff, expand the scope beyond baseline inspection procedures and focus on diagnosing the cause of the performance
deficiency. There are three levels of supplemental inspections that are increasingly expansive in the breadth and depth of their analysis. The lowest level of supplemental inspection assesses the licensee’s corrective actions to ensure they were sufficient in both correcting the problem and identifying and addressing the root and contributing causes to prevent recurrence. The second level of supplemental inspection has an increased scope that includes independently assessing the extent of the condition for both the specific and any broader performance problems. The highest level of supplemental inspection is even more comprehensive and includes determining whether the plant can continue to operate and whether additional regulatory actions are necessary. The highest level of supplemental inspection is usually conducted by a multidisciplinary team of NRC inspectors and may take place over several months. Also, as a part of this supplemental inspection, NRC inspectors assess the adequacy of the licensee’s overall programs for identifying, evaluating, and correcting its performance issues, among other things.

In addition to its various inspections, NRC also collects plant performance information through its performance indicator program, which it maintains in cooperation with the nuclear power industry. On a quarterly basis, each plant submits data for 15 separate performance indicators—quantitative measures of plant performance related to safety in the different aspects of plant operations. Working with the nuclear power industry, NRC set thresholds for acceptable performance and assigned colors to each of the indicators to reflect increasing risk. In contrast to inspection findings, a green indicator does not indicate a performance deficiency but instead reflects performance
within the acceptable range, while white, yellow, and red represent decreasing levels of plant performance. NRC inspectors review and verify the data submitted for each performance indicator annually through their baseline inspections

On the basis of the results of its oversight process, NRC provides plant licensees and the public with an overall assessment of each plant’s performance. At the end of each 6-month period, NRC issues an assessment letter to each plant to describe its placement on the action matrix, what actions NRC is expecting the plant licensee to take as a result of the performance issues identified, any specific enforcement actions NRC has taken, and any documented substantive cross-cutting issues. If a substantive cross-cutting issue is identified, the letter will describe what actions NRC intends to take to monitor the issue and how the licensee is expected to respond to NRC with the corrective actions it intends to take. NRC also holds an annual public meeting at or near each site to review its performance and address questions from members of the public and other interested stakeholders.

In addition, NRC reviews the conclusions of independent plant assessments, such as those conducted by INPO. The purpose of this review is to selfassess the NRC inspection and assessment process to ensure that NRC is identifying similar performance issues.

NRC communicates the results of much of its oversight process to members of the public through an Internet Web site devoted to the ROP. This Web site makes available plants’ inspection reports and assessment letters, and other general materials related to NRC’s oversight process. NRC also provides a quarterly summary of every plant’s performance, consisting of its inspection findings, the color of each performance indicator, and its placement on the action matrix. NRC also provides a
short description of each inspection finding issued during the quarter.

In addition to its plant-level assessments, NRC assesses the results of its oversight process on an industry-level basis. NRC management holds an annual meeting to (1) discuss any significant performance issues identified at specific plants and (2) analyze the overall results of its inspection and performance indicator programs and compare them with other industrycollected and reported performance data. NRC program officials said that if they identified any negative trends or inconsistencies, they would take action to better understand and address the cause.

ANTINUKE IS ANTIPEOPLE

2007-03-08T00:52:00.001+06:00

ANTINUKE = ANTIPEOPLE

How easily those misled by "movement angst" misconstrue reality. A merchant plant operator entered the Lohud in 2000, intending to take NYPA's & Con Ed's unwanted, neglected, outliers, their atypical nuclear assets, and make them a winning proposition. Entergy's will, its vision, its avowed intention, was to reshape the assets, make them a single united service benefit for the region, and apply all the best methods to aid the customer base, the northeast region consumer, in continuing to prosper, expand horizons, and never suffer any return to former levels of less wealth, less freedom, less hope, less empowerment, or their ultimate ramifications, want , disenfranchisement, and/or deprivation.

This is a very people-centric vision. The assets are here, written in concrete and steel, but corrupt Con Ed myopia, along with NYPA state-agency myopia, did not choose to see any bright future. It took the naivete' of Entergy, to think of us all, the regional rate payer, as worthy of rescue.

However, the society at large hereabouts, is not done with its amazing self hate. It is not done flirting with doomism, defeatism, less-ism, choking NIMBYism, and the intellectual detritus of a long leftist opposition history, here near Peekskill.

Answer me this.

If Paul Robeson strode the streets of Peekskill in 2007, as he once did in the riot days, would he tell his people: "Fear your future"? Would he say to them (and to us): "Let these wealthy folks have their pristine condo landscape, free of us blue collar trash"? Would he say: "Forget moving up. What you got now, is good enough".? Is that what he would say?

Or would he say: "These folks from New Orleans want to serve YOU!" Wouldn't he say: "Take what they offer you!" Take prosperity. Take jobs. Take low taxes. Take Low electric bills. Take development, and new places of work. Take a land in which people not endowed with trust funds can hold their heads up and say "I work"..... "I pay my taxes"..... "I'm as equal as any man.".....and make it stick, by not hunkering down to wealthist myths of white-water-rafting as a life endeavor. Because I truly believe the great man would see through the charades, and reach out his hands, and tear down their tissue paper lies and sing out: "Let my (working class) people go"

Anybody see it any different?

If so, we are gonna have a talk, I guarantee it!

tag: Indian Point

GENESIS OF TRIBAL MYTH --1997

2007-03-07T23:43:00.001+06:00

In shaping a picture of the NRC for Congress, the General Accounting Office, in its 1997 report: GAO/RCED-97-145, May 30, 1997, stated: Determining the safety of plants is difficult because NRC does not precisely define it. Instead, NRC presumes that nuclear plants are safe if they operate within their approved designs (design basis) and meet NRC's regulations. However, NRC's regulations and other guidance do not provide either the licensees or the public with the specific definitions and conditions that define the safety of a plant. As a result, NRC does not have an effective way to quantify the safety of plants that deviate from their approved designs or violate regulations. Determining a plant's safety condition is, therefore, a subjective judgment.

The GAO's 1997 statement about NRC and the definition of safety is off the mark, because it ignores the very basis of safety in the nuclear industry.

Rather than embody safety in the agency, or in a single static model imposed upon 103 plants, the licensing system has imposed a vast creative task individually on each licensee, prior to the granting of each license. The task involves the writing of a detailed Safety Analysis Report. The definition of safety, for that plant, is embodied in the Safety Analysis Report, a huge document running to ten or more volumes, with internal references to thousands of calculations stored elsewhere, and hundreds (if not thousands) of detailed design drawings, also stored elsewhere.It is known as the SAR, or (final) FSAR. So, defacto, the engineering designers who wrote the FSARs and the technical specifications have also written the safety standards, 103 differing safety standards for 103 plants. Each standard is extremely concrete, there is no vagueness. However each standard is huge, and there are 103 separate versions.

This kind of a document cannot be inspected casually, or cursorily by GAO, nor can operator compliance with it be casually determined by observing the NRC. To wrongly imply that NRC methods were lax, or "subjective" is a misleading and self serving statement, designed to lift the onus of comprehending the FSAR system, off the shoulders of the GAO team, and deposit GAO's unreadiness to prepare its inspectors onto NRC's doorstep, as a vague accusation of "subjectivity". With 103 versions of law, residing in 103 FSARs at 103 Nuclear plants, the amount and difficulty of material is just too great for GAO to assess, much less sum up. GAO failed to adequately comprehend this system, and wrongly reported it to Congress as an NRC shortfall. It is in point of fact, the defacto status of present regulatory law. As law, as a sitting legal structure, it ought not be mischaracterized as an administrative shortfall.

Perhaps if it understood its intended mission more completely, GAO might have proposed a new legal structure, complete with a general unified FSAR, but of course, it lacked the technical competency to even determine the nature of what it was assessing, and so could not have successfully replaced it with a more comprehensive upgrade. As it is, GAO has shuffled its feet unknowingly, at the periphery, accusing NRC of not safeguarding the public, when in fact it was GAO failing its mission, the mission to understand just where the concrete jot and tittle of nuclear safety was embodied--- in the FSARs and the tech specs, and not within NRC. This kind of a safety standard demands the dedication of a qualified set of resident inspectors, tasked with climbing the extremely steep learning curve in each FSAR, as a preparation for understanding how each individual plant is fulfilling its specific commitments to each FSAR. Once the subject matter is mastered, then the individual inspector, be he an NRC resident inspector, or a GAO inspector, can be ready to realistically compare plant performance parameters to the mammonth compendium of promised performance parameters, that is the FASR and The Technical Specifications. With such knowlege in hand, the judgement is not subjective. It is extremely objective. Meet tech specs=pass. Not meet tech specs= fail.

This is the American system. If it is monumentally complex, and thus not amenable to easy GAO mastery, that fact just makes any casual GAO suggestions made after a cursory look-see a lot less than enlightening. Therefore must Congress remain in the dark, and simply trust NRC? Perhaps, but better that they understand their own inpectors' blind spots. Therefore allow me to analyze the GAO assertion,line by line, in the light of what I've revealed above.

Determining the safety of plants is difficult because NRC does not precisely define it.
This is not true. Determining plant safety is difficult, because it is precisely defined 103 separate ways in 103 FSARs, and because each FSAR , with its accompanying references may take a year or more for a talented individual to comprehend.

NRC presumes that nuclear plants are safe if they operate within their approved designs and meet NRC's regulations.
This is true, but is not a shortfall. The vast system of redundant safeguards embodied in each FSAR provides large margins of safety, and its initial approval came only after detailed critical evaluation to the best scientific/engineering standards. Such trust is not ill-founded trust.

However, NRC's regulations and other guidance do not provide either the licensees or the public with the specific definitions and conditions that define the safety of a plant.
This is not true. The Technical specifications provide an absolutely precise and objective standard to the licensees, and to NRC. Perhaps GAO is suggesting a tech spec primer series be prepared for public consumption along the lines of "A nuclear plant is safe, when its tech specs are met", with explanations. I doubt if the public would be interested. GAO, on a mission to find the tech specs, missed them entirely, and now it reports that NRC has none. Would the public do any better?

As a result, NRC does not have an effective way to quantify the safety of plants that deviate from their approved designs or violate regulations.
This might have been germaine in 1997. In 2007 it is not true. The Reactor Oversight Process is now in place, giving objective banded scoring to each plant, in all major areas. Note that this statement is not about safety per se, but rather it is about the reporting of safety conditions to the general public.

Determining a plant's safety condition is, therefore, a subjective judgment.
This was not true in 1997, and it is most certainly nonsense in 2007.

In missing the absolute inflexibility of the tech specs, and by looking in the wrong place for the exactitude (looking within NRC, rather than in the license), GAO overlooked the very concrete methodology for maintaining plant safety, as being non-existent. This failure has now propagated itself outward through the Congress, and the public, as a tribal myth, wrongly accusing NRC of laxity.

WHAT WOULD MR. ROBESON DO?

2007-03-07T05:13:00.000+06:00

UBERDOG AND THE WATCHPUPPIES

2007-03-06T02:22:00.000+06:00

UBERDOG AND THE WATCHPUPPIES

How absolutely deceptive, in its very conception. A small cozy meet-up, no different from 100 other meetups done every day for party politics, or cigar smoking, or charity. A simple meetup NOT sponsored by any official agency, or governmental department, ....AND YET ... the deceptive PR copy distributed in announcements & blogs promised "High Level Scientific Seminar---- Major Figures From The Govermental, Environmental, and Scientific World to appear"..... but read a bit further and we begin to see the disclaimers: "John Hall (invited)"...... "Charles Schumer (invited)"..... That little bracket, with the word "invited" says more than volumes of spin from me.

I once invited Paul McCartney up to my recording studio to jam. My wife had a bake sale once, and invited Martha Stewart. Did they show up? I'm not gonna tell ya, folks, but Hall & Schumer didn't show at Pace last Friday. Nor did NRC, nor did Entergy. Why? Because they had correctly identified the event as a highly spun smalltime anti-Indian Point worry-fest, tricked out to seem like something it was not.

I'm not going to rail on about the meeting's content in this blog. Read my old posts for that. All I wish to point out is the blowfish-type self puffery indulged , seemingly in every breath in, and every breath out, by the tiny hard core "Lets be afraid of Indian Point, regardless" clique. Who was it said "If her lips are moving, she's lying"?

If we listen to a single sentence from this arrogant, deceptive, self-inflating anti-people, anti-work, anti-blue collar, anti-normalcy crowd, we are forced to go home, get deep into Wikipedia for an hour or two, and take notes in a stenographer's notepad, to separate the exaggeration from the known fact, the pretense from the actuality. And it is always so, so, prophetically knowing! So, so dire, so, so urgent, so concerned, serious, so frowning and so, so precious. It's kind of a "Me-as-Potential-Mass-Victim" passion play, for the electric rate payer.

But answer me this--- What if it's 100% histrionics?

What if the few "concerned" souls who showed up to hear about how long it takes a thimble full of water to sink into the Ramapo fault are not representative of anything real? What if their entire area of focus is trivial , even neurotic---- self importance gone wild? A fantasy club? Why do our media outlets have to play along, and announce "High Level Scientific Inquiry at Pace next Friday", when in fact it was 5 local activists, one paid antinuke harrassment agent from Washington DC, and a doctor from NYS DEC-- a doctor who, by the way, disagreed with the other panelists, and said not to worry?

I agree with their right to meet up. I even agree with their right to try to seem much more authoritative than they actually are.

I do not agree that their attempts to speak for the populace are ethical, and I insist absolutely on MY right to debunk their endless charade, in public forums such as this.

I also promise them, and you, that I will be watching these autoinfatuated watchpuppies, as a kind of Uberdog commentor, conscience, and debunking machine.

It ought to be real fun.

SPINNING AMERICAN LIFE AS DEFICIENT

2007-03-04T03:36:00.000+06:00

Inept Quislings, and Contempt for John Q

What,... a day without Indian Point to talk about?

Whatever will Manna Jo Greene and Paul Gunter do with themselves? Will they go back to their homes lighted by Indian Point, and rest secure under the local emergency services upheld by Indian Point ? Will they perhaps notice the new arrivals whose upward aspirations will be prevented by closing Indian Point? Will they return to the Washington DC area (Gunter) knowing he has once more misrepresented local realities to unsuspecting local people, in one more agent provocateur action in a decades long subversion of the local American political process, by an agency (WISE/NIRS) spawned in Europe, and supported by "Big Oil" (Rockefeller) money? Will Phil Musegaas own up to his connection with the Tamarind foundation, the recently renamed private social engineering experiment of billionairess Helaine Heilbrunn Lerner? Or will he try to pass himself off as "just one more Riverkeeper activist", even though Ms. Heilbrunn pays his salary to sit within Riverkeeper and uphold her personal antinuclear campaign at all cost, even after Robert F Kennedy jr has realized the duplicity, and moved on (along with Kyle Rabin?) Do Hinchey, Lowey, Spano, Hall , and Clinton know they are inept Quislings dancing to the agitprop tune of antinuke Tamarind Fund choreographer Alice Slater? Do all of the self-serving manipulators of fact above care a whit about the common man, in this area?

You instinctively know the answer.
Need I say it for you?
Ok, allow me then...... NO THEY DO NOT!!

People!! Beware!!

Fact is being spun, by well-heeled and deeply entrenched oligarchs. They aim to make you uneasy. They wish you to doubt your own civilization. Why? Simple......... vanity, and a pre-arranged agenda, where they end up manipulating the populace via paid (albeit earnest) middlemen, to make you tear down the system in which you live, so that their experimental greenist paradise can take its place. Please note: Ginsburg development is seeking to buy the Hudson itself, from Haverstraw to Tompkins cove, even as I speak! (Yes... Its all a real estate thing).

And what is your place, or my place, in this new Armageddon, this Millennial antinuke paradise? EASY: to huddle in our houses without heat, whilst Heilbrunn, & Slater travel first class to Geneva confabs. To watch illegal immigrants starve in shacks along the Mamaroneck river, whilst Mr. Kennedy spends roughly $2500 per day flying from $20,000 speaking engagement to $20,000 speaking engagement. To give up our TV sets, and our entertainments, whilst Al Gore spends $6000 per month to light up just ONE of his five houses. AND.... on top of it all..... to be told that WE are guilty, for wanting to have what our parents had, a job, a house, a car, security, stability, and love for our country. You see, these simple pleasures are NOW FORBIDDEN!! We must be satisfied with less ! You, me , Kennedy, Al Gore, Clinton, Heilbrunn, and Slater. For THEM,...." less" means a carbon footprint conveniently offset by diverting foundation contributions to a green fund (it does NOT mean traveling in coach). To them,.... "less" means giving up the fifth white water vacation in Peru this year, poor dears, the other four white water vacations HAVE JUST WORN THEM OUT! For us, everything is to be different! We must now suspect everything that helps us, embrace everything that impedes us, and hate each other!..only this one way will we be allowed as peons, into the great celebractivist religion of antinuclear anarchy. (And oh yes, we must send in contributions!)

But I ask you---- ARE YOUR LIGHTS ON?
Yes they are.
That simple fact might just mean that I am right, and they are wrong.
their "conclave" was a crock. Their agenda is a crock.
They are careerist troublemakers with contempt for our local lives.

And if your lights stay on tonight, I advise you, in all sincerity:
COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS, PEOPLE,
AND FIND OUT JUST WHO YOUR SUPPOSED "SAVIORS" REALLY ARE!
Note: I am well prepared to help you in this area. Just stay tuned!

Tags: Indian Point Hudson River Antinuclear Agents Provocateur WISE NIRS

THE KNOLLSFISH THEOREM

2007-03-02T02:13:00.000+06:00

The Knollsfish Theorem

Four Hudson River fish testing strontium-positive were caught 30 miles north of Indian Point. What's up there, to make fish contaminated ? A man named Jack Shannon has a lot to say about corruption at the Navy's Knolls Atomic Power Lab, directly on the Erie Canal at West Milton New York. Check out http://www.mindspring.com/~kapl/index.html. He even gives a telephone number 518-587-3245. Another Knolls website is: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/knolls_k.htm.

One surmise I make is that work done under military aegis, can legally omit safeguards, under the rubric of national security. Shannon says much about this. Apparently Knolls dumped a lot of stuff, willy-nilly. Shannon was pursued, and fired from the Knolls Kesselring installation for blowing the whistle on it. Most likely, compared to Knolls, Indian Point is a virgin, pure as the driven snow. Most likely, estuarian damage from Kesselring far outstrips any imagined damage from the beseiged and minutely-watched Indian Point.

Very possibly, Entergy's mysterious fish test has outed the Hudson's covert radioactive polluter, Bechtel, operators of Knolls/Kesselring. The location of the 4 "hot" fish would strongly suggest this. If true, the green community would owe a strong debt of gratitude to the proactive Entergy corporation, instigators of the fish test, for bringing this abuse to light.

It is interesting to note that Knolls is not mentioned by congress people stridently demanding various concessions from Indian Point. Knolls is well upstream of Indian Point, and if Mr. Shannon's very detailed laundry list of dumped carcinogens, actinides, and radioactive junk at Knolls is even remotely accurate, Knolls and its leach fields are non-point-sourcing a heady weapons-of-mass-destruction cocktail directly into America's first river in full view of a silent John Hall, Maurice Hinchey, Nita Lowey, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives, honorable representatives?

How about an Independent Safety Assessment of Kesselring?

Celebrity Career Launch Service-- Nuclear Division

2007-03-01T00:08:00.000+06:00

WHY FLY THE NUCLEAR ROCKET?

I recall in 2001, doing a quickie, informal internet count to see who was big, and who was not. When I googled the words "Indian Point" I got about 89,000 hits. When I googled the word "Riverkeeper" I got only about 150 hits.Likewise, googling the monikers "Alex Matthiessen" and "Robert F Kennedy jr" got each only about 80 hits. But that condition was not to last.

You see, throughout late 2001 and all of 2002 we had the big press agent's foodfight, lasting roughly three years, resulting in the hit count I got this morning: Check it out:

Indian Point............461,000
RFK jr......................260,000
Riverkeeper.............202,000
A. Matthiessen..............1,250
Rep. John Hall.................314

Wrestling with the huge attention-grabber Indian Point, has been extremely beneficial for both Kennedy, and Riverkeeper. Although environmental purists might consider their struggle to close Indian Point to have been a failure, that is not exactly true. The old Riverkeeper pre- 2001, with a tiny mailing list, just six volunteers, and a mission many people considered over and done with, only pulled 150 internet hits.

Riverkeeper of 2007, with 23+ workers, 202,000 internet hits, and a specially created office of institutional collections, geared to pulling in the big moneys available from foundations, colleges, and trust funds, is firmly nestled in the pantheon of big charities, along with United Way and the Sierra Club. Congratulations, Riverkeeper! Talk about using nuclear power !! It seems like your organization found out just how to utilize the "nuclear rocket" that the Air Force never got the hang of, to orbit yourselves into a permanent cushy gig, being mildly offended and accepting checks (in between charity balls).

Since the middle aged Riverkeeper no longer depends completely on Indian Point, I've included the next Greenworlder to discover the star power of Indian Point's nuclear rocketry, Representative John Hall, as harbinger of the next generation of press-hungry wannabe's "Mounting The Nuke-Rocket", for the wonderful ride to stardom, and fat retirement. Although he just garners 314 hits currently, I'm sure that if he sticks with Indian Point as his ride, his numbers will balloon. Besides, doesn't he look GREAT in that silver suit?

(Oh, by the way,...Indian Point gets no bonus from the quintupling of their fame, you buy their electricity regardless)

DID YOU FORGET THE QUESTION, DR. HELEN ?

2007-02-26T14:58:00.000+06:00

PEPE LA GAI REBUTS HELEN CALDICOTT

Dear ex-Doctor Caldicott.

Congratulations on a long profitable career overexaggerating these issues. May you have success with each new book, and its associated flogging tour. It is your right to maintain yourself in upper middle class fashion, tossing non-facts around, that is true---BUT--- since the earth's core itself is heated by U235 decay, the simple realization of ways to use this natural Gaian gift-power cannot be evil, and certainly not in an anti-Gaian sense. Perhaps if you were to ponder how many farmers have been gored, keeping cattle, how many goldsmiths have been burned, smelting ore, perhaps you will begin to see that we never approach Gaia without danger. (The Hindu goddess Kali, is also the goddess of destruction & blood). The price mankind pays to live in a manner superior to a grazing animal (or a plant) is fraught with danger. Houses are invented, they do not grow. Trees must be cut, to fashion them. In just such a way, the use of terran core-power, the natural gifted planet-heat, U235 decay, can be dangerous.

Thanks for reminding the cooks not to stick their hands into the fire while using that power.

As far as NOT using it?

What alternative universe do YOU propose we live in, Narnia perhaps?

A word, dear ex-doctor. Narnia is a fiction, as are all your desperate evasions, in all your books.

Have a nice rest-of-your-life

Pepe la Gai

Tags: nuclear indian point entergy helen caldicott Pepe La Gai

INDIAN POINT CONSPIRACY REVEALED!

2007-02-25T00:21:00.004+06:00

ANGEL MORONI REVEALING TO JOHN HALL THAT INDIAN POINT NEEDS AN INDEPENDENT SAFETY ASSESSMENT

After a long Orleans road trip in 1978, John was awakened from his cannabis dream by a piercing white light, and a heavenly voice saying to him in ethereal tones:
"G e t _ a _ b e t t e r _ g i g !"......

"J o h n !"........

"G e t_ a _ b e t t e r _ g i g !".....

"D o_ s o m e _ a n t i-s o m e t h i n g_ c o n c e r t s_ ,
_ J o h n !"

It was the middle aged angel of middle aged rockers (Bony) Moroni.

JOHN KNEW IMMEDIATELY HE WOULD FORVER BE "ANTI" --It was just against WHAT that troubled him!

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ENTERGY HAVING ITS POCKETS EMPTIED BY NYS INQUISITORS
Governor Paterson today vowed to make electricity rates "As high as the people can stand"... by raising the anti on national guard troops sent to Indian Point to do guard duty. Despite the fact that these servicemen are paid from the Federal dime, Paterson wishes to monetize this function, because attacking Indian Point seems to be in vogue with New York left leaning dilletantes having more than 3 million in the bank---Like Spitzer...like Tiger Woods! Next Spitzer...er....Paterson intends to impose a "Voting Booth Fee"--- of $50, not imposed since Jim Crow in the South 60 years ago. "We have to get money somewhere" Paterson quipped, while eating escargot, and sipping chardonnay.

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WESTCHESTER BOARD OF LEGISLATORS LISTENING TO A LONG MIKE KAPLOWITZ HARANGUE.
The spineless "legislators" (here seen in the dunce caps), are being trained by Mike "Kapo" Kaplowitz to respond to verbal stimuli, kind of like Pavlov's dogs. His "dog trainer" , Tom Abinanti, is seen holding the punishment stick, on the left. The legislators are being forced to vote in a bloc on a series of nonsense issues, to demonstrate their Kapo's herding abilities. The rest of the people in the hall are disgruntled real estate clients that Kaplowitz has bilked, waiting for a chance at the mike to complain.
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STRINGENT TEST OF ROTATING MACHINERY AT INDIAN POINT SAFETY ASSESSMENT.
A rotating "nuclear Strapado" device is tested out by Hillary Clinton minions, on an NRC worker, seen bound and disrobed. The worker will be roasted above the fire, until a false confession is elicited, which will be written down and immediately sent to all progressive news outlets. This will form the basis of Hillary's new legislation, a call for an "Independent Spanish Inquisiition" , a stringent, piercing test, to be applied to any victim Hil thinks she can get away with it on, and besides Bill used to LOVE watching these kinds of S/M tapes while governor of Arkansas!
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AG CUOMO PRACTICES HIS NEW ETHICAL METHODS--- HERE SEEN INTERROGATING A KENNEDY LACKEY, ON CUOMO JUNIOR'S EX-WIFE'S CURRENT WHEREABOUTS

The angry Attorney General is seen hanging Patrick J. O'McGillicutty, Hyannisport whiskey-butler and Kennedy party-girl procurer, thought to know just why the Kennedy-Cuomo liaison never worked. O' McGillicutty is seen exhausted , just after screaming out in pain "Bejeezus man, I can't help the wench if she can't cook friggin macaroni!"

THE PUBLIC DESERVES ANSWERS !!!

2007-02-21T05:24:00.000+06:00

Truth or Dare in Public Affairs... The "IDK"

What we need is good old keelhauling.

As long as the "Gang-of-Democrats" is proposing obsolete "Trial-by-Combat" methods of finding out whether their staffs have been lying to them for years, I suggest we reach back into the American Nautical past, and revive another obsolete method of examination, the good old keelhaul. (no- not the "Independent Safety Assessment"---sorry!)

If John Hall's chief of staff can be tied to a rope, and dragged beneath the intake ports of Indian Point at high tide, he can undoubtedly either uncover whatever hidden evils are down there with the zebra mussels, or , if he finds just Hudson River Goodyears down below, perhaps the time "below the surface" can motivate him to own up to not really believing 100% of the exaggerated scare stories about Indian Point, after all.

Either way, the public can be reassured, and widespread public concern that they were being shined-on by professional Chicken Little-ists can be finally and definitively be proven either right or wrong, by a different examination crew, and a different method, much deeper and more stringent than is habitually applied to political press agents.

Therefore it is with great solicitude for public sensibilities, and the expressed wishes of millions that their electric bills not be arbitrarily tripled, that I declare a RISING TIDE OF MOMENTUM for an Independent Democratic Keelhauling, ( ..an IDK...) to be held each week at the Indian Point dock, until the truth is finally brought to light (or all the Anti-Nuclear Democratic politicians quit, and go to live in Bahamas, near Anna Nicole's old place).

At any rate , tapes of the "IDK" will become collector's items, as well known demi-celebrity press-hacks puke, and grovel, admitting they had contempt for the American public for decades---( until the definitive "IDK").

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF NUCLEAR

2007-02-05T21:41:00.001+06:00

The Moral Imperative of Nuclear

I always knew the earth's core was hot, but It was unclear to me exactly why. On some astronomical bodies, such as Jupiter's moon Io , it's flexing due to Jupiter's gravity that causes purely mechanical rubbing heat. In some white stars, it's nuclear fusion. Guess what the earth's internal heat comes from? Good old U235 decay. In the earth's core, the exact, self-same process that runs every nuclear reactor in the world, is the ancient historical process causing earth's volcanoes, and thus all the geothermal power anywhere on the planet. Thus, ...U235 CAUSES our environment. The scope of this news is staggering, in its philosophical implications for environmentalists. It makes environmentalist opposition to human use of U235 fission into a backward cult of avoidance, a kind of meaningless earth-hating tabu, pure superstition, not tied to science, or love of the planet.

It's implication for those who love the planet, and are truly willing to act on that love outside narrow energy politics, is that just as Watson & Crick outed the double helix of DNA as the essence of biological life, Earth-Philosophers must now accept that U235 fission is in point of fact, the white-hot beating heart of Gaia.

Where does that place the American Nuclear Industry, and all it's spokespeople? It places them firmly in the right. Overwhelmingly on the side of the planet. Undeniably historical. Absolutely ethical. Backed up in all their assertions by both of Stephen J. Gould's "Two Magisteria"-- Science, and Religion (both capitalized).

The powerful arguments deriving from nuclear power being what the planet itself does, easily smash all pseudoscience attacks on nuclear as sophistry,... at their widest scope,... nothing but quibbling over means and methods.
Any argument over merest means and methods can be countered by engineering. Engineering can always find new means, new methods. All that is required is optimism, expertise, and funding.

The knowledge that we are right to use U235 is founded on the broadest philosophical stepping stone, a tacit license to proceed, given by the planet itself. Any person then arguing otherwise, is placed in the unenviable debating stance, of claiming that mankind as a race does not deserve to occupy the earth. That assertion is tantamount to a Lemming's call for mass suicide, and is evil nonsense, closely approaching Hitlerian angst in its self-hate, and its Faustian deathwish.

People at large emotionally recognize this Dr. Strangelove inversion displayed by anti-nukes, but cannot easily pin it down. I hereby share it with the U235 outreach community, exposed in all its magnificent simplicity.

Why nuclear? Because Gaia tells us so.
Enjoy

John Sweeney
Buchanan New York

Gaia is Nuclear

2007-02-02T21:57:00.001+06:00

Nuclear power is the gift of Gaia’s long past
The heat given in ancient times
By Gaia to her progeny
at Oklo then
At Peekskill now
One and the same
heart of matter
heart of gaia
warmth without fire
spontaneous living metals
warmed by history
to give us life

This planet, called Earth, or Terra, which has awakened as the living being known as Gaia has assembled itself over eons , eons in which examples were layed down for the wise to ponder and learn from. What better way to solve some modern day problem, than to observe what the planet or its life forms has done in the past, under similar circumstances.This outlook might be termed biomimetics, or Gaiamimetics, and its lessons ought to help avoid plans or agendae too uninformed, too unconnected to Gaian reality to succeed.

One incident that happened spontaneously 2 billion years ago, was the formation of the mats of Oklo. Bacterial beings, the earliest known life forms, have formed
mats or nodules around the globe, similar to coral reefs, as both their living homes, and as the historical record of their having existed. In Australia, the nodules of their habitations still exist,in coastal waters, and are known as stromatolites. At Oklo, in Gabon, Africa, similar creatures have left not only mats, but a mineralized historical record of the most surprising kind, a record only decipherable recently, using physical knowlege not available until late in the twentieth century. At Oklo, a deposit of heavy minerals existed in a wet environment, perhaps a stream. For 12 billion years or so, nothing notable occurred, until micro-organisms occupied the inner spaces between grains of this mineral deposit, using it as their home, but also inadvertently acting as a living moderator for certain chemical reactions now enabled to occur within the mineral itself.
On a steady basis, interludes of wetting, drying, growing, and changing occurred, completely altering the raw minerals, to suit the needs of the stromatolite population living within the grains, and leaving (as in Australia) , a permanent record of their having lived. Microbiotic symbiosis between bacteria and an inorganic chemical reaction had created the special conditions required to permanently alter the mineral, and thus write the record of the Oklo mats, in stone, or rather, in metal.The stone, a uraninite oxide, now contains an imbalance of its U238 and U235 metals which is easily recognizable to scientists, as the result of a biological nuclear reactor. The depletion in its 235 species of metal can’t be attributed to any other cause, and could not have happened any other way. The Oklo bacteria created their own living Indian Point. Without the bacteria –unmoderated– the reaction could not have occurred (and did not for 12 billion years before they arrived). Without the warmth of the reactor surrounding them, the bacteria could not have flourished as they did, for an estimated billion years, living high on the hog in their self-heating apartment house, their own self-warming coral reef in a river in Africa, a successful nuclearbiotic symbiosis of the first magnitude, teaching us how to use what Gaia provides– the spontaneous warmth of her own body, contained in her own mineral gift, used locally, in full biomimetic respectfulness,
and Gaiamimetic gratitude, only at the Indian Point Energy Center, our own biomimetic triumph on the Hudson. Far from being an interloper, invading a pristine shore, IPEC is seen in this light to be an environmental savior, using its biomimetics to gather Gaia’s gift, her self warming mineral deposits, cleanly, silently, and naturally, to warm & sustain us like the bacteria at Oklo, rather than burning up the dwindling atmosphere as other power plants, on coal, oil, or gas, will surely do.

You enjoy life.
We all, each & every one of us, sleep,
with a chunk of uranium beneath us.
That chunk is known as “Terra” or “Earth” Without the radiating core, Earth would be cold. Therefore we may look on Earth's uranium core as its heart, its "Life", or personalizing a bit, as Gaia herself. The heat of uranium makes the hot volcanic lava beneath us. Would you plunge your hand into the lava?…. Of course not.

HOWEVER …
All these powerful Gaian outpourings are GIFTS!!
Gaia gives, and we are allowed to accept, and use, or die out
and become mere food for whatever creature accepts the gifts.
(Gaia’s first Law).
Neither volcanoes nor uranium are evil,
they are both natural, even supernatural, gifts.
The greenest gifts ever given our humble monkeyrace.
We ought to use them.
Hope to meet you all someday,
and hoist a brandy (organic of course)
to our momma,
Goddess Gaia!

Now, to the Protection of Mother Earth’s Daughters!
6000 Chinese coal miners die on average each year, mining the coal used to create the permanent east Asian atmospheric disturbance which has been visible from outer space for the last decade, the brown death-smog which now grows increasingly worse each year. Not only do the massive mining operations mar the breast of mother earth, causing acid runoffs into streams, killing fish, deforesting entire provinces with irreparable open scars, but the impoverishment & lung disease following stunt the lives of millions, to place the sleeping giant, China, at the forefront of the fossil burning nations. The single technology most protective of mother earth, of the miners, of the atmosphere, of the steams, their fish, their trees, and all the poor people dependent on them, is the gift of the Earth itself, giving heat without burning anything, vastly reducing mining operations by a thousand, or ten thousand orders of magnitude for the same power (thus saving 6000 lives directly),
the minerals used by bacteria ages ago, and used today in the biomimetic triumph on the Hudson, Indian Point.

Closing Indian Point would necessitate the burning of oil, or coal in the USA, on the same scale as in China, shooting us backwards 200 years in one fell swoop, back to the age of “Black Birmingham”, when 100,000 people per year would die of lung disease in England, from the soot clouds of Birmingham’s factories. Mother Earth has given us a way out. Are we to deny its existence out of malicious self pride? Gaia’s self warming minerals are here whether we use them or not. You don’t burn them. You need not even mine any more of them (simply use what we already possess). Simply acknowlege the purity, the pristine invisibility of the Indian Point process, which makes no smoke, buries its own waste in its own casks, emits no greenhouse gas, and asks only to be allowed to continue to protect our mother earth with her own gift.

This is the moral fact of it.
This is the one ethical solution to it.
This is the scientific reality of it.
Any denial of this, is malicious self promotion,
based on malicious misinformation,
and is, in fact,
the knowing promotion of intentional death.

PAPIER MACHE' PANDERING ?

2007-02-01T19:44:00.001+06:00

There's a papier-mache' mockup of Indian Point, faithful in many details to the real original Indian Point, and it lives in journalist's communal psyche as a dependable knock. Write a few words about aging, ailing, leaking, distressed, woeful, etc., and you've got yourself a story. It's not even required to leave one's chair to investigate,.... all the needed parameters spring right to hand, out of communal memory of a nice hot purple flashing story angle, and blink on the page, obligingly, for our journalist, drawing attention, readership, and the satisfaction of having served up a palatable piece of work.

The only drawback, is that the leaking purple papier mache' model is not the real Indian Point.
The real Indian Point is apparently wearing a cloak of journalistic invisibility, kind of like Harry Potter.
Who built the cloaking device? I must state out front, that I don't believe journalists began the deception on their own... (except for one poor schmuck, who was fired for it). The list of perps is short, 2 organizations, and maybe 8 or 10 individuals, but buoyed by internet chumminess, and the active trading of techniques for capturing press attention, they hovered around their phones, and their letters-to-editors keyboards, and carefully applied papier mache',-- bit by bit, slopping on the bogus concern, the overdrawn and bathetic complaints, until the purple model of the domes rose high enough to obscure the real place ,and a journalistic staple, a dependable hot-button brouhaha, was hatched out of thin air, and activist chutzpah.

Do away with Indian Point? I can't wait! I am sick to death of the lurid claims, the carefully posed mock concern, the politician's sanctimonious puppet acts, mouthing less-than-credible complaints hatched for them by deluded and pushy place-grabbers, the kind of people who sneak to the front of democracy's feeding-line, and eat up all the deliberative attention for their own bogus complaints, leaving the rest of us screwed, annoyed, and without effective politicians, since ours are all tied up mired chin-deep in papier-mache'.

Yes, let us do away with Indian Point immediately--- the papier mache' version, that is.
While the Axis-Of-Anxiety (journalists, politicoes, and activists) fritters away weeks and months in their cute glue-spattered artist's smocks, carefully placing little Al Qaeda action figures on their toy domes, and making "brrrrrr---brrrrr" lip noises, while holding little model airplanes aloft above their papier mache masterpiece, the rest of us have to live here, and not get screwed.

We need an affordable Hudson Valley. That need, slipping ever so steadily out of our grasp, ought not be forgotten by our oh-so-ethical (they say) new Democratic administration, despite Riverkeeper's 5000 name mailing list,....... 5,000,000 of the rest of us need to hold the line, AND DO THEY CARE? Maybe not... you see, we are not pre-captured for them into a convenient voting bloc, like those 5000.

We need the power that the real Indian Point provides us, and I hear no construction plans coming out of Cuomo junior's lips, or new Governor Spitzer's planning office, so I know they have no plans for new power plants.Tell me--- HOW DO YOU ETHICALLY PROPOSE CLOSING INDIAN POINT WITHOUT BUILDING NEW PLANTS?

Short answer--you don't.

Even the National Academy of Scientists told us just that last year,.... but this new administration can only deal with papier mache', and so Cuomo jr. is hell-bent on ignoring both NAS, and us. So...... sadly, indeed, .....that makes new AG Cuomo's latest press-blast against Indian Point into a pandering exercise. Pandering to papier-mache', and a mailing list, while the real Indian Point hums away quietly, powering the last days of Hudson affordability.

If we stripped away the papier mache'---what would we see? We would see an environmentally proactive Entergy Corporation, remaking, improving, and cleaning up the mess Con Ed left here, gathering their national expertise to provide us what we have almost forgotten that we need, helping our communities with charity, volunteers, and positive interaction, maximizing power, minimizing damage, maximizing security, minimizing hype, maximizing value, minimizing loss..... in short..... doing a lot of the functions local and state government might be doing for us---IF THEY WERN'T POSING IN THEIR CUTE LITTLE BERETS AND ARTIST SMOCKS, in front of the big purple papier mache horror castle, for a vid byte to be shown to Riverkeeper's 5000 name mailing list, because Cuomo junior's political ambitions don't end with the state attorney general position!

Therefore, Let us all consider this question:

IS CUOMO JUNIOR'S POLITICAL FUTURE IMPORTANT ENOUGH , TO LET HIM SACRIFICE YOUR FUTURE FOR HIS?

Here, learn some truths about nuclear power

2007-01-31T17:47:00.000+06:00

As the U.S. Congress debates energy policy, White Nuclear Snowflake provides this summary review of the answers to frequently raised (false) objections to the only feasible solution to the U.S. and worldwide power shortage, nuclear energy.
Q: Aren't nuclear power plants dangerous to public health?
A: In fact, there has never been any nuclear accident in the United States that has endangered the health or welfare of the public. The worst American accident, at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, in 1979, injured no one.
Q: What about the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986?
A: The severity of that accident was a function of a poor reactor design, and inadequate training of plant personnel. In the United States, oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides the standards for reactor design and plant operation, which has contributed to our excellent nuclear power plant safety record.
The new generation of nuclear power plant designs, already being built internationally, feature passive safety systems, which simply shut the plant down if there is an operator error or equipment failure.
By comparison, during 2006, more than 5,000 miners died in China, during the production of the more than 1 billion tons of coal that power its economy. The health of the public in China's cities is also endangered, by the pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
As far as vulnerability to "terrorist" attacks is concerned, there is no public infrastructure that is as well protected as nuclear power plants. There is no scenario under which a release of radiation (which effect in low dosages is, in any case, completely exaggerated), would significantly affect public health.
Q: What do we do with the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants?
A: There is no such thing as nuclear "waste." This is a term used in popular parlance by anti-nuclear ideologues to frighten the public, and its elected representatives. More than 95% of the fission products created in commercial power plants can be reprocessed and recycled. The spent fuel from a typical 1,000 megawatt nuclear plant, which has operated over 40 years, can produce energy equal to 130 million barrels of oil, or 37 million tons of coal.
In reprocessing, fissionable uranium-235 and plutonium are separated from the high-level fission products. The plutonium can be used to make mixed-oxide fuel, which is currently used to produce electrical power in 35 European nuclear reactors. The fissionable uranium in the spent fuel can also be reused. From the remaining 3% of high-level radioactive products, valuable medical and other isotopes can be extracted.
Q: What about the stalemate over burying radioactive spent fuel in the Yucca Mountain geological depository in Nevada?
A: This is an irrational program which is a result of the success of the anti-nuclear nonproliferation lobby in the 1970s. The Department of Energy's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership proposes to spend billions of dollars, and more than a decade in research and development, to develop new, "proliferation proof," reprocessing technologies, under the guise of preventing the spread of plutonium and nuclear weapons, and bury the spent fuel at Yucca Mountain, in the meantime. This delay is unnecessary. Today, Britain, France, Russia, India, Japan, and China reprocess spent nuclear fuel, and technology today can be used here in the U.S. to eliminate the "nuclear waste" problem, in the short term.
Q: But if the United States goes ahead now with reprocessing, doesn't making this technology available increase the risk that other nations will develop nuclear weapons?
A: No nation has ever developed a nuclear weapon from a civilian nuclear power plant. If a nation has the intention to develop nuclear weapons, it must obtain the specific technology to do so. Israel is an example of a nation that has no civilian nuclear power plants, but has developed nuclear weapons.
The nonproliferation argument—that controlling technology will reduce the risk of weapons proliferation—is an historically demonstrable false one. Nations make decisions based on their security and military requirements, not on which technologies are available.
Q: Isn't it the case that nuclear energy is more expensive than fossil, or "alternative" fuels?
A: The radical escalation in the cost of building nuclear power plants in the late 1970s and 1980s was the result of political actions, not economics. Some plants projected to cost less than $1 billion ended up costing ten times that amount, because anti-nuclear "environmentalists," and legal intervenors were given free rein, using specious and ideological arguments, to delay plant construction for years, sometimes, for decades. Where there has been no political interference, new nuclear power plants have been built in 38 months, on schedule, and on budget, such as in Japan.
While it does require less up-front capital investment to build a gas-fired power plant than a nuclear plant, the operational cost over the 30-or-more-year lifetime of the gas plant swings heavily in favor of nuclear power. And compared to coal, the overall economy is not taxed to transport millions of tons of fuel.
In 2002, faced with increasing demand, and after careful economic analysis, the Tennessee Valley Authority decided that it was more economical to spend $1.8 billion to refurbish its Browns Ferry nuclear plant, which had been shut down since 1986, than build a gas-fired unit.
So-called renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, are not only inefficient because their energy is so dispersed, (see EIR Jan. 19) for discussion of energy flux density), they are so unreliable that back-up power supplies (fossil or nuclear) must be available for any time it is not sunny or windy. So, not only do consumers bear the expense of inefficiency, the entire electric grid system pays the price of having to provide stand-by redundant power-generating capacity to ensure grid reliability.
It was determined in the 1970s, that alternative, "soft" energy sources would only be competitive with fossil and nuclear plants, when energy costs reached a $100/barrel oil-equivalent price. To bring these uneconomical sources on line before then, political decisions were made to spend $20 billion in Federal subsidies for alternative energy, while Federal expenditures for advanced nuclear technologies came to a screeching halt. It has been this irrational investment policy that has made nuclear power "expensive."
Q: How can the large capital cost of new nuclear power plants be financed?
A: There must be a sea-change in economic policy, where the reconceptualization of the Federal budget on the basis of needed capital investment, are the guidelines.
The provision of reliable and affordable electricity, as recognized by President Franklin Roosevelt more than 50 years ago, is not a luxury, but a necessity. For this reason, in the 1930s, the electric utility industry was regulated by Federal and state governments, to protect consumers from financial manipulation and fraud, and to ensure that affordable power would be available to every home, farm, and factory.
The deregulation of the U.S. utility industry, beginning in the early 1990s, has nearly destroyed an electrical energy system that was the envy of the world. Utility companies must have access to low-interest, long-term credit, assurance from government regulators and policy-makers that "environmental" sabotage and delay will not be tolerated; and that a crash effort will be made to rebuild the nuclear manufacturing industry, which has nearly disappeared. These must be approached as a national policy, not dependent upon Wall Street financiers, but by directing resources into infrastructure through fiscal policy.
Q: But the immediate energy crisis is our dependence upon petroleum. How does nuclear energy alleviate that problem?
A: In two ways. In the long term, the only sensible and renewable replacement for petroleum-based liquid fuels is hydrogen. When next-generation, high-temperature nuclear fission reactors (which are under development now in South Africa and China) come on line, splitting water into its constituents elements will make hydrogen available as a versatile and universally available transportation fuel.
In the near term, petroleum consumption could be dramatically reduced through large-scale investment in mass transit and rail. Our decrepit diesel-fueled rail system should be electrified. Half of the nation's truck-hauled freight should be taken off the road and put on the rails. Millions of miles, and hours, of commuters driving automobiles should be eliminated, by using public transportation. A crash program to build conventional intra-city commuter trains, and magnetic levitation (maglev) systems for inter-city transport, would replace finite and polluting fossil fuel-based transport with nuclear power.
Q: But isn't it the case that there is broad opposition to new nuclear plants, and that citizens do not want plants built in "their backyard?"
A: The opposite is the case. Over the past two years, as utilities have indicated they will be applying to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licenses to build new nuclear plants, communities have been competing with each other, to offer attractive packages to companies, in order to encourage them to build plants in their "backyard."
Last year, resolutions were passed by communities in Louisiana; Oswego, New York; and Fort Gibson, Mississippi, to support the addition of new nuclear reactors to existing nuclear sites. The states of Georgia, Utah, South Carolina, and South Dakota have passed resolutions supporting the building of new nuclear power plants.
At the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, just a stone's throw from Washington, D.C., the Board of County Commissioners voted last August to offer $300 million in tax breaks to the Constellation Energy Group to add a third reactor at the Calvert Cliffs site. The plant is the largest employer in that Maryland county, and the $16 million it pays in taxes each year contributes 9% of the county's total tax revenue.
In September 2006, Bisconti Research Inc. released the results of a telephone survey, of a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults, about nuclear energy. The survey found that nearly 70% of those queried support nuclear power, and 68% of those who live near an operating plant, support building a new nuclear reactor at the existing site.
In point of fact, the aging and off-base anti nuclear movement is dwindling fast, most of its heroes now well past retirement age, not in touch with the true wishes of the new, 300,000,000-strong US population, and spouting myths so ludicrous, that many just shrug, and consider them an annoyance to all. However, because a media anxious for controversy always gives them inordinate coverage, they try to maintain an illusion of still being as strong as they were in the 1970's. Except among celebrities, they are not. Celebrities use them as a convenient way to get in front of cameras.Behind the cameras, no "movement" exists.

THE UNAFFORDABLE LUXURY OF FEAR

2007-01-26T02:29:00.000+06:00

Do we need a new petition, asking us to shut down our infrastructure?

In 2002, when Indian Point discussion was current, and relevant to ongoing public events, Mr. Ross Weale jr. started a "Close Indian Point" petition. With great effort, utilizing every associated activist group then in operation, teams of canvassers were sent out with clipboards, through the entire region , in a maximum signup effort, with over 100 core canvassers gaining about 8000 signatures. This was the high tide of anti Indian Point concern, and the high tide of activist cross-cooperation, and it garnered 8000 signatures. Never closed, that petition sits online with about 10,000 signatures, the last 2000 having dribbled in, in the intervening 5 years, through the few web activism sites still remaining, the response diminishing steadily over time.

Simultaneously with Mr Weale's creation, a pro-Indian Point petition was begun by those friendly to Indian point. That petition quickly and easily garnered 13,000 signatures, thanks to the efforts of town residents, friends, and workers at or around the plant. It too sits online today, now abandoned, after the 13,000 to 8,000 drubbing given to the supposed "widespread anti coalition" at its own high point in early 2003. There was no further need to demonstrate that the greatest possible efforts of the naysayers, had met up with an almost casual landslide from the silent majority, had definitively lost, and had walked away, sadder but wiser.

What has changed?

The isolated gaggle of bloggers now proposing a new petition, is obviously unaware of this minor piece of local history, and that is sad. However, general feelings in the populace are moving away from nuclear jitters, and swinging toward taxation anxiety, and lifestyle anxiety , in the tough years after Iraq, and into 2007, when what had seemed assured previously, now looks to evaporate in a tide of lost Mirant tax suits, skyrocketing school taxes, a broken housing bubble, and a massive campesino invasion from central America, putting the very stability & viability of the region at risk.

Who is it, that is asking us to revisit the worst months of our lives, the months after September 2001, for strategies on living in 2007 and beyond? We need NEW strategies, ones that ought to be looking to better lives ahead, putting all the shibboleths of the discredited Bush regime behind us forever, especially any false terror fear, or malicious faux "activism", abused covertly for personal power, or gain.(or for no good reason at all).

The monumental impossibility of ever building new infrastructure is becoming more and more clear, as the TZ bridge sits crumbling, route 9 remains a relic of the 1920's, routes 119 and 35 are totally overwhelmed with no enlargements in sight, and White Plains itself sinks slowly into semi-permanent ghetto-hood, despite "renewal" after "renewal", and the jewel in Westchester's crown, the Southern Westchester Children's hospital, gets spun off, simply because it was planned in an earlier, more deep-pocketed time, and we simply can no longer afford it, or anything else like it.

So let us not be so anxious to dig ourselves into a bond-issue hole, inside a lost-electricity trench,
holding a still-radioactive non-producing Indian Point, while new avalanches still unseen, of the 2010's, and the 2020's bury us, and all our future hopes.

We must use what we have to survive. We must manage it , use it, and protect it. To do otherwise would be foolhardy at best, and criminal at worst. Let Indian Point be.

INDIAN POINT--WHO SAVES US FROM OUR SAVIORS?

2007-01-24T01:24:00.000+06:00

It is truly wonderful that the Westchester board of legislators has the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to petition for an Independent Safety Assessment of Indian Point, and they certainly have the right to express their wishes, even if it is more a matter of being politicked from above by Mike Kaplowitz, rather than asked from below (by their constituents) to do so.

However,... I believe what is at question here, can only be answered in part by NRC, even if they double the size of their agency,.. and move the entire NRC staff up to Buchanan to boot for ten or more years to do so.

What is NOT being assessed, is the credibility of promoters' claims (Mr. Kaplowitz among them) that there is actually any useful result for such an ISA, no matter which way it turns out. Sending the same inspectors back to Indian Point one more time, after they leave later this week, can turn up nothing they have not found yet, in some 50 years of inspecting the place. Sending new or unfamiliar inspectors to try to learn 50 years worth of engineering in six months is an invitation to a boondoggle, and a nonsense result. What is being ignored, the huge stinking purple elephant in Mr. Kaplowitz' living room, is the 50 years' worth of evidence that Indian Point is already safe, already up to code, already well inspected, and that inspecting it further does not therefore arise from any real world evidence. Reality has assessed Indian Point since 1955, and found it up to providing clean silent energy safely and without incident. Can politician Kaplowitz, angling for a Spitzer appointment, assess Indian Point any better than the 20 million ratepayers who have happily paid their bills since Eisenhower was our president? I truly doubt it, polymath that Mike K. might be--- real estate mogul, Westchester County whip, and now self-convinced safety & security genius for the northeast region. In fact, I think Mr. K. might just be spreading his talents a bit thin here, and that of late, his interest pretty clearly diverges from the public interest in this (meaning the peoples' interest).

So where do our county legislators turn, for an Independent Sincerity Assessment, of Mr. Kaplowitz' motives, and judgement? Unfortunately, there exists no NRC to regulate overeager personalities, whose command of a board room may just equate to a monster pillaging of the region's affordability--- to pay for a golden-tongued ego's rise to state office. Where do our legislators turn for an Independent Credibility Assessment of dangers that never seem to materialize? To whom can they turn for an Independent Viability Assessment of Westchester's tax rate, and electricity rate structure, once they pull the plug on the common man, for the sake of well-dressed "angry angels" in five years happily dividing up the Hudson shore for more sterile condo projects, while the blackouts multiply, and the stable core of Westchester's population empties out into the south, and the midwest?

In these areas of inquiry, an independent assessment is sorely needed.

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THE GHOST IN THE FISHES

2007-01-22T21:14:00.000+06:00

Why would strontium be found in 4 fish, and not found in 8 other fish? Why would a reputable lab find 7 times less (or more) strontium, than another reputable lab? Is there a conspiracy, with Doctor Strangelove secretly irradiating some fish in his underground lair, and then releasing them in the Hudson at Troy, to mislead us all, for political purposes? Are the strontium tests themselves unreliable as performed, and should we not take their results as "scientific proof" of anything?

To educate myself, I googled "Strontium test protocols" , and waded in, reading half a dozen DOE documents so dense, that 3 or 4 cups of coffee are definitely recommended for anybody else so inclined.One document is Sr-03-RC, Vol.1, HASL-300, 28th edition "Strontium 90 in Environmental Matrices".

This is DOE's own short description:
Strontium is separated from calcium, other fission products, and other natural radioactive elements.Fuming HNO3 (fuming nitric acid >86% pure) separations are used to remove the calcium and most of the other interfering ions.Radium, lead and barium are removed with BACRO4, (barium chromate).Traces of other fission products are scavenged with iron hydroxide adsorbent. The sample is isolated and Yttrium ingrowth is allowed to occur, 97% ingrowth taking place in 14 days. After ingrowth Yttrium/Strontium equilibrium has been attained, the yttrium 90 is precipitated as a hydroxide and then converted to an oxylate for counting on a low background gas proportional beta counter. Chemical yield is determined with a strontium 85 tracer by counting in a gamma well detector.

Got all that?

This being a Department of Energy test procedure, it is geared to gross amounts of strontium, in such places as the Hanford atom bomb plant in Washington. The procedure for testing soil states: "Weigh out enough soil to generate an activity at least 10 times background (ideally 100 times) into an appropriate container....."

In order to get a good test run, the technician is being advised to use enough sample, to have 100 times the background radiation, just to begin. No Hudson river fish ever had anywhere near this level, in fact by this warning alone, the test ought not to have been run. (background is the level a geiger counter reads, when it is nowhere near any radiation). As a matter of fact, by geiger counter alone, the Hudson fish had NO DETECTABLE ACTIVITY. (When frisked, the fish were clean).

So was there ever strontium in any fish to begin with?
Maybe not.

The ground beneath Indian Point is not soil, not aggregate gravel, It is solid ancient rock, straight down to China, rock with no interstices, except from fracture cracks induced by the blasting to build Indian Point. The fracture cracks, not being geological in origin, do not go anywhere, but exist in a small circle around each blast location, So, rather than some "pool" existing, or some "groundwater" (as you might find in some midwestern area, like the oglala aquifer) there actually is no pool, and there is no groundwater (no aquifer-- All drinking water in the area is piped in from upstate reservoirs.)
What does sit beneath Indian Point is a solid rock mass, with microscopic fracture cracks of very short length, centered on the Indian Point excavation profile. Water from plant activities over the last 50 years has entered the fracture cracks, and now exists within tiny feathered spaces inside solid rock, kind of the way your 3 fingers exist in the holes in a bowling ball, but just imagine the solid part of the bowling ball being 1000 feet across, and 1000 feet deep, and imagine the finger holes shrunk down to a millionth of an inch in diameter. The trapped water is not going anywhere, is not free, and is not connected (as far as anyone knows) with any geological flow channel able to move it anywhere.THAT'S why it was able to collect, and be found. It's in a jar.
Looking globally at the 3 dimensional outline of the "jar" (the part of the bowling ball that's drilled out) you get the misnomered "plume" of some 350 feet, a non-plume because it is just a virtual object, an autocad outline of those drill samples where microscopic water is trapped within rock. Actually, the whole thing, plume, and non-plume are all solid rock.
"Cleaning the Rocks"
Right now Entergy, using the virtual "plume" as a drilling guide, is emptying the "plume" with suction shafts, and reverse pumping these shafts, to draw whatever is in the feathered cracks BACK UP to a treatment station, and to draw whatever is seeping down toward the feathered cracks OUT through the suction shafts. Meanwhile, at the top, in the old Con Edison fuel pool where the original leak happened in 1996, Entergy has set up a cleaning station to remove all radioactive stuff from the water by chemical absorption means, thus removing any potential future leaks, and when they are done, the entire fuel pool will be dried, hermetically sealed, emptied, epoxied, fitted with permanent sensors to note any recurrances, and retired, empty of any fuel, with the fuel going to dry casks, or Yucca mountain. Finito, strontium leak.
If and/or when Entergy leaves, this cleaning operation will cease. It is not mandated by law, and Entergy is doing it to be a good enough neighbor to be able to run their revenue making units a few more years for us....NRC has not ruled on these leak issues elsewhere, and is actually looking to Entergy to invent the new technological framework right here, in their proactive and environmentally helpful suction & cleanout routine. If NRC likes it, they may make all the other nuke plants do it too. If Entergy is politically prevented from finishing it, no nuke plant anywhere will be forced to do it, and NRC will probably drop it, and not return to it. So everybody better let their single environmental hero in this--Entergy-- do its job, or misguided activism will have had the effect of crapping up the environment permanently, around EVERY nuclear plant. So, that kinda covers the "strontium plume" issue.There actually IS no water plume. It's solid rock, with water trapped inside in micro-cracks.

Now on to the issue of maybe-there-is and maybe-there-isn't strontium in Hudson river fish. The world was blanketed in strontium from 1945 through 1995, when all the nuclear powers tested atom bombs above ground.Future archeologists will date the earth by its pre-strontium, and post strontium layers, just like the pre and post Santorini layers, or the 65 million year ago asteroid hit. It is everywhere, including in Andrew Spano's molars. If Mr. Spano was chopped up and ground to a mush, centrifuged to a paste, cleansed with 8 successive baths of nitric acid, re-centrifuged to a crystalline residue, which was then mixed with ion-free distilled water, boiled for 8 hours, put through a barium chromate reduction, re-centrifuged, dried, and then put through a set of iron hydroxide scavenging runs, and cooked onto the surface of a special stainless steel disk, which was then heat-dried for 2 days, before being isolated in a sealed flask for a month, and then unsealed, and run through a geiger counter looking for a tell tale 20,000 decays per minute beta particle profile, specific to Yttrium, and those Yttrium radiations extrapolated backwards by a very nebulous calculus computation , inferring the PREVIOUS presence of Strontium, from the current presence of its daughter product Yttrium 90, then, depending on whether the lab tech had cleansed and calibrated every solution correctly, run every reaction exactly the right time, not contaminated any step of the 238 steps, and had then computed the back-track correctly, we would get EITHER just background levels OR a level just a wee bit above background. Taking into account the fact that bone & tooth COLLECT strontium, concentrating it by about 5.7 times over background, it means that any ground-up-tooth reading near or just above background actually implies an environmental level BELOW background (by a factor of 5.7), Knowing that any detection of Strontium is by inference, by circumstantial evidence only, and that the minimum detectable level is not friendly to the tester, we now have an explanation of why different labs get different readings. Without the advised "100 times background" sample size, mentioned above, the test is so nebulous, so easy to do "wrong", and so tied to background, that it can't be believed, unless you set up a program of constant fish collection, and constant testing, to generate a body of samples that would screen out individually unsatisfactory test runs..... AND you would need to compare this to a CONTROL COHORT , of "definitely-non-strontium" fish, and run each one of those tests at the same time as each of the "strontium-fish" tests, doing it under the typical double blind protocol, in order to determine where MDL lies (Minimum Detectable Level). Our challenge as a scientific community is to find a control cohort anywhere on the planet. There just might not BE one....Maybe cave fish from deep underground somewhere (provided no strontium rain ever penetrated their cave). The test protocols are tough, making up about a 160 page document altogether.. One surprising and dismaying thing I found was the test procedure for finding strontium in Bikini Atoll fish, was double the length of the test used for finding strontium in freshwater fish. the "Marine Protocol" is much longer and more rigorous, because the dissolved residual actinides in the high mineral content of seawater causes false positives, and must be religiously screened out, by an additional 175 steps not done in the non-marine protocol. Once a person has read up on the marine protocol the fact will hit you, that THE HUDSON RIVER IS BRACKISH! Did the test lab use the Marine Protocol, or the freshwater protocol? Since the Hudson salt line moves up and down river with the tides and the rains, unless a separate "Semi-Marine-Protocol" were devised (AND CORRECTLY APPLIED), a large error trap, one might even say a GAPING ERROR TRAP yawns beneath a single test run, on a much-too-small sample of 12 Hudson fish, done only once and with no control cohort , and a deceptive well-nigh impossible to determine MDL level, depending on just how salty each fish was.

Conclusion? Almost all of these tests so far have been reading technician errors, and mistaken MDL computations, and reporting them out as the possible existence of non-existent strontium. THAT'S why the levels vary, and THAT'S why its supposedly in some fish but not in others. We are reading the technician's inability to validly run the test, on such tiny non-radioactive samples.

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Greenpeace.... WHERE ARE YOU?

2007-01-18T23:58:00.000+06:00

Much was made of NYC banning transfats in restaurants, a groundbreaking intrusion of dietism into the free enterprise world. The banning of smoking in public went over rather easily a decade ago, its negative impact more or less proven by assent, (and a successful near-billion dollar class action suit). We await the next lifestyle pogrom, and earnestly hope it bans only those activities we ourselves avoid. Seeing as all the broken limbs, fostbitten extremities, and a gaggle of participant deaths recently, have set the stage for "A Perfect Banning", it remains only for the Pelosista hordes to caucus, and rid America of the scourge of mountain climbing. Mountain climbing, mountain biking, mountain skiing, mountain leveling, and mountain-purchasing ought to be thrown in the pot, too. Thus can we save the mountains. See how it works? We ban, we save. It's easy. Mindless, even. The banning of alcohol would be a good second-next, if it wasn't for the fact that it was tried, and made things worse. What a fine world it could be without all the nasty drunks beating spouses, and killing innocents on the roads. I guess we're kinda stuck with the drunks, the DWI events, the endless rehab costs, and even the liver surgery bills, which come into play only at the endstage.

Funny thing about banning. The Islamics banned alcohol 1000 years ago, and made it stick. (except for during Ramadan, and only after sundown). So you never get 100% from a good banning, I suppose. You see, its the escape clause that makes it workable, and aiming for 1000% would have ruined everything. Deuced clever, those Muslim rulemakers, truly cognizant of human limitations! When 'Greenpeace Incorporated' sends its attack boats up the Hudson to ban our local power plant, I'm hoping they recall the "Ramadan Exclusion", and let us use nuclear power for at least the sweltering July-August dog days, and maybe for the December blow-up-yard-decoration fest, a simple-minded but happy aberration, somewhat beloved of non-Marxists, and now attracting world interest in its various guises as Chanukka, Kwanzaa, and even the agnostic "Festivus".

Yes, a few simple exclusions, like for instance, maybe allowing Hudson Valley Hospital Emergency Room to continue to use nuclear power, (seeing as Entergy donated the place to us 2 years ago) might make the "No Nukes" pill go down a little easier! I hope the "Masters of Banning" remember to keep Valhalla prison on good steady nuke power, seeing as a blackout there might release a horde of banned individuals back out among us, unwanted. We definitely would not want THAT!

With all the right exclusions in place (let's say--- RFK jr's manse at Howland's Lake, Andy Spano's digs, and sloop Clearwater's dock burglar alarm), the stage could be set for Westchesterites to "bite the bullet" and go non-nuclear at last!

I can't wait!

Greenpeace..... WHERE ARE YOU?