Environment
Atomic Energy’s death spiral has spawned a run to green power.
But the toxic mineral lithium has become a critical pitfall…with clear ways around it that demand attention.
Humankind’s 400+ licensed large commercial reactors embody history’s most expensive technological failure.
Once hyped as “too cheap to meter,” just three “Peaceful Atom” plants have opened in the US since 1996, all of them very late and hugely over budget. Four at Japan’s Fukushima blew up in 2011, with ever-escalating economic, ecological and biological costs. Two in South Carolina are outright $9 billion failures. Projects in Georgia (US), Finland, France and the UK have come with catastrophic delays, overruns and cancellations. So have much-hyped Small Modular Reactors, and the taxpayer-funded idea of restarting nukes already dead.
And in the post DeepSeek era, gargantuan projected power demands for Artificial Intelligence and crypto are coming back to Earth.
What if bodies of water were guaranteed the kinds of legal rights that would criminalize their destruction? What if communities had the authority to enact laws that prevented pollution, extraction, and waste-dumping?
This would be the case under a new bill introduced into the New York State Assembly by Patrick Burke on Wednesday. If it becomes law, New York Assembly Bill AO5156A, the Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights, would recognize “unalienable and fundamental rights to exist, persist, flourish, naturally evolve, regenerate and be restored” for the Great Lakes and other watersheds and ecosystems throughout New York State.
Greenpeace is well known around the world as an activist environmental organization over the last more than fifty years. Internationally, it’s based in the Netherlands, but has huge branches in many countries. To say the organization is high-profile is almost an understatement. Its ships have tried to stop nuclear testing, been fired on by the
French, been in one mess after another with Japan and other whaling countries, and more. It’s resilience and activism has won it huge support from individual donors along with a very effective door-to-door canvass, which has allowed Greenpeace to maintain its independence, fueled by zany, media grabbing tactics.
The foundation of good health is simple: Wholesome food, fresh air, physical movement and low stress. Yet, these fundamental principles are absent in modern food production.
Animal factories—industrial-scale factory farm livestock operations—create ideal conditions for the emergence and rapid spread of disease, including avian flu.
High-density confinement, genetic uniformity, and poor air quality weaken birds’ immune systems and enable viruses to mutate and transmit quickly.
Unlike in natural settings, where biodiversity and space act as buffers against disease, factory farms concentrate thousands or even millions of animals in close quarters, amplifying viral loads and increasing the risk of spillover to wild birds and even humans.
The industry’s reliance on mass culling, vaccines, and “biosecurity measures” fails to address the root cause of so many food safety and food security crises: an unnatural, high-stress system that prioritizes profit over resilience.
Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s egg crisis, resulting in soaring prices, plummeting availability, and over 120 million chickens killed due to avian flu scares.
Is It An Inalienable Human Right to Self-Destruct and Take Others With You?
Are a few decades of electric power really worth future millennia of radioactive waste deadly to all living things?
Nuclear Logic
Atomic reactors were originally developed to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Using the heat of their operation to produce steam pressure to drive turbines to generate electric power was a convenient cover story necessary to overcome people’s fear and repugnance against using nuclear weapons after the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since nuclear reactors’ inception, over 50 years of repeated official promises to ban nuclear weapons have never been honored.
Every nuclear power reactor in every nuclear nation, and the accumulated radioactive spent fuel from its operation, is a potential nuclear weapon-in-place for saboteurs and terrorists.
Uranium mining, milling, enriching, fuel fabrication and nuclear reactors are also the industrial foundation for nuclear weapons production.
The ‘inalienable right’ to have nuclear power therefore also carries with it the right to make nuclear bombs.
Today Putin’s Russia used a drone to hit the sarcophagus that covers seething nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, in Ukraine.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/europe/russia-ukraine-drones-chernobyl-intl-hnk/index.html
As of this writing, there has been no formal statement from the Russians.
But it really doesn’t matter: this terrifying strike sends the world a clear message...in the age of drone warfare, any “Peaceful Atom” plant can be turned into a radioactive apocalypse at any time.
Chernobyl is not in a “hot” war zone. Drone warfare has evolved into a highly sophisticated, carefully controlled nightmare with very advanced computerization.
https://progressive.org/latest/drones-nukes-and-the-myth-of-reactor-safety-wasserman-20250129/
the deadly illusion that nuke power helps alleviate climate chaos is balanced by its definitive economic failure.
all atomic reactors emit Carbon 14, massive waste heat & unmanageable radioactive wastes.
they also cost double or more all projections for wind, solar & battery backup.
of the 4 reactors attempted in the US since 2000, 2 at VC Summer totally failed, costing $9 billion in pure waste. the 2 at Vogtle, GA, came in years late & at 2x the promised cost, nearing $40 billion.
SMRs (silly mythological rip-offs) have already failed, will never compete with renewables & have had their projected market upended by DeepSeek & the realization that data centers will not need the massive quantities of electricity the industry has been scamming for a phony hyper-powered future.
meanwhile wind, solar, geothermal & batteries continue to plummet in price while soaring in efficiency.
In the wake of catastrophic fires that have devastated Los Angeles, America’s top anti-green Luddites——Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom—-met at a southern California airport, where Melania greeted the Governor with exceptional warmth.
In service to the coal, oil, nuke and gas burners at the core of climate chaos, her husband’s“drill baby drill” war is devastating a green-powered future built on wind turbines, solar farms, battery storage, electric cars, micro-grids and more.
Trump’s alleged rival, Gavin Newsom, has escalated that attack in California. In 2022, he betrayed a state-approved plan to transcend the states last two atomic reactors with a renewable-based energy system set to compete in global markets.
But forcing Diablo Canyon’’s prolonged operations, Newsom risks a radioactive apocalypse that would dwarf the Los Angeles fires, while currently costing the state at least $11 billion in over-market charges through 2030.
Simultaneously, Newsom’s hand-picked Public Utilities Commission has hit the state’s rooftop solar industry with a multi-billion-dollar wave of bankruptcies, costing at least 17,000 jobs.
Our GREEP Zoom #209 begins with “Time” by our Poet Laureate MIMI GERMAN.
We hear the latest about Leonard Peltier from TATANKA BRICCA and LYDIA PONCE in concert with the Indigenous community supporting him: “I would like to be out of prison, but I am a free man.”
BARBARA WRIGHT reminds us to thank The Creator for the fact that Leonard is out of prison & with his people.
LIndsay Graham, Lisa Murkowsky & Susan Collins are summoned for praise by DANIELA GIOSEFFI.
Will Trump’s GOP wear itself out with a Rope-a-Dope of illegal acts, asks MYLA RESON.
We hear from MIMI S about the need to recognize what should have been with Bernie Sanders.
From Columbus, Ohio we hear from SANDY BOLZENIUS about the kinds of election fraud that turned the Buckeye State to Bush in 2004. .
From co-convenor MIKE HERSH we bemoan the Democrats’ lack of a backbone—except when disenfranchising people of color.
“How long can they keep this up?” wonders MELISSA HALL.
Massive disenfranchisement demands a class action case against the Democrats for failing to protect the vote, says DAVID SALTMAN.
Among his many actions on Monday in his first day as U.S. president, Donald Trump ordered a “temporary withdrawal” of any new federal leasing of the Outer Continental Shelf for new offshore wind projects.
As Reuters reported, Trump “suspended new federal offshore wind leasing pending an environmental and economic review, saying windmills are ugly, expensive and harm wildlife. ‘We're not going to do the wind thing. Big, ugly windmills. They ruin your neighborhood,’ he said. Without providing evidence, he said offshore wind projects were behind an increase in whale deaths off the U.S. East Coast in recent years.”
New York State and other states have embraced offshore wind. As its governor, Kathy Hochul, declared in her “State of the State” address a week earlier, “We recommitted to reducing carbon emissions with offshore wind off the coast of Long Island.”