Environment
Florida’s right-wing Governor Ron DeSantis has vetoed a bill designed to kill solar power in Florida.
But “progressive” Governor Gavin Newsom is standing by as pro-utility regulators embrace new taxes and metering restrictions set to devastate California’s solar industry.
Newsom is also supporting prolonged operations at the high-cost Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which is surrounded by active earthquake faults near San Luis Obispo.
DeSantis and Newsom could face off in the 2024 race for the White House.
DeSantis is an extreme pro-corporate social conservative known nationwide for his bigoted “Don’t Say Gay” pubic school mandate. He’s primarily identified by his MAGA-style attacks on human rights, voter access, democracy, abortion rights, social justice and more.
In most mainstream polls, DeSantis now runs a strong second to Donald Trump for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination. He’s already raised tens of millions of dollars and built a high national media profile.
As he begins to campaign for the White House, Gov. Gavin Newsom is toying with extending operations at two of the world’s most dangerous atomic reactors, sited at the aptly named Diablo Canyon, nine miles west of San Luis Obispo.
The coastal nukes are surrounded by a dozen earthquake faults, just 45 miles from the San Andreas, whose eruption could send an apocalyptic radioactive cloud into Los Angeles County, just 180 miles downwind. Potential human casualties could far exceed ten millon. The economic and ecological devastation would be incalculable.
Newsom’s emergence as a potential atomic triggerman has been tortured and tragic. Long marketed as an environmentalist, Newsom has fiercely criticized the state’s largest utility, for good reason.
Since 2000, Pacific Gas & Electric has twice fled to bankruptcy.
In 2010, PG&E’S under maintained gas lines caused a San Bruno explosion that killed eight people while burning 19 homes. Its grid mismanagement ignited huge fires that devastated northern California forests while killing more than 80 people, incinerating the entire town of Paradise (which Trump famously mis-labelled “Pleasure”).
A Nuclear Nightmare Bill
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has introduced S.4064 - International Nuclear Energy Act of 2022. Designed to spread American nuclear technology internationally and end prohibition on foreign ownership of nuclear in the US, Manchin’s bill would:
Create fast-track procedures for deemed civil nuclear exports for countries defined by the Secretary of Energy. Expand the Export-Import Bank program on Transformational Exports to include civil nuclear facilities and related goods. Create the U.S. Nuclear Fuels Security Initiative to reduce and eventually eliminate reliance on Chinese and Russian nuclear fuels.The proposed legislation – like the campaign to keep Diablo Canyon, California’s last nuke standing - is part of a current concerted push to resuscitate a moribund industry that should be allowed to die before it kills us.
A Mounting Pyramid of Catastrophes
The latest stab at reviving nuke power is mocked by the actual reactors.
Today 93 are allegedly operable in the US, more than 400 worldwide….including the 15 in Putin’s Ukraine crosshairs, plus four lethal corpses at Chernobyl.
Every atomic reactor is an apocalypse in progress, set to explode at any time from error, terror, age, nature.
Every nuke spews heat, radiation, carbon, gases. They all kill birds, fish, people, eco-systems, the planet. They all create unmanageable wastes, untamable fire, unconscionable inequity, uninsurable danger.
All US reactors are more than 25 years old. They can’t get private insurance. Nobody can guarantee their individual safety.
A dozen-plus earthquake faults could shatter California’s Diablo Canyon, says former NRC site inspector Michael Peck. So could the San Andreas.
Diablo is embrittled, cracked, decayed, under-maintained. Its radiation, heat and chemicals fry the planet and the seascape. Its owner killed eight people in San Bruno with an avoidable gas explosion, then eighty more torching northern California.
In this special emergency edition of the SOLARTOPIA GREEN POWER & WELLNESS SHOW we confront the horrifying realties of the fifteen Ukrainian nuclear power plants now teetering on the brink of the Apocalypse.
Pssst . . . here’s a little secret. Don’t tell anyone, OK? It might cause trouble.
In recent years, there have been more than a thousand lawsuits filed around the world — including a few in the United States — challenging corporate or governmental negligence about climate change and ecosystem damage.
That’s not the secret. This is the secret: These lawsuits, especially as they continue and grow in number, come with consequences beyond comprehension. They are infinitely larger than “the law” they are humbly summoning in order to address specific issues — a construction company dumping rubble in Ecuador’s Vilcabamba River, loggers and farmers destroying the Amazon rainforest, the state of Montana promoting the fossil fuel industry — and are pushing the social and legal status quo well beyond the abstractly linear world it presumes to control.
09 december 21
Amidst our ever-escalating climate Apocalypse, the viral insanity of atomic power gets ever worse. Now it’s spread deep into the Biden Administration, with no apparent cure in sight.
Nowhere is the atomic disease more potentially lethal than at California’s ancient, aging, embrittled reactors at Diablo Canyon.
Throughout the US there are now 93 big licensed commercial reactors. Except for one, they are all more than 30 years old. Many are more than 40.
Worldwide there are more than 400.
After more than 60 years of uneven operation, the US nuke industry still can’t get private insurance. Any American reactor could be blowing up as you read this, taking down your health, your family, your home.
Since there’s no private insurer (your homeowner’s policy explicitly excludes liability from any reactor disaster) you’ll have no recourse beyond a very limited federal taxpayer fund…if that.
Over the decades the industry has touted one “Nuclear Renaissance” after another. Each time, with a few pliant “environmentalists” in tow, they declare atomic energy’s time has really really come.
“Protecting the border” is essentially the same thing as protecting your own property, right? You’ve got to protect it from invaders, thieves — lawless jerks who want what you have.
If you’re rich and paranoid, then you have no doubt that’s what refugees are, especially down there at the southern U.S. border, or if you’re the European Union, the northern edge of Africa. The EU’s “Mexico” is the failed state of Libya, which, thanks to its former colonial conquerors, can now make a little scratch stopping the desperate hordes of people fleeing poverty, violence and the vicious effects of climate change from crossing the Mediterranean and finding a more secure life in Europe.
How do we move beyond a world that is shredded by invisible (imaginary) borders into endless enclaves of us and them? How do we embrace Planet Earth as a single, organic whole, of which we are just a part? How do we govern with a reverence for this whole?