Environment

 “The Fukushima Disaster, The Hidden Side of the Story,” is a just-released film documentary, a powerful, moving, information-full film that is superbly made. Directed and edited by Philippe Carillo, it is among the strongest ever made on the deadly dangers of nuclear technology.
It begins with the words in 1961 of U.S. President John F. Kennedy: “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by an accident, or miscalculation or by madness.”
It then goes to the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plants in Japan after they were struck by a tsunami. Their back-up diesel generators were kicked in but  “did not run for long,” notes the documentary. That led to three of the six plants exploding—and there’s video of this—“releasing an unpreceded amount of nuclear radiation into the air.”

Because it can’t compete with the massive rise of renewable energy, its death rattle has morphed into yet another of the industry’s periodic big budget PR campaigns meant to spark a “Renaissance.”  

But America’s dangerously dark, aging fleet of 94 reactors constantly leak dangerous radiation.  

They make climate chaos worse, kill downwind living beings, and dangerously deteriorate every day. 

And as the breaking news shows, a wide range of experts now warn that Russia might not hesitate to actually blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, with six reactors and fuel pools that could blanket Europe with deadly radiation—-a catastrophic disaster that could be duplicated at any other atomic reactor targeted by a hostile power or terror organization.   

What follows are 108 reasons for the industry’s failure.  A second set will follow shortly:  
 
1.    Commercial atomic reactors regularly burn the planet at 325 degrees Celsius or more.

2.  They emit significant quantities of carbon and other greenhouse gasses during nuclear fission. 

“Nuclear Renaissance (version 4.0)” is the centralized corporate power industry’s final grab at mega-sums of public money and total control of energy.

Facing a definitive tsunami of cheaper, cleaner, safer, faster-to-deploy renewables, it’s meant primarily to serve the nuclear weapons complex while insulating entrenched centralized power against distributed green social democracy.

The “Renaissance’s” prime medieval reality is the escalated likelihood of another Three Mile Island-Chernobyl-Fukushima disaster at one of America’s lingering 94 reactors.

Most US nukes were designed in the pre-digital 1960s and ‘70s. They are dangerously decayed, with an average age of around 40. They are structurally dubious, seriously under-maintained and inherently unsafe.

None have significant private accident insurance. But a major meltdown/explosion could threaten millions of lives and inflict apocalyptic health, ecological and economic harm.

In 1825, long before anybody even thought about air flight, the US Navy began operations in the Pensacola, Florida area, when the federal government built a naval yard on Pensacola Bay.

90 years later, in 1914, the naval yard became home to the Navy’s first permanent air station. Since that time, NAS (Naval Air Station) Pensacola has served as the primary training base for naval aviators and has housed the Blue Angels aerobatic programs, which will be giving 61 shows at 32 locations from March through November of 2019. The two Blue Angel shows in Duluth are scheduled for July 20 – 21, 2019.

Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island is the title of a newly-released documentary feature film directed, written and produced by award-winning filmmaker Heidi Hutner, a professor of environmental humanities at Stony Brook University, a “flagship” school of the State University of New York.

With greatly compelling facts and interviews, she and her also highly talented production team have put together a masterpiece of a documentary film.

It connects the proverbial dots of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant disaster—doing so brilliantly.

Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced it approved licensing for Holtec International’s controversial consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) in southeastern New Mexico’s Lea County, not far from the Texas border. The facility is designed to store high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants across the U.S. But NRC approval notwithstanding, a recently enacted New Mexico State law and multiple federal court challenges may yet block the project.

Holtec’s Bid to Enter the Nuclear Waste Storage Business

Germany has shut its last three commercial atomic reactors.  

Thus Satrday, April 15, 2023, marks a day that will live in joy and promise.

The world’s fourth-largest economy has gone post-nuclear.

While the conjoined atomic power and weapons industry wastes uncounted millions pushing yet another doomed-to-fail “nuclear renaissance,” Europe’s biggest economy has steered itself toward a sustainable green-powered future. 

For more than a half-century, a powerful Solartopian movement has fought reactor construction in Germany.  

A key early uprising came in the rural community of Wyhl, where thousands of No Nukers physically occupied the site of a proposed radioactive waste dump.  Films of the action circulated worldwide, helping to inspire mass non-violent occupations at Seabrook, New Hampshire, Diablo Canyon in California, and dozens of other reactor sites around the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Germany’s Green movement achieved significant parliamentary clout.  In early 2011, it set a massive national demonstration to shut the nation’s 19 reactors.

The Energy Information Agency (EIA) has released data that shows that in 2022 for the first time renewable energy surpassed the generating capacity of coal on the U.S grid. This follows data in 2020 showing renewable energy surpassed nuclear energy as a generating source. 

Currently wind and solar account for about 14 percent of the power that's on the grid. Hydro is at about six percent and the other forms such as geothermal and biofuels account for another three percent. The renewable share of the U.S grid is around 23 percent in generating capacity. Coal is currently down to about 20 percent and nuclear is down to about 18 percent. The number one generating source is natural gas at about 40 percent of the generating capacity on the grid. https://www.eia.gov/

A recent report demonstrates that renewable energy has grown 9.6 percent worldwide. This record rate of growth saw 295 gigawatts of renewables added to the various grids, resulting in a total of 3372 gigawatts of renewables worldwide. China accounted for almost half of new generating capacity with 141 gigawatts added. Europe followed a distance second at 57 gigawatts of generating capacity. North America added 29 gigawatts with the continent of Africa falling far behind with only 2.7 gigawatts of installed new renewable capacity in 2022. 

Worldwide installed renewable generating capacity is split pretty much evenly between hydroelectric, solar and wind. China is far ahead with 392 gigawatts of installed systems. In second place with a quarter of that amount or about 111 GW is the United States, followed by Japan, Germany and India.  

In its home-page on World Water Day, 2021, the United Nations pointed out the following facts:

Today, 1 in 3 people live without safe drinking water.

By 2050, up to 5.7 billion people could be living in areas where water is scarce for at least one month a year.

Climate-resilient water supply and sanitation could save the lives of more than 360,000 infants every year.

If we limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, we could cut climate-induced water stress by up to 50%.

Extreme weather has caused more than 90% of major disasters over the last decade.

By 2040, global energy demand is projected to increase by over 25% and water demand is expected to increase by more than 50%.

Clearly, water is a crucial resource, and the future well-being of human society depends on how well we manage our global supply of fresh water. This will require a high level of international cooperation and social justice.

Maude Barlow: water as a human right