Nuke Florida?
Nuclear power plant to cost more, startup delayed
6 May 2010-- Progress Energy Inc increased the estimated cost of its proposed 2,200 MW Levy nuclear power plant in Florida and delayed its start-up until 2021 due to a delay in licensing the reactors, uncertainty about federal and state energy policies and a recent credit rating downgrade of Progress Energy Florida.
The company estimates the project could cost up to $22.5 billion, up from its previous estimate of $17.2 billion. The first reactor is now expected to enter service in 2021 and the second, 18 months later. Progress originally estimated the first unit to enter service in 2016 but pushed that date back a year ago.
Progress also expects to receive its combined operating license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in late 2012. The company expected to get the license in 2011 but received requests for additional information.
update thanks to http://www.ncwarn.org/
Apocalypse Now and Next:From Gulf Spill to Nuke Disaster
AlterNet / By Harvey Wasserman | June 10, 2010
As BP's ghastly gusher assaults the Gulf of Mexico and so much more, a tornado has forced shut the Fermi2 atomic reactor at the site of a 1966 melt-down that nearly irradiated the entire Great Lakes region.
If the White House has a reliable plan for deploying and funding a credible response to a disaster at a reactor that's superior to the one we've seen at the Deepwater Horizon, we'd sure like to see it.
Meanwhile it wants us to fund two more reactors on the Gulf and another one 40 miles from Washington DC. And that's just for starters.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned that at least one new design proposed for federal funding cannot withstand tornadoes, earthquakes or hurricanes.
But the administration has slipped $9 billion for nuclear loan guarantees into an emergency military funding bill, in addition to the $8.33 it's already approved for two new nukes in Georgia.
Pioneering Nuclear Activist Offers Warnings
from truthout.org: Here's an excerpt of Helen Caldicott's speech in Copenhagen at the Climate Conference.
The Earth is in the intensive care unit, it is acutely sick. We are all now physicians to a dying planet ...
The nuclear power industry has used global warming to say "we're the answer." All the money to go into nuclear power, 15 billion dollars per power plant, is being stolen from the solutions to fix the earth - solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, conservation.
The nuclear power industry is wicked. The nuclear power industry was formed by the bomb makers - it's the same thing. Nuclear power plants are bomb factories - they make plutonium. Two hundred and fifty kilos a year of plutonium that lasts for 250,000 years. You need five kilos to make a nuclear bomb. Any country that has a nuclear power plant has a bomb factory.
If the Second World War were fought today in Europe, none of you would be here; Europe would be a radioactive wasteland because all the nuclear power plants would melt down like Chernobyl. So, war is now impossible in Europe. Do the politicians understand that?
Nuclear power produces massive quantities, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste, which will get into the water, concentrate into the fish, the milk, the food, human breast milk, fetuses, babies, children. Radioactive iodine causes thyroid cancer. Twelve thousand people in Belarus had thyroid cancer. Radioactive Strontium 90 causes bone cancer and leukemia, [it] lasts for 600 years. Cesium 137 - all over Europe now - in the reindeer, in the lands, in the food, lasts for six hundred years, causes brain cancer. Plutonium, the most dangerous substance on Earth, 1 millionth of a gram cause cancer, lasts for 250,000 years. Causes lung cancer, liver cancer, testicular cancer, damages fetuses so they are born deformed.
Nuclear power, therefore, nuclear waste for all future generations will cause cancer in young children because they are very sensitive, [will cause] genetic disease, congenital deformities. Nuclear power is about disease, and it's about death. It will produce the greatest public health hazard the world has ever seen for the rest of time. We must close down every single nuclear reactor in Europe and throughout the world...
the truthout article:
Dr. Helen Caldicott, the pioneering Australian antinuclear activist and pediatrician who spearheaded the global nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s and co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has joined with left-leaning environmental groups here in an uphill fight to halt nuclear power as a "solution" to the global warming crisis. "Global warming is the greatest gift the nuclear industry has ever received," Dr. Caldicott told Truthout.
The growing rush to nuclear power was only enhanced, experts say, by the weak climate deal at the Copenhagen 15 climate conference. The prospects for passage of a climate bill in Congress - virtually all versions are pro-nuclear - were enhanced, most analysts say, because it offered the promise that China might voluntarily agree to verify its carbon reductions and it could reassure senators worried about American manufacturers being undermined by polluters overseas. But at the two-week international confab that didn't produce any binding agreements to do anything, Caldicott and environmental activist groups were marginalized or, in the case of the delegates from Friends of the Earth, evicted from the main hall.
The upshot of the latest trends boosting nuclear power - although no nuclear reactor has been built in America since the 1970s - are indeed grim, she said. "Nothing's going to work to stop them but a meltdown," she said, fearing the prospects of such a calamity. "I don't know how else the world is going to wake up."
for more see: http://www.truthout.org/1222096
Nuke Florida?
How Florida will soon be at the front lines In the fight for a sustainable future
Public acceptance of nuclear energy rests on assurances by the industry that it is safe.
In the thirty years since the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the industry has been busy generating public and political support for a new wave of construction. There are plans underway now to build 34 new reactors in the next decade, 16 in the southeastern United States. Two of those reactors were recently approved by Florida Governor Charlie Crist for construction in Levy County, about 50 miles southwest of Gainesville (see map at right). Progress Energy, a Fortune 250 company based in Raleigh, NC, has high hopes for record profits.
To hear the utilities tell it, nuclear energy is good energy. According to their claims, it is carbon-neutral, fiscally responsible and all the safety quirks have been ironed out. Anyway, it's the only reliable option. And remember, it's safe.
But a little research shows these arguments to be false.
They claim: Nukes are safe.
Even when they are functioning according to design, nuclear reactors release radiation on a regular basis, within the limits set by the federal government. But according to numerous studies, people who live near nuclear power plants are at greater risk for cancer, a risk which decreases when the plants are closed.1 While industry advertising cheerfully boasts that 'their radiation' is no different than sunlight, a growing body of evidence suggests that there is no “safe” dose of iodine-131, strontium-90, etc.
According to the federal EPA, “there is no level below which we can say an exposure poses no risk. … Radiation is a carcinogen. It may also cause other adverse health effects, including genetic defects in the children of exposed parents or mental retardation in the children of mothers exposed during pregnancy.”2
What's worse, in case of accident, it's too late. Radiation releases at Three Mile Island (TMI) may have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times greater than the government has admitted, according to researchers like Arnie Gundersen, who worked in the nuclear industry for nearly two decades before turning whistle-blower.3 While the official story continues to be that no one died as a result of the melt-down, a 1997 peer-reviewed study by epidemiologists at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill suggests that leukemia and all cancers spiked among residents downwind of the plant in the years following the botched evacuation.
They claim: Another nuclear accident won't happen.
Progress Energy has for years been under fire for prioritizing cost savings over public safety and security at its Shearon Harris nuclear facility outside of Raleigh, NC. Four years ago, recurrent security lapses prompted desperate guards at the plant to contact an anti-nuke group anonymously in hopes they might bring about improvements.4 With so much at stake, this does not inspire confidence.
And even barring mishap, there still exists no long-term storage facility for high-level waste. This means that we in North Florida are essentially being (not) asked to consent to a nuclear waste dump (and attack target) within deadly range. And then when/if a different storage location is established (Progress Energy favors Yucca Mountain), the still highly radioactive wastes will travel an “approved” route through Gainesville along I-75. Remember, this stuff can make you and your children's children's children sick, for millennia, besides being an enticing target for sociopaths.
They claim: Nukes are carbon-neutral and sustainable.
In order to call nuclear energy carbon neutral it is necessary to completely ignore construction of facilities and infrastructure as well as the devastating mining process necessary to get fuel. Both of these require exhaustive use of fossil fuels and have substantial and lasting impacts on the environment.
They claim: Nukes are reliable.
To stay safe, nuclear plants must operate according to very strict tolerances. The ones planned for our area could use around 71 million gallons of water per day, one half of which will be lost to evaporation. During seasonal Florida drought conditions, the reactors may have to shut down operations, which utilities promise will only result in higher prices rather than blackouts.5
But droughts are only one of the issues that can require a shut down. A third of British nuke plants, and 7 out of 17 of those in Germany have been closed at the same time for maintenance, while several in France must cease operations during the peak of the summer when river temperatures rise. These chronic closures, and questions of nuclear unreliability have prompted increased investment in renewable technologies in those countries.
They claim: Nukes are financially wise.
Nuclear energy depends on a vast array of federal subsidies (pdf). Research, licensing, construction, operation, waste handling, and decommissioning: at every single step, a utility can expect enduring tax-payer support totaling billions of dollars, according to Physicians for Social Responsibility (pdf) and others. It appears that federal climate legislation will do little to end this boondoggle; one industry executive recently bragged to investors and senior executives that the bill “will add $700 to $750 million to [our] annual revenues.8”
Most astoundingly, there is little financial risk for utilities investing in nukes, as the federal government offers $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors. As a result, unsurprisingly, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the default rate is “very high – above 50%.9
Last year, local nuclear enthusiast and Governor Charlie Crist signed a repeal of laws that once prohibited utilities from charging customers for services they are not receiving. This scam is called Early Cost Recovery and is allowing Progress Energy to charge its customers today for the construction of a nuclear plant that may not even serve them. It may be unconstitutional, but rate-payers who have no choice are apparently an easier sell than Wall Street, despite the subsidies.
According to Marty Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, that's because investors “favor climate-protecting competitors with less cost, construction time, and financial risk.” Comparing energy sources, he writes, “new nuclear power is so costly that shifting a dollar of spending from nuclear to efficiency protects the climate several-fold more than shifting a dollar of spending from coal to nuclear.”10
Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School
testified in Tallahassee recently that the cost of nuclear power is catastrophically out of proportion with its benefits. In a June 2009 report called “The Economics of Nuclear Reactors,” Cooper estimates that it would cost “$1.9 trillion to $4.1 trillion more over the life of 100 new nuclear reactors than it would to generate the same electricity from a combination of more energy efficiency and renewables.”11
The work of researchers like Lovins, Cooper, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and others provide ample evidence of the viability of renewables and efficiency measures to meet our energy needs. Our choices are not limited to coal or nuclear.
Utilities who have benefited from government largess may not be accustomed to accounting for the “hidden” costs of nuclear energy production described here, but a growing portion of the public considers this accounting a priority. Encouraged by advances in alternative sources of energy, communities are finding new ways to organize and are turning to a variety of strategies for creating a sustainable future.
Public utilities that remain relevant will be those that recognize long-term sustainability is a strategic and profitable choice. They will look for ways to become partners with their customers. They will recognize that nuclear is neither sustainable, nor safe, nor profitable.
They may not make those connections spontaneously; they may require our encouragement. Although state and national policy makers have not always been responsive to the wishes of local communities, I believe these times offer courageous people an opportunity for a new kind of political involvement, at the local level with global ideas. In Florida, we have some thinking to do, and probably some changes to make. But it is clear as spring water to me that in these uncertain times, using our resources on nuclear power is inconsistent with a peaceful, healthy region.
-Lars Din, October 2009
