Californië, een apocalyps van vuur, plus een boodschap voor dwaze nucleaire energie lobbyisten

In het volgende artikel vertelt Harvey Wasserman over de enorme branden in Californië een goed geschreven verhaal over een vreselijke gebeurtenis, waar intussen volgens de laatste berichten al meer dan 50 mensen het slachtoffer van zijn geworden........ Bosbranden die één op één te maken hebben met de door de mens veroorzaakte snelle opwarming van de aarde. Met deze enorme bosbranden komen er duizenden tonnen CO2 vrij en ook dat doet het klimaat verder opwarmen..... (om maar te zwijgen over de gifstoffen die ook bij bosbranden vrijkomen en de luchtvervuiling verder vergroten >> ook daar spreekt Wasserman over...)

Opperschoft Trump had het gore lef om de bosbouw in Californië de schuld te geven, terwijl de klimaatverandering ervoor heeft gezorgd dat de bossen kurkdroog zijn* en dus bij het minste geringste in brand 'vliegen....' Trump heeft een aantal natuurparken opengesteld voor commerciële activiteiten, waardoor de kans op bosbranden in de toekomst nog verder worden vergroot..... 

Dit alles terwijl Trump de door de mens veroorzaakte klimaatverandering een leugen durft te noemen, zelfs nadat al lang bekend is dat Exxon en Shell uit eigen onderzoek respectievelijk in de 70er en 80er jaren van de vorige eeuw wisten dat de verbranding van fossiele brandstoffen zorgt voor een relatief snelle klimaatverandering....... Deze georganiseerde misdadigers van de oliemaffia stopten deze rapporten diep weg in een kluis, waarna ze 'klimaatsceptische' wetenschappers inhuurden, die e.e.a. ontkenden...... (de top van die bedrijven zou moeten worden vervolgd door het Internationaal Strafhof [ICC] in Den Haag!!)

Wasserman spreekt ook over de ramp met de kerncentrales in het Japanse Fukushima, waar men voor de kust van Californië een paar jaar geleden al tonijn ving die fiks was besmet met radioactiviteit (en niet geschikt was voor consumptie), radioactiviteit die te herleiden was naar de Fukushima rampencentrales...... Terecht stelt Wasserman nog eens dat de ramp in Fuskushima in feite voortduurt, dagelijks nog stromen daar grote hoeveelheden zwaar radioactief besmet water in de oceaan....... 

Californië zelf heeft overigens nog 2 stokoude centrales in Diablo Canyon (toepasselijke naam), centrales die een enorme ramp kunnen veroorzaken bij een zware aardbeving en dat bijna op de San Andreasbreuk (-lijn)....... Eén van de vele feiten die pleiten tegen kernenergie is het feit dat er geen verzekeringsmaatschappij is die een (nieuwe) kerncentrale wil verzekeren, me dunkt een teken aan de wand......

Voorts haalt Wasserman ook de laatste schietpartijen in de VS aan (dagelijks worden er in de VS meerdere mensen vermoord met vuurwapens, echter alleen de meest 'sensationele schietpartijen' komen in het nieuws). Kortom Wasserman wijst op alle gevaren waaraan VS burgers dagelijks bloot staan.

California Apocalypse: Fire and Fury

In today’s America, random mass murder has merged with ecological devastation.

by Harvey Wasserman

November 12, 2018

Fifty years ago, in my twenties, I often hitchhiked the Pacific Coast Highway through Southern California. I slept on pristine beaches, swam in the ocean, and spent endless hours watching seals and dolphins ride the waves just a few yards offshore.

A favorite spot was in Santa Monica, where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea at Will Rogers State Park. This gorgeous stretch of white sand, framed by the Santa Monica pier to the south and the Malibu Hills to the north, seemed like paradise.

Today, fulfilling a lifelong dream, I live in the San Fernando Valley, a forty-minute drive from the Pacific, half of which is through beautiful Topanga Canyon.

This past Friday, I set off for my weekly bike ride along the beach. As usual, I parked at Will Rogers and rode my bike south down the concrete path about six miles to the Venice Pier. The final stretch, through Venice Beach, featured a constant cloud of the cannabis smoke that now flows free and easy in the land of legal pot.

At the end of a peaceful afternoon, I rode north back up to Will Rogers (always into the wind) to watch the sunset and take a dip in the ocean, which was, as expected this time of year, warmer than the air.

But this evening there was something else—an unwelcome terror. Over the ridge, in Malibu and Calabasas, fires were raging, engulfing the entire range of hills and valleys to the north in smoke. The flames were clearly visible as I rode along, all too aware that at that moment, fellow humans were dying, homes and livelihoods were being consumed, and for many people not much different from me, the world was ending.

Earlier in the week, in nearby Thousand Oaks, yet another crazed gunman shot up yet another bar, killing eleven people. Some of the victims were survivors of the Las Vegas shooting a year ago, where more than fifty people died. Now they died here.

I thought about the ocean waves, once so pure, now laced with unseen traces of Fukushima. The March 11, 2011, earthquake there caused three meltdowns and four hydrogen explosions that blew radiation into the air and water far in excess of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The three melted cores still seeth underground. A constant flow of liquid carries untold isotopes into the Pacific as Tokyo Electric has failed for nearly a decade to permanently cool them.

That witches brew of some of the world’s most lethal substances has long since arrived here. Years ago tuna caught off the coast of California were found to be carrying significant doses of identifiable Fukushima contaminants.

I swim anyway. I don’t know how much radiation is in those waves. But it’s there, as are the twin nuclear reactors just four hours drive north at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo. Thousands of us have been arrested protesting those reactors, capable of making this entire region a dead zone, especially once hit by the “Big One” earthquake we all know will eventually come.

The awful glow of the deadly fires shine through massive clouds of soot and smoke. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, a hellish reality in a paradise I once took for granted.

The following afternoon, I find solace in a few blessed hours with my darling grandchildren, playing in an idyllic suburban backyard under pristine blue skies.

And then it arrives. The soot and smoke of the Woolsey fire smacks us in the face. The flames have already torn through Santa Susana, a toxic wasteland whose lethal pollutants—including radioactive isotopes from ten small reactors—may be pouring over Los Angeles. At least twenty-five people have already died in the inferno, several of them roasted to death in their cars, caught by the rapidly moving flames. Many more are still missing.

Fallout from the fires cover us with a filthy, acrid fallout.

Only fate has thus far protected me and my family from the poisonous contamination and the killings—the sudden death that seems poised to strike at random anywhere we live, work, and play. In today’s America, random mass murder has merged with ecological devastation.

There is much we can do about both of these sources of terror. Meaningful gun control. Limiting fossil fuel and nuclear emissions. Finally switching totally to renewable energy.

But the path to security is narrowing. Breathe the air, look at your kids, think about being in a crowded public room, and know that the need for meaningful, powerful, and effective citizen action is more immediate than ever.

Tags: GUN CONTROL DISASTERS ENVIRONMENT DISPATCHES

Harvey Wasserman

Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman’s prn.fm podcast is Green Power & Wellness.  His show, California Solartopia broadcasts at KFPK-Pacifica 90.7FM Los Angeles. His books include the forthcoming The Life & Death Spiral of US History.

Read more by Harvey Wasserman

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* Afgelopen zomer waren er zelfs grote bosbranden in Canada en Siberië........

Kerncentrales geliefd bij grote bedrijven: Wasserman met een extra pleidooi voor echt groene energieopwekking

Het lijkt erop dat we in Nederland niet bang hoeven te zijn, dat er nog nieuwe kerncentrales gebouwd zullen worden, hoewel zaken drastisch kunnen veranderen als de lijpe angst- en haatprofeet Wilders een absolute meerderheid haalt bij de verkiezingen op 15 maart a.s., maar dat is zeer onwaarschijnlijk.

Daarnaast moeten we de ijskoude, inhumane neoliberalen van de VVD niet vergeten, mochten die niet zo goed goed boeren op 15 maart a.s., is het niet onwaarschijnlijk, dat men toch met de PVV in zee zal gaan, een coalitie die het CDA zeker interessant zal vinden. Hoe men ook van de 'VVD en CDA toren blaast' over het niet willen samenwerken met de PVV, de kans dat dit toch zal gebeuren bij voornoemde situatie, is alles behalve ondenkbaar....... Zoals u wellicht weet: ook CDA en VVD hebben weinig of geen bezwaar tegen kernenergie........*

Afgelopen zaterdag ontving ik van Harvey Wasserman het onderstaande artikel over kernenergie en waarom grote bedrijven, zeker in de VS deze vorm van energieopwekking verder willen uitbouwen, ook al zijn er grote problemen met de kerncentrales in de VS**, die men verzwijgt voor de pers. De reguliere pers in de VS is alles behalve anti-kernenergie en men legt zich daar, o.a. wat betreft problemen met kernenergie, met alle liefde zelfcensuur op.........

Aan bod komt in het artikel o.a. de strijd tussen Edison en Tesla, met feiten waar je haar stijl van op gaat staan!! Ook beschrijft Wasserman ten overvloede nog eens, dat er ook voor kernenergieopwekking alsnog een hele berg CO2 de lucht ingaat......... In de staat Nevada wil de overheid huiseigenaren die zonnepanelen op het dak hebben, extra belasten op de energierekening, aldus Wasserman.

Genoeg gezegd lees en oordeel zelf:

Why Corporations Love Nukes: King CONG v. Solartopia

As you ride the Amtrak along the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, you pass the San Onofre nuclear power plant, home to three mammoth atomic reactors shut by citizen activism. 

Framed by gorgeous sandy beaches and some of the best surf in California, the dead nukes stand in silent tribute to the popular demand for renewable energy. They attest to one of history’s most powerful and persistent nonviolent movements. 

But 250 miles up the coast, two reactors still operate at Diablo Canyon, surrounded by a dozen earthquake faults. They’re less than seventy miles from the San Andreas, about half the distance of Fukushima from the quake line that destroyed it. Should any quakes strike while Diablo operates, the reactors could be reduced to rubble and the radioactive fallout would pour into Los Angeles.

Some 10,000 arrests of citizens engaged in civil disobedience have put the Diablo reactors at ground zero in the worldwide No Nukes campaign. But the epic battle goes far beyond atomic power. It is a monumental showdown over who will own our global energy supply, and how this will impact the future of our planet.  

On one side is King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes, and Gas), the corporate megalith that’s unbalancing our weather and dominating our governments in the name of centralized, for-profit control of our economic future. On the other is a nonviolent grassroots campaign determined to reshape our power supply to operate in harmony with nature, to serve the communities and individuals who consume and increasingly produce that energy, and to build the foundation of a sustainable eco-democracy.

The modern war over America’s energy began in the 1880s, when Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla clashed over the nature of America’s new electric utility business. It is now entering a definitive final phase as fossil fuels and nuclear power sink into an epic abyss, while green power launches into a revolutionary, apparently unstoppable, takeoff.  

In many ways, the two realities were separated at birth.  

Edison pioneered the idea of a central grid, fed by large corporate-owned power generators. Backed by the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, Edison pioneered the electric light bulb and envisioned a money-making grid in which wires would carry centrally generated electricity to homes, offices, and factories. He started with a coal-burning generator at Morgan’s Fifth Avenue mansion, which in 1882 became the world’s first home with electric lights.

Morgan’s father was unimpressed. And his wife wanted that filthy generator off the property. So Edison and Morgan began stringing wires around New York City, initially fed by a single power station. The city was soon criss-crossed with wires strung by competing companies.

But the direct current produced by Edison’s generator couldn’t travel very far. So he offered his Serbian assistant, Nikola Tesla, a $50,000 bonus to solve the problem.

Tesla did the job with alternating current, which Edison claimed was dangerous and impractical. He reneged on Tesla’s bonus, and the two became lifelong rivals.

To demonstrate alternating current’s dangers, Edison launched the “War of the Currents,” using it to kill large animals (including an elephant). He also staged a gruesome human execution with the electric chair he secretly financed.

Edison’s prime vision was of corporate-owned central power stations feeding a for-profit grid run for the benefit of capitalists like Morgan. 

Tesla became a millionaire working with industrialist George Westinghouse, who used alternating current to establish the first big generating station at Niagara Falls. But Morgan bullied him out of the business. A visionary rather than a capitalist, Tesla surrendered his royalties to help Westinghouse, then spent the rest of his haunted, complex careerpioneering various inventions meant to produce endless quantities of electricity and distribute it free and without wires. 

Meanwhile, the investor-owned utilities bearing Edison’s name and Morgan’s money built the new grid on the back of big coal-burners that poured huge profits into their coffers and lethal pollutants into the air and water.

In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal established the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority and Bonneville Power Project. The New Deal also strung wires to thousands of American farms through the Rural Electrification Administration. Hundreds of rural electrical cooperatives sprang up throughout the land. As nonprofits with community roots and ownership, the co-ops have generally provided far better and more responsive service than the for-profit investor-owned utilities. 

But it was another federal agency—the Atomic Energy Commission—that drove the utility industry to the crisis point we know today. Coming out of World War II, the commission’s mandate was to maintain our nascent nuclear weapons capability. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it shifted focus, prodded by Manhattan Project scientists who hoped the “Peaceful Atom” might redeem their guilt for inventing the devices that killed so many.

When AEC chairman Lewis Strauss promised atomic electricity “too cheap to meter,” he heralded a massive government commitment involving billions in invested capital and thousands of jobs. Then, in 1952, President Harry Truman commissioned a panel on America’s energy future headed by CBS Chairman William Paley. The commission reportembraced atomic power, but bore the seeds of a worldview in which renewable energy would ultimately dominate. Paley predicted the United States would have thirteen million solar-heated homes by 1975.

Of course, this did not happen. Instead, the nuclear power industry grew helter-skelter without rational planning. Reactor designs were not standardized. Each new plant became an engineering adventure, as capability soared from roughly 100 megawatts at Shippingport in 1957 to well over 1,000 in the 1970s. By then, the industry was showing signs of decline. No new plant commissioned since 1974 has been completed.

But with this dangerous and dirty power have come Earth-friendly alternatives, ignited in part by the grassroots movements of the 1960s. E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautifulbecame the bible of a back-to-the-land movement that took a new generation of veteran activists into the countryside. 

Dozens of nonviolent confrontations erupted, with thousands of arrests. In June 1978, nine months before the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, the grassroots Clamshell Alliance drew 20,000 participants to a rally at New Hampshire’s Seabrook site. And Amory Lovins’s pathbreaking article, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken,” posited a whole new energy future, grounded in photovoltaic and wind technologies, along with breakthroughs in conservation and efficiency, and a paradigm of decentralized, community-owned power. 

As rising concerns about global warming forced a hard look at fossil fuels, the fading nuclear power industry suddenly had a new selling point. Climate expert James Hansen, former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman, and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand began advocating atomic energy as an answer to CO2 emissions. The corporate media began breathlessly reporting a “nuclear renaissance” allegedly led by hordes of environmentalists.

But the launch of Peaceful Atom 2.0 has fallen flat.

As I recently detailed in an online article for The Progressive, atomic energy adds to rather than reduces global warming. All reactors emit Carbon-14. The fuel they burn demands substantial CO2 emissions in the mining, milling, and enrichment processes. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen has compiled a wide range of studies concluding new reactor construction would significantly worsen the climate crisis.

Moreover, attempts to recycle spent reactor fuel or weapons material have failed, as have attempts to establish a workable nuclear-waste management protocol. For decades, reactor proponents have argued that the barriers to radioactive waste storage are political rather than technical. But after six decades, no country has unveiled a proven long-term storage strategy for high-level waste.  

For all the millions spent on it, the nuclear renaissance has failed to yield a single new reactor order. New projects in France, Finland, South Carolina, and Georgia are costingbillions extra, with opening dates years behind schedule. Five projects pushed by the Washington Public Power System caused the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. No major long-standing green groups have joined the tiny crew of self-proclaimed “pro-nuke environmentalists.” Wall Street is backing away. 

Even the split atom’s most ardent advocates are hard-pressed to argue any new reactors will be built in the United States, or more than a scattered few anywhere else but China, where the debate still rages and the outcome is uncertain.

Today there are about 100 U.S. reactors still licensed to operate, and about 450 worldwide. About a dozen U.S. plants have shut down in the last several years. A half dozen more are poised to shut for financial reasons. The plummeting price of fracked gas and renewable energy has driven them to the brink. As Gundersen notes, operating and maintenance costs have soared as efficiency and performance have declined. An aging, depleted skilled labor force will make continued operations dicey at best.

And nuclear plants have short lifespans for safe operation.

“When the reactor ruptured on March 11, 2011, spewing radioactivity around the northern hemisphere, Fukushima Daiichi had been operating only one month past its fortieth birthday,” Gundersen says.

But the nuclear power industry is not giving up. It wants some $100 billion in state-based bailouts. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently pushed through a $7.6 billion handout to sustain four decrepit upstate reactors. A similar bailout was approved in Ohio. Where once it demanded deregulation and a competitive market, the nuclear industry now wants re-regulation and guaranteed profits no matter how badly it performs.

The grassroots pushback has been fierce. Proposed bailouts have been defeated in Illinois and are under attack in New York and Ohio. A groundbreaking agreement involving green and union groups has set deadlines for shutting the Diablo reactors, with local activists demanding a quicker timetable. Increasingly worried about meltdowns and explosions, grassroots campaigns to close old reactors are ramping up throughout the United States and Europe. Citizen action in Japan has prevented the reopening of nearly all nuclear plants since Fukushima.

Envisioning the “nuclear interruption” behind us, visionaries like Lovins see a decentralized “Solartopian” system with supply owned and operated at the grassroots.

The primary battleground is now Germany, with the world’s fourth-largest economy. Many years ago, the powerful green movement won a commitment to shut the country’s fossil/nuclear generators and convert entirely to renewables. But the center-right regime of Angela Merkel was dragging its feet.

In early 2011, the greens called for a nationwide demonstration to demand the Energiewende, the total conversion to decentralized green power. But before the rally took place, the four reactors at Fukushima blew up. Facing a massive political upheaval, and apparently personally shaken, Chancellor Merkel (a trained quantum chemist) declared her commitment to go green. Eight of Germany’s nineteen reactors were soon shut, with plans to close the rest by 2022.

 That Europe’s biggest economy was now on a soft path originally mapped out by the counterculture prompted a hard response of well-financed corporate resistance. “You can build a wind farm in three to four years,” groused Henrich Quick of 50 Hertz, a German transmission grid operator.

“Getting permission for an overhead line takes ten years.”

Indeed, the transition is succeeding faster and more profitably than its staunchest supporters imagined. Wind and solar have blasted ahead. Green energy prices have dropped and Germans are enthusiastically lining up to put power plants on their rooftops. Sales of solar panels have skyrocketed, with an ever-growing percentage of supply coming from stand-alone buildings and community projects. The grid has been flooded with cheap, green juice, crowding out the existing nukes and fossil burners, cutting the legs out from under the old system.  

In many ways it’s the investor-owner utilities’ worst nightmare, dating all the way back to the 1880s, when Edison fought Tesla. Back then, the industry-funded Edison Electric Institute warned that “distributed generation” could spell doom for the grid-based industry. That industry-feared deluge of cheap, locally owned power is now at hand.  

In the United States, state legislatures dominated by the fossil fuel-invested billionaire Koch brothers have been slashing away at energy efficiency and conservation programs. Ohio, Arizona, and other states that had enacted progressive green-based transitions are now shredding them. In Florida, a statewide referendum pretending to support solar power was in fact designed to kill it.  

In Nevada, homeowners who put solar panels on their rooftops are under attack. The state’s monopoly utility, with support from the governor and legislature, is seeking to make homeowners who put solar panels on their rooftops pay more than others for their electricity. 

But it may be too little, too late. In its agreement with the state, unions, and environmental groups, Pacific Gas and Electric has admitted that renewables could, in fact, produce all the power now coming from the two decaying Diablo nukes. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District shut down its one reactor in 1989 and is now flourishing with a wave of renewables.  

The revolution has spread to the transportation sector, where electric cars are now plugging into outlets powered by solar panels on homes, offices, commercial buildings, and factories. Like nuclear power, the gas-driven automobile may be on its way to extinction.  

Nationwide, more than 200,000 Americans now work in the solar industry, including more than 75,000 in California alone. By contrast, only about 100,000 people work in the U.S. nuclear industry. Some 88,000 Americans now work in the wind industry, compared to about 83,000 in coal mines, with that number also dropping steadily.

Once the shining hope of the corporate power industry, atomic energy’s demise represents more than just the failure of a technology. It’s the prime indicator of an epic shift away from  corporate control of a grid-based energy supply, toward a green power web owned and operated by the public.

As homeowners, building managers, factories, and communities develop an ever-firmer grip on a grassroots homegrown power supply, the arc of our 128-year energy war leans toward Solartopia. 

Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at solartopia.org. His Green Power & Wellness Show is at prn.fm. He edits nukefree.org.

http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/12/189107/king-cong-vs-solartopia     King CONG vs. Solartopia by Harvey Wasserman

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*  Vergeet niet, dat voorafgaand aan de ramp in Fukushima, PvdA volksverlakker Samsom zijn bezwaar tegen kernenergie bijstelde in geen bezwaar.........

** Zoals zo ongeveer alle bestaande kerncentrales kampen met fikse problemen, die zoveel mogelijk uit de pers worden gehouden. In Nederland kan het nog gekker: de centrale in Borssele heeft eenzelfde reactorvat als de centrales in het Belgische Tihange en Doel, waar men haarscheurtjes heeft ontdekt in het reactorvat, toch weigert men een grondig onderzoek te doen naar haarscheurtjes in het reactorvat van de centrale in Borssele........

Zie ook:
'Radioactieve deeltjes van Fukushima ramp gevonden in de Beringstraat'

'Samsom (PvdA), de nieuwe 'Eco Warrior' laat van zich horen.... OEI!!!'

'Californië, een apocalyps van vuur, plus een boodschap voor dwaze nucleaire energie lobbyisten'' 

'Radioactieve wijn door kernramp Fukushima'

'Hans Spekman (PvdA) vindt uitdelen van jodiumpillen aan 'omwonenden' van wrakke kerncentrales onzin.....'

'Stientje van Veldhoven (D66 staatssecretaris) 'plotsklaps' slap op kernenergie, waar de Belgische kerncentrales in Doel en Tihange levensgevaarlijk zijn......'

'Jodiumtabletten voor omwonenden kerncentrales.......... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'

'Eigenaar Fukushima wil 777.000 ton radioactief afval in oceaan dumpen.....!!!'

'Bam gaat meebouwen aan nieuwe Britse kerncentrale..........'

'Hinkley Point C: EU keurt 21 miljard overheidssubsidie goed voor bouw kerncentrale..........'

'Melchior: na Fukushima lachte Frankrijk de Duitsers uit, daar men 'gratis' kernenergie afzwoer........'

'Australische 'wetenschappers' verklaren Fukushima tot een incident........'

'Turkenburg stelt dat een 'meltdown' van de kerncentrales in Borssele en België onmogelijk is........ AUW!!!'

'Turkenburg: "de ramp in Fukushima is aan menselijk falen te danken.." ha! ha! ha! ha! Ja, zoals de kerncentrales ook door mensen worden gebouwd!!'

'Ramp Fukushima door menselijk falen'

Klik voor meer berichten n.a.v. het bovenstaande, op één van de labels, die u onder dit bericht terug kan vinden, dit geldt niet voor de labels: Diablo Canyon, Edison,  San Andreasbreuk, Tesla.