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
==========
* 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'
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.
