Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant should not be relicensed

[struggle4progress]

<snip> Whatever the reason for the perceived complacency we should oppose the re-licensing of Pilgrim, one of the oldest and most vulnerable plants in the nation, for many reasons, among them:

A possible terrorist attack or nuclear accident. The National Academy of Sciences in a study mandated by Congress stated unequivocally in 2004 that nuclear power plants are on the terrorists' short list. Those plants designed like Pilgrim are extremely vulnerable. The most vulnerable target is the 1.2 million pounds of densely packed radioactive spent fuel rods stored in the reactor building well above ground level.

The human element. Innumerable accidents have been documented in the life of Pilgrim. Most recently, the Cape Cod Times, July 16, 2005, reported that the U.S. Regulatory Commission fined the owners $60,000 only 13 months after a control room supervisor fell asleep on the job and another worker failed to wake him up!

Inability to evacuate the public. The Hingham League of Women Voters' study reported by Hilary McCarthy in the Hingham Journal Sept. 8, 1983, reported that the town is unprepared for nuclear evacuees. Hingham is only one of many towns in the Pilgrim area with no clear evacuation plans. During the recent hurricanes we witnessed the disastrous attempt to evacuate large numbers of people. <snip>

http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/net/2005/10/21/police.on.full.alert.for.friday.s.anti.arroyo.protest.html

[pinto]

1. your link comes up with a Google search for "protesters".

Maybe there's a more static link for folks...?

[struggle4progress]

2. Fixed it. Heh heh. Guess it's clear what I'm scoutin around fer. eom

[bananas]

3. fix it again

The ending of the url is "police.on.full.alert.for.friday.s.anti.arroyo.protest.html"

[struggle4progress]

4. Man, this might be too hard fer me! Try this:

http://www2.townonline.com/hingham/opinion/view.bg?articleid=351310

[Oerdin]

24. You know that is an editorial, right?

[struggle4progress]

28. So very kind of you to point that out. eom

[NNadir]

5. Um, has a US nuclear power plant ever required an evacuation like Katrina?

Obviously people who express this "terrorist nonsense" have no understanding of and are indifferent to global climate change. Without this plant evacuations and mass destruction will become more likely not less likely.

How about when FEMA couldn't be disturbed for dinner? Doesn't this mean that we should shut down all of the power plants that contributed to global climate change, since we can't disturb the FEMA director's dinner?

Come on. Tell us. Do you support the shutting of coal plants? Very clearly from the dead bodies floating in New Orleans, we can't evacuate the cities that actually are being destroyed (as opposed to theoretically being destroyed) by them? How many coal plant licenses have the ladies of Hingham opposed?

How many people have been killed by operations at Pilgrim? Can you name one? Any white ladies driving their SUV's to anti-nuclear meetings? Has Hilliary McCarthy - no doubt a scientific illiterate -had so much as a headache from nuclear operations?

How many people were killed by global climate change in North America by global climatic instability this summer and fall? And yes, you must count the thousands of people killed by Hurricane Stan. Even though they are brown and poor, and clearly are not paranoid members of the Hingham League of Women Voters' still obsessing over junk and nonsense from 23 years ago, the people killed by Hurricane Stan are still human beings.

Will the ladies of Hingham be paying for the housing of the poor citizens of New Orleans since they insist on dumping more global climate change creating toxic climate destabilizing filth into the atmosphere to replace Pilgrim?

Or are the ladies going to move into caves themselves, and desist from using electricity? After all, when their power plant is replaced they will find themselves finding a much higher risk of dying of air pollution.

Or is the contention of the ladies league the same as the contention of the morons at Greenpeace, that energy can be provided by magic?

In 2003 the Pilgrim nuclear station ran at full capacity loading and produced 5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/states/statesma.html

In that year alone, the plant prevented the dumping of the dangerous waste, carbon dioxide, which is actually killing huge numbers of people on the planet right now, of more than 5 million tons of carbon dioxide, not to mention nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides. Do the ladies of Hingham give a shit about who exactly will have to breath this stuff because they don't understand science?

All energy involves risk. The only difference between Pilgrim and the other energy risks is the Pilgrim is risk minimized. So have the ladies log on and tell us. What are the alternatives to Pilgrim? Who will have to die to prevent Hilliary's headache?

[struggle4progress]

7. Nuclear Control Institute doesn't seem to consider the concern nonsensical

http://www.nci.org/nci-nt.htm#react

[NNadir]

13. No, they are idiots.

[struggle4progress]

14. What a clever response ... eom

[NNadir]

18. Thank you. It is I think a winner.

Perfectly appropriate for the level, I think, which is very, very low.

I am dying to read about the actual uncovered terrorist plots against a nuclear plant.

The last major terrorist attack I recall in the United States involved oil. Or am I mistaken?

Was Muhammed Atta angry because of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant?

I am dying to learn how, within the next decade, the global climate change crisis will be solved by shutting nuclear power plants. What is exactly going to replace 361 gigawatts of nuclear capacity installed and operating without failure for nearly two decades?

I have been trying to learn for years about the first person killed by the storage of so called nuclear waste.

I have been trying for the same period to learn why people who are actually killed by global climate change, say like today in the Yucatan, last month in Guatemala, weeks before that in Texas, weeks before that in Louisiana are worth less that people who conceivably be killed by a putative nuclear accident or terrorist attack.

I am in short asking the same question that one would ask of the fear mongering press and the fear mongering "government" in another context. Is, for instance, the risk of being killed in a skyscraper by a terrorist attack as high as the risk of destroying the world's oldest democracy. Is the need to address that risk through blindly striking out and stealing (or hoping to steal) a little oil on the side, equal to the risk of fostering an eternal war?

But since I won't get any of that, I think I'll just specify that I regard idiocy as idiocy.

Here is what I call idiocy, something about which I have been clear for sometime, although idiots, being idiots, have a hard time grasping it: An idiot is a person who cannot do comparisons on a simple level or on a slightly deeper level, simple risk analysis. An idiot is a person who evaluates a problem in isolation from the possible consequences of alternatives.

Risks are measured by numbers, by probabilistic analysis, analysis that derives from data. Here for instance is a link to a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing causes of death in the United States in the year 2000:

http://www.csdp.org/research/1238.pdf

We see that the number of deaths in the United States is reported as 2,403,351. Thus if we assume that the number of deaths that occurred in 2001 was similar, and we also assume that 3000 people were killed in the oil inspired terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, we can see that the fractional risk of dying by being an occupant of a tall building killed in a terrorist attack is 0.001 of the risk of dying all other causes.

Now some people think that this risk is worth completely discarding the US constitution, just as some people declare - with contempt for human life - that the risk of an imaginable attack on a nuclear plant - which may or not succeed by the way - is worse than the risk of global climate change which is killing people right now, as I write.

Now, I'm going to look over the figures and see how many people died of causes related to the operations of nuclear power plants. Excuse me, I'll be right back...

...OK I'm back, looking at table 2 in the link (I'm actually reading the link, as opposed to merely presenting it as if it supports what I say - what a concept!)...

Here we go. Toxic agents: 55,000 deaths.

Now, let's go to the discussion and see what the toxic agents are, looking especially for those deaths attributable to nuclear power plants.

Toxic Agents.

Estimating the number of deaths due to toxic agents is more challenging than any of the other risk factors due to limited published research and the challenges of measuring exposure and outcome. In the 1990s, many improvements were made in controlling and monitoring pollutants. 44 There is more systematic monitoring of pollutants at state and county levels, and exposure to asbestos, benzene, and lead have declined.44 In fact, the US Environmental Protection Agency reported a decline of 25% from 1970 to 2001 in 6 principal air pollutants: carbon monoxide, lead, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter.45 Toxic agents are associated with increased mortality from cancer, respiratory, and cardiovascular diseases.46-49We used the National Morbidity, Mortality, and Air Pollution Study to estimate mortality due to air pollution.50 The study assessed the association between air pollution and mortality and morbidity in 90 cities in the United States. Only particulate matter (PM) was associated with a significant increase in mortality— an approximate 0.5% increase in total mortality for each 10-ì/m3 increase in PM10. Previous studies reported a range of 0.4% to 1% for that association. 51,52 We used 23.8 ì/m3 as the daily average of PM10 concentration in 2000,45 which results in an estimate of 24000 deaths per year (range, 22000-52000 deaths) from air pollution alone.

There seems to be NO mention whatsoever of nuclear materials in the paper on deaths under toxic agents. Maybe it's somewhere else. Let me see...

Let's see, let me search the document for the word "nuclear," as in nuclear terrorism, nuclear accidents, nuclear waste, nuclear power plants, let's see what I get.

Zero.

Zero?

Yeah, Zero.

(I do note that the period in which sulfur dioxides and carbon dioxides is alleged in the paper to have decreased corresponds roughly to the period in which nuclear power production rose worldwide from 684 billion kilowatt-hours (1980) to 2,517 billion kilowatt hours (2001), an increase of 370%.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls)

People do die from air pollution though. Why don't they count? Because they're not part of some special esoteric paranoia, specifically the anti-nuclear hysteric paranoia that is backed by zero numbers.

The anti-nuclear crowd is completely ignorant of numbers. This is how they can make a completely pixilated and confused argument, filled with "what if" and "could happen" links, for closing the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, a plant that, when we review the deaths from air pollution, clearly saves lives.

Now I'll sit and wait for 15 or 20 posts "refuting" what I say via irrelevant hysterical blabber while outside, people continue to die.

[struggle4progress]

23. Well, if you are concerned about people in Central America, ..

.. then of course you should be organizing to help them.

It is, however, disingenuous to pretend that propagandizing nuclear power does anything at all to help them.

I certainly expect that US energy use has contributed to and is contributing to the global warming problem.

But, as far as I can tell, nothing you push actually seems to promise any reduction in US energy use: quite the opposite, in fact ...

[NickB79]

17. They also seem to believe Iraq was and still is a nuclear threat

Which we all knew was bullcrap even before the war began. Just click on "Saddam and Bomb" on their homepage, and you can read:

"IRAQ: STILL A NUCLEAR THREAT

All of Iraq's nuclear scientists are still in place.
None of the nuclear-bomb components they built
before the Gulf War have been found. If Iraq could
steal or buy plutonium or bomb-grade uranium,
Saddam could have the Bomb in short order."

Wow, they're sooo credible to me now :sarcasm:

[struggle4progress]

21. "If Iraq could steal or buy plutonium or bomb-grade uranium.." eom

[struggle4progress]

8. Federation of American Scientists apparently considers concern credible

The Search for Proliferation-Resistant Nuclear Power
http://www.fas.org/faspir/2001/v54n5/nuclear.htm

[struggle4progress]

9. Center for Defense Information has worried about the threat:

http://www.cdi.org/terrorism/nuclear.cfm

[struggle4progress]

10. The National Academies recently issued a warning about the danger

http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/0309096472?OpenDocument

[NNadir]

15. Did they also issue a warning about global climate change?

After all that IS happening isn't it?

Terrorist attacks against nuclear power plants are NOT happening, are they?

Maybe you can list all of the plots that have been discovered, all that have been attempted and all that have succeeded, or are we just doing a Judy Miller here and reading the press releases from the Office of Homeland Security?

But let's say that there was a credible threat against a nuclear power plant...

Is it the contention of the fear squad that the results would be worse than the submersion of Bangladesh? Thirty hurricanes a year? Drought induced famines wiping out vast areas of Africa? The complete melting of the Himilayan glaciers?

Is the main difference here that the women near the Pilgrim nuclear power plant are white and the vast majority of people actually killed by global climate change in this year are not?

I repeat that "nuclear exceptionalism," wherein immoral people assert irrational fear of nuclear power while ignoring all other energy risks - even those that are no no longer merely risks but are now becoming certainties - are unimpressive and weak.

They are what they have always been, appeals to fear of the possible to the exclusion of the events that are actually happening.

Global climate change is a fact. Anyone who wants to limit access to what is measurably the safest form of energy known, nuclear power,

http://www.externe.info/results.html

needs to state clearly what they intend to replace it with. They need to show what it will cost and who will die to pay that cost.

I expect now to get 50 posts with "so and so" said this, lists of resumes, appeals to authority, post after post after post.

What I will not hear is a solution to global climate change, which is killing people right now in Mexico TODAY. The bodies will be collected and added up later this week.

That the unethical and immoral are more worried about the paranoia of the Massachusetts ladies - whose lives are actually being saved by the non-polluting Pilgrim Nuclear Plant - whether they are remotely intelligent enought to grasp that FACT or not - than they are about the lives the people of Mexico, the people of Guatamala, the People of Haiti, the People of Bangladesh, speaks volumes.

[struggle4progress]

16. The usual: change of topic, name-calling, and unsupported claims.

The topic isn't global warming. But we'll set that aside.

You claim nuclear power will end global warming. As I have explained before, there's no good reason to expect that it will -- in part, because global warming is a problem with a largely political origin, and the political problem won't go away just because nuclear plants are built.

Trying to address the problem without reducing consumption will simply fuel demand, with the result that both nuclear and coal plants will proliferate. Much consumption in America is waste, pure and simple: the energy is used to produce trash, which then ends up in landfills. The political problem is that this production of waste has an organized constituency, which won't just melt away spontaneously.

If you want to reduce or eliminate use of coal, that's fine with me. But that requires organized political work, because there is an economic sector based on coal, and it has a constituency. Absent effective political organization to limit use of coal, it is empty noise to claim that using nuclear will reduce coal consumption. A strategy that says "first nuclear, then limit coal" will, in effect, become "first nuclear, then more coal and more nuclear."

And as I have said before, the name-calling is merely tiresome: it is nothing but an attempt to distract from the weakness of your argument.

[dcfirefighter]

19. nuclear plants are a sunk cost

coal plants must continue to pay for fuel (and hopefully one day, emissions).

If more nuclear plants were built, as energy costs rise, we'll get economic-forced conservation with fewer emissions: the nukes will run at 95% capacity loading b/c it's not much more expensive to run them than it is to not run them. Coal plants are significantly more expensive to fuel - they'd be only viable to fill in where a hydro or nuke plant couldn't.

I agree with your desire for conservation - though the only way I can see that happening is through higher energy prices. This has the potential for disproportionally affecting lower income families. The alternative I like is to raise the price of energy by capturing externalities through the assessment of fees against emissions, and using those fees to provide an energy dividend to each resident - a cost-neutral change for the average energy consumer, likely cost-advantaged for median and lower energy consumers.

[struggle4progress]

22. We're already seeing the politico-economic response to increasing ..

.. energy costs: it is simply to gut environmental protection.

Unless we can construct an effective political response to THAT response, there's no reason to believe that increasing costs will have the effect of forcing conservation.

I supported emission taxes for years. But a similar problem applies: corporations will simply pay for the privilege (at costs that completely fail to reflect externalities) exactly as corporations simply "buy" mining rights on public land (at 1870's clearance prices). The standard economic theories only apply if government is strong enough to enforce, and enforces, the market conditions assumed in the derivation of the theory: this is not a given, because (for example) unconstrained capitalism appears naturally to tend to monopoly, with the corresponding loss of the always hypothesized competitive forces.

[NNadir]

32. Well, well, well, well.

Nuclear power won't reduce coal eh?

How much coal, exactly, do they burn in France?

How much did they burn in 1980?

Look here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table14.xls

Since 1980, coal consumption has dropped in France by more than half. As a nation, they used 21 million tons of the stuff, much of it presumably to make steel. http://www.cslforum.org/france.htm (Table 4). This compares to 1.1 billion tons in the United States. The difference is a factor of 50, for those who can do numbers. Also one who is equipped to understand numbers can see that the $10,553 billion GNP of the US (2000) is NOT 50 times bigger than the $1,543 billion GNP of France. Far from it.

Now you are arguing, from out of nowhere, that nuclear energy has no effect on coal consumption. On what basis? You have founded a thread demanding the shutting of a nuclear plant in a town inhabited by rich white people. Either someone will have to turn of the power to something, or a fossil fuel plant will need to be built or run at higher capacity. All the platitudes about conservation will not change any of this. The global climate change crisis is an emergency, not something involving parlor talk over a glass of Pinot Noir and some Godiva chocolates. As you are claiming some political expertise, maybe you can tell us exactly how you intend to manage the shutting of the plant. Who will shut their power off exactly and how will you get them to do it? If you do not insist on getting the power turned off, with what will the power be replaced?

I have no doubt that you think you have explained or supported an argument, but what I hear is what one often hears from self identified "progressives," this is bad! That is bad! This is too dangerous! But when you ask them for specifics on how they intend to correct the situation, you just get vague stammering and a change of subject.

For once I agree with you on something. The only reason the global climate change crisis is not being addressed is political. It certainly is not technical. Technical people know exactly what to do and how to address a huge fraction of the global climate change driver, specifically that involving the burning of coal to generate electricity: Build nuclear power plants.

Politics, though, has ceased to be matter of embracing providing for good government making for a safer, richer, and more just society; it has ceased to be about making wise decisions based on probable outcomes. More recently it has become a game of distortion exacerbated to specious appeals to largely absurd fears. Fear has replaced reason in politics. This is why there is political opposition to nuclear power.

Just as in the case of nuclear energy, the people who shout the loudest are about politics are the same people who are the least knowledgeable about them, and the least effective at realizing their goals. More often than effecting change, some people elevate politics to the same level as science as if a political chant can effect a physical outcome. This is just dumb. Political change that make no sense is dangerous, particularly reactionary political change - and above all dogma based political change.

I can say for certain that I would resist a take over of those doublespeakers who identify themselves as "progressives" with almost the same enthusiasm as I resist the neocons. Both are mindless chanters of dogma.

I support conservation consistently, just so long as it does involve further impoverishment or deeper impoverishment of those who are already impoverished. I have shown recently in another thread, that for everyone to live at the same level of Mexicans (1.63 ton oil equivalent per capita) most of whom live a very low - even impoverished - lifestyle, world energy demand would need to rise to 445 exajoules, from around 420 exajoules. That's telling. It means that to reduce the poverty of the average person on the planet to the poverty of Mexicans, even if we at the same time reduced all Americans to the living standards of Mexicans, we would need more energy.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x33655#33710

In a way I'm glad that safe clean and economical nuclear energy is being most enthusiastically embraced in countries like China and India, where massive poverty is commonplace. These countries will not be able to accomplish much in the way of real change without energy. I am very happy to see that they are working hard to educate their people, to elevate their technical skills, and as follows from that, build more nuclear plants.

And now a note of personal advice for whatever its worth. I am quite sure that you find my posts tiresome. There is an ignore button available to DU users that can be switched on easily. You don't have to read a single word I say and there is an easy-to-use technical way to avoid ever seeing a word I say.

(This by the way works outside of DU. Bill O'Reilly doesn't bother me, since I never have heard more than however many words he can say before I channel surf past him.)

Speaking for myself, I never use the ignore button. It is true that I hold a very low opinion of some posters here, particularly those who are prolific purveyors of immoral nonsense about the issue I regard as being the most important of our times, the issue of climate destabilization. My strategy for dealing with these people is to scan one or two or their hundreds of posts at random and simply ignore the rest. Usually any member of the sample set is just as bad as any other. I've learned that there is remarkable consistency. I can then respond to that post - if I desire to do more than a chuckle to myself at it's level of pixilation - to suit my purposes. This spares me the agony of reading the vast majority of the pablum and while still me an opportunity to place on my own particular, if tiresome, vision in contrast.

[struggle4progress]

33. The spreadsheet mainly exhibits continuing growth of US energy gluttony:

18% of world coal consumption in 1980, about 22% in recent years, during which time world coal consumption increased by about a third and US coal consumption by about 60%.

This, of course, is a symptom of the increasing rate at which the US squanders energy in order to support our major product, which is:



Our supposedly ever greater need for energy is nothing but our unwillingness to reorganize our economy to avoid ever increasing garbage production.

[bananas]

20. Sounds like Rice

"Terrorist attacks against nuclear power plants are NOT happening"

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would try to use an airplane as a missile"

[struggle4progress]

11. In brief, the issue probably deserves some careful attention. eom

[midnight armadillo]

26. LOL, Hingham residents

Will the ladies of Hingham be paying for the housing of the poor
citizens of New Orleans since they insist on dumping more global
climate change creating toxic climate destabilizing filth into the
atmosphere to replace Pilgrim?


Oh, if only you knew what the residents of Hingham were like. The state wants to extend the commuter rail south of Boston, the 'Greenbush' line. Every town calamored for the extension...except Hingham. A few wealthy, loud residents bitched that the train (running on an existing track, mind you), would damage the historic downtown buildings, ruin their lives, etc etc.

They've held it up for like 10 years. They even rejected a $30 million tunnel UNDER their downtown.

All this to keep the riffraff from more southerly towns from passing through their prescious fucking downtown. The self-centeredness character of Hingham is hard to fathom - it's difficult to describe the whole fucked up nature of this in a few sentences.

Fortunately, the state is building the commuter rail now anyway.

[NNadir]

31. Here's a little known fact about the anti-nuclear movement.

One of the hotspots of the anti-nuclear movement was Long Island where we (yes, I am a regretful veteran of this movement) stopped the Shoreham nuclear power plant from coming on line, thereby sentancing many people in the area to death by air pollution. In fact, after Shoreham, most utilities where terrified to order new nuclear plants, not because nuclear plants didn't work, but because they dreaded the assault of idiots.

The genesis of the anti-nuclear anti-Shoreham movement did not begin at Shoreham however. It started on Lloyd's Neck. Lilco, the utility at the time proposed building three nuclear plants on Long Island, one at Shoreham, one at Jamesport (on the North Fork of the Island) and one at Lloyd's Neck - which happens to be one of the wealthiest communities in the world. Suddenly the non-existent anti-nuclear movement was a well-funded well-promoted affair with excellent access to the media.

Lilco got the message pretty quickly and scratched Lloyd's Neck off the list. The damage was already done though The millionaires and billionaires in Lloyd's Neck moved on to other pursuits, and lost their interest in nuclear issues, but the anti-nuclear movement on Long Island had been created and would come to fruition at Shoreham.

Those protests by the way, were sometimes great places to meet girls.

Now on Long Island they burn garbage for power.

[SlightlyWorried]

29. Bravo NNadir

You are one of the few voices of reason on this board and one of, if not the only, reason I peruse it.

The eco-freaks on this board who are incapable of economic analysis make me just as upset as the Jesus wingnuts on other boards. It is flatly insane that american political discourse has been taken over by such non-rational extremists.

On balance I am *happy* that the eco-nuts continue to contribute to republican wins in the senate, house, and in the whitehouse. I am distraught that these wins have reduced the top marginal rate and that they have resulted in a nonsensical middle east policy. But this is the price oe has to pay to keep people who are entirely non-rational out of office.

[NNadir]

30. I am an eco-nut, just for the sake of clarity.

Anyone who can be happy about Repuke wins in any area of government is, if I may so, completely out of his or her mind. Such a person definitely is not one to judge what is and is not rational.

My views are informed by something that the Republican party despises, science.

[One_Life_To_Give]

6. Are you supporting Brant Point?

If I had my choice of which one of these to shut down. It wouldn't be Pilgrim.

Maybe we should build a new "Clean Coal" plant on the outskirts of Hyannis, to replace Pilgrim. That could be fun to get thru public comment!

[struggle4progress]

12. Not a big lighthouse fan?

[One_Life_To_Give]

25. S/B Brayton Point

Brayton Point


Pardon my error above.

But every KWHR generated by Pilgrim is one less generated by Brayton Point and the other 4 members of the "filthy five."

[struggle4progress]

27. I note that the political pro-nuclear noise has been accompanied by ..

.. a continuing relaxation of clean air standards.

So it looks to me like we're just gonna get "more nuclear + more combustion."

The appropriate response to a filthy source in my view would be to demand more stringent clean air standards -- or, failing that, at least actual enforcement of existing standards.

The Clean Air Act did NOT anticipate endless delay in implementing control technology.

Going after the dirty burner makes sense to me -- but I see no evidence for the claim that supporting nuclear itself will have the effect of limiting combustion sources.