Nuclear Disaster and Obama's Disastrous Response
by Karl Grossman
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, has long specialized in doing investigative reporting on nuclear technology. He is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He is the host of the nationally aired TV program, Enviro Close-Up
March 31, 2011
President Barack Obama’s support this week for the construction of more nuclear power plants in the United States, amid the ongoing nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, must be considered -- against stiff competition -- as one of the most wrong-headed and irrational positions ever taken by a U.S. president.
.... as president, he hired a nuclear power proponent out of the national nuclear laboratory system, Steven Chu, as his energy secretary. Chu, who had been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, minimizes, indeed denies, the impacts of radioactivity, as do many of the atomic physicists in the national laboratory system. Obama’s two top White House aides, meanwhile, had been deeply involved with what is now the utility operating more nuclear power plants than any other in the U.S., Exelon. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, was as an investment banker central to the $8.2 billion corporate merger in 1999 that produced Exelon. David Axelrod, senior advisor and chief political strategist, was an Exelon PR consultant. Candidate Obama received sizeable contributions from Exelon executives including John Rowe, its president and chief executive officer who, in 2007, also became chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry’s main trade group. Forbes magazine, in a January 18, 2009 article about Rowe and how he has “focused the company on nuclear,” displayed a sidebar titled “The President’s Utility.” It read: “Ties are tight between Exelon and the Obama administration,” noting Exelon political contributions and Emanuel’s and Axelrod’s Exelon links.
So as president, Obama began talking about “safe, clean nuclear power” and pushed for multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies for the construction of new nuclear plants. The disaster in Japan is not stopping that. In his speech Wednesday evening on energy, Obama also wheeled out a major nuclear lie in its effort to “revive” nuclear power that it provides “electricity without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”
As to “new, improved” nuclear plants a “next generation” as Obama called it this is also a major theme of Dr. Chu, before and since the nuclear disaster in Japan. The key issue here is radioactivity. And thus, no matter what the design, all nuclear plants are deadly. Whether they are the U.S.-manufactured General Electric boiling water plants in Japan now spreading radioactivity in Japan and around the world, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or the design of Russian plants, etc., all nuclear plants generate thousands of tons of lethal radioactive poisons as they boil water to turn a turbine to generate electricity.
Read the full article at:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/31-1
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