NUCLEAR POWER – NOT IN MY BACKYARD, THANK YOU

I attended an excellent presentation at the University of Florida law school last month by a recent LLM graduate in environmental law. He’s now working for the Army Corps of Engineers, and his views are his own.

His presentation was truly scary – due to global warming, Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Creek Nuclear powerplant, bordering our Everglades National Park – could be an island, or perhaps even underwater, in a few years.

FPL proposes expanding Turkey Point and building more reactors (see Wikipedia article, below).

St. Augustine residents are paying for it. Our City of St. Augustine unwisely granted FPL a 30 year franchise extension while WILLIAM B. HARRISS was our City Manager. We will live to rue the day we did so -- and that day may not be far away.

From City Hall to the White House, there is little logic in U.S. nuclear policy. Essentially, the U.S. commercialized nuclear power before it was ready and allowed profit-making oligopolists (General Electric and Westinghouse) and monopolists (who sell us electrons) to make gazillions off the notion that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter.”

Puffery, flummery and dupery was the order of the day when 101 nuclear powerplants were built in the U.S.

Former Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA_ Chairman Aubrey J. “Red” Wagner was once asked by a Tennessee nuclear activist about the probability of a nuclear accident. He responded, “probability, get real!”

Since that time we’ve seen a massive fire at a TVA nuclear powerplant where they used a candle to look for air leaks.

We’ve seen Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the Japanese nuclear disaster.

We’ll see more disasters until we regulate the oligopolists and monopolists and care more about protecting people than profits for the Wall Street oligarchy of atomic blunderers.

The U.S. nuclear industry is run by satraps who harass, intimidate and coerce ethical employees (whistleblowers or ethical resisters). The reason I know this is that I proudly represented whistleblowers across this nation, including employees of the Tennessee Valley Authority and Southern California Edison Company,

The nuclear industry does not deserve Congress’s or President Obama’s trust or confidence.

The nuclear industry does not deserve any more Corporate Socialism and government bailouts. It is contrary to the genius of a free people that this potentially fatal technology is subsidized by the American people.

We should repeal the Price-Anderson Act, which limits liability in the event of a nuclear accident.

We should repeal the special interest legislation that provides for tens of billions of dollars in new loan guarantees.

We should repeal state laws that allow nuclear utilities to steal from senior citizens, putting the cost of nuclear construction in today’s electric bills (CWIP or “Cost of Work in Progress).

We should end the days of lax, ineffective, faux “regulation” by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is as lugubrious a bunch of goobers as ever made a chair squeak, unadorned by fairness or intelligent, science-based decisionmaking.

The nuclear industry does not deserve our respect, or our support.

It deserves science-based policymaking protecting the public interest without fear or favor.

After the Japanese nuclear debacle, it is time to just say “whoa” to what former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman would call “technological turkeys.”