Support for and opposition against wind power a key issue in fight over 20 year license extension at Davis-Besse

In its intervention against a 20 year license extension at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in northwest Ohio, Beyond Nuclear contended that on- and off-shore wind power could readily replace the problem-plagued reactor's 908 MWe of power. But some are pushing back against wind power in that area. So the fight is on. Will America's energy future be renewables and efficiency, or more of the same from the past -- nuclear and fossil fuels? As Dr. Arjun Makhijani of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research put it on a Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy book tour in southern Michigan in October 2008, we have few choices: we can either (1) do without electricity, and freeze in the dark while starving without a job; (2) bake the planet by continuing to combust fossil fuels and thereby unleash catastrophic climate chaos; (3) kick plutonium -- and thus nuclear weapons proliferation risks -- down the road to our descendents by expanding nuclear power; or (4) "deal with the view" of wind turbines. Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps wrote an op-ed to that effect, published by the Muskegon Chronicle, when the controversy of wind turbines' aesthetic impact raised its ugly head on the Lake Michigan shore. And in the Davis-Besse proceeding, Beyond Nuclear mentioned that artists, from Vincent Van Gogh (at left) to Dutch fine china craftspeople, have found wind turbines beautiful enough to depict for centuries. Currently, photographers are waxing eloquent about the beauty of wind farms, and Ohio municipalities are regarding them as tourist attractions, even in urban settings.