Nuclear Free Future: Vermont Yankee, Nuclear Waste, Mobile Chernobyl

As hosted by Margaret Harrington on Channel 17/Town Meeting Television (Burlington, VT):

Description

Chris Williams, Vermont organizer for the Citizens Awareness Network, talks about the Vermont Yankee/North Star proposal which gives the Paris, France based company Areva the contract to segment, package, and transport to offsite disposal the reactor pressure vessel and internal reactor components of the VY Boiling Water Reactor.

Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste watchdog of Beyond Nuclear, discusses the Nuclear Waste Amendments Act of 2017, which U.S. Representative Peter Welch from Vermont voted for in committee on June 28. He also talks about Waste Control Specialists and irradiated fuel shipments through most states.

Watch the recording.

New U.S. reactor construction collapses because it's “prohibitively expensive”: the fight for justice continues

South Carolina electric utilities have scrapped finishing construction for two half-built Westinghouse reactors admitting that nuclear power is “prohibitively expensive.” The abandonment of the V.C. Summer Units 2 and 3 in Jenkinsville, SC comes with an estimated $11 billion in sunk costs and still projected six years from completion. The cancellation adds to the growing number of tombstones for once championed “milestones” in an atomic power revival. The inability to control the “cost-of-completion” and “time-to-completion” is the fundamental economic failure behind this recent collapse of the nuclear industry. In fact, these same reasons were featured in a 1985 Forbes magazine cover story “Nuclear Follies” describing the development of commercial atomic power as “the largest managerial disaster in U.S. business history where only the blind and the biased can say the money was well spent.”

There is not one nuclear power project in the United States that has ever been built on budget and on time, only more or less grossly out of proportion. The country is littered with the abandoned hulks of the 20^th Century’s "nuclear error” including Seabrook Unit 2 in New Hampshire, Shoreham in New York, Midland in Michigan, the “Whoops” reactors in Washington, Bellefonte in Alabama, Marble Hill in Indiana and Zimmer in Ohio. These sites stand as monuments to nearly 100 more cancelled construction projects.   

The recent collapse of V.C. Summer 2 &3 now weighs heavier on the only remaining new reactor construction in the U.S. at Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Waynesboro, Georgia. With the bankruptcy of Westinghouse Electric and still mounting financial trouble for its Japan-based parent company Toshiba, Southern Company and Georgia Power were handed the dubious oversight and management of construction by the U.S. Department of Energy for the two Westinghouse reactors still being built there. The fate of the Vogtle boondoogle is still uncertain even with Toshiba giving $3.7 billion to Southern Company to contractually cut loose of the project and spread the cost out over more owners. Just how much and how long it will take to complete the untested design remain inescapable questions.  Southern Company's new projected cost-of-completion for Vogtle has balloned to $25 billion.  Southern is under pressure to tell the Georgia Public Service Commission by end of 2017 whether it plans to go forward with completion of the Vogtle expansion.  The decision could come as early as the end of August 2017.

The repeated and predictable economic failure of atomic power sends an ever direr warning of the shear folly in wasting billions more dollars and decades longer only to predictably fall short in the challenge to abate climate change. Again, nuclear power is exposed as an unreliable partner in any “energy mix” with renewable power from the wind and sun, energy efficiency and conservation. Nuclear power, new and old, only serves to divert and deplete necessary resources and squander the precious little time that remains.

The collapse of the nuclear industry further lay bare the economic and environmental justice struggles still ahead to hold corporations accountable to greed, fraud and desecration.

Accolades are much deserved to the environmental and consumer protection groups that have been involved from the beginning with the proposed Summer and Vogtle expansions. These same organizations are now demanding ratepayer restitution and protection from still more fleecing.

As Tom Clements, South Carolina’s advisor to Friends of the Earth (FoE) puts it, “The decision to abandon the V.C. Summer project is of monumental proportion and is a full admission that pursuit of the project was a fool’s mission right from the start.” According to Clements, the abandonment of construction now portends a fight for economic justice where, “Rather than applauding the decision this is a time for reflection and to prepare for formal proceedings before the PSC that will review how this debacle happened and how to refund ratepayers money due to a string of imprudent decisions.”

Sara Barczak with the Southern Alliance for Safe Energy (SACE) is wondering how much longer it will take Southern Company to pull the plug on Vogtle 3 and 4. Still she continues the call for “stopping the forced draining of customers’ wallets” there. Indeed, as Barazk observes for V.C. Summer, “A very costly door has closed on the so-called nuclear renaissance” and the awaited announced cancellation of Vogtle 3 and 4. 

Beyond Nuclear on Thom Hartmann: Is Fukushima still melting down?

Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps appeared on Thom Hartmann's "The Big Picture" to discuss the discovery, 6.5 years later, of melted core at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3, as well as Tokyo Electric Power Company's threat to simply release 770,000 metric tons (around 200 million gallons) of very highly tritium-contaminated wastewater directly into the Pacific Ocean.

Atomic Homefront propels story of nuclear contamination to headlines

"Why is this not a national story,?" asked New York film director, Rebecca Cammisa, whose new film, Atomic Homefront, will be screened on HBO. That was after she learned about the nuclear weapons waste -- the oldest nuclear waste of the Atomic Age -- that sits in the West Lake Landfill in North St. Louis County, threatening to contaminate the drinking water of area residents. The nuclear wastes are contaminating the groundwater in the floodplain of the Missouri Riverand and must be removed. The wastes were dumped there illegally during the Manhattan Project. The film is a case study of how citizens are confronting state and federal agencies for the truth about the extent of the contamination and are fighting to keep their families safe. The film also covers the concerns of famlies living by Coldwater Creek, historically contaminated by nuclear waste. Aside from the Army Corps of Engineers, all other government departments and regulators refused to be interviewed for the film.

As Hiroshima/Nagasaki anniversaries approach, a poignant reminder of suffering and hope

Pictures from a Hiroshima Schoolyard presents the aftermath of the first atomic bomb through the remarkable drawings and stories of surviving Japanese school children who were part of an extraordinary, compassionate exchange with their American counterparts after the war.

In 1995, a parishioner of the All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., discovered a long-forgotten box containing dozens of colorful drawings made by Japanese children from the Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima just two years after their city was destroyed. The surprisingly hopeful drawings were created and sent to the church nearly 50 years earlier in appreciation for much-needed school supplies received as part of the church’s post-war humanitarian efforts.

The Honkawa school was just 1100 feet from ground zero on August 6, 1945. Nearly 400 children died in the schoolyard that fateful morning. Surviving students and teachers describe the horror of that day and reflect on their difficult lives amidst the rubble of their decimated city, as well as the hope they shared through their art.

Classes resumed soon after in the window-less concrete shell of the remaining Honkawa school building to provide some sense of normalcy. The film features recently found archival footage that shows what life was like in the weeks and months after the bomb fell and how Hiroshima gradually recovered.

The rediscovered drawings were restored by members of the All Souls Church, who several years later embarked on an emotional journey to Japan to exhibit the artwork at the Honkawa school and reunite the surviving artists for the first time with the drawings they created as children.

The artists and church members reflect on the lessons that resulted from a compassionate exchange nearly 70 years ago between American and Japanese children following a bitter and devastating World War.

The film is produced by Shizumi Shigeto Manale and written and directed by Bryan Reichhardt. More information here.