Accidents Can Happen: Voices of women from Three Mile Island is a film about about the silenced story of the women from the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
This is the tale of the mothers — Linda, Joyce, Beth and Paula — ordinary American housewives who lived five miles from the nuclear power plant at the time of the meltdown on March 28, 1979. The accident turned their lives upside down and awakened them to the politics of the nuclear industry and the silencing of truth. The women fought back.
Long Island Power Authority ratepayers—including those in Suffolk County—will be and already are paying a disproportionate share of the $7.6 billion bailout of four upstate nuclear power plants pushed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, writes Karl Grossman this week. The bailout runs for 12 years. It kicked in last year with an added charge in the electric bills of all New York State residents, businesses and other entities including schools and governments.
A lawsuit is underway in New York State Supreme Court to end the bailout. It follows unsuccessful efforts in the State Legislature to stop it, of which State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. from Suffolk, was a leader. “The lawsuit is our hope now,” he said last week.
The disproportionate share LIPA ratepayers are being charged is based on a complicated formula developed by Exelon, which owns in whole or part the four plants, and approved by the state. Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, calculates that LIPA ratepayers are being hit with an overcharge of many millions of dollars a year in contrast to what should be their share.
The bailout is based on a claim by Governor Cuomo supported by the State Public Service Commission that nuclear power plants don’t generate greenhouse or carbon gases and thus should receive “zero emissions credit”—an assertion the lawsuit strongly challenges. Read the full article.
And watch Grossman explain more on Enviro Close-Up with attorney Susan Shapiro.
If enacted, this bailout of some 80 coal and nuclear power plants in a 13-state region could cost the public $8 billion per year in dirty, dangerous, and expensive energy surcharges on their electric bills and/or income taxes.
AP reported on May 29th that energy lobbyist Jeff Miller is the carbon-breathing, radioactive swamp monster mutating U.S. energy markets for his client FirstEnergy, with his intimate access at the highest levels of the Trump administration. Miller is an old, close personal friend of Energy Secretary Rick Perry -- Miller served as Perry's campaign manager in his unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. And Miller sat down for a private dinner with Trump himself several weeks ago, with the president immediately stating publicly afterwards that this coal/nuclear bailout was a top priority for his administration.
Miller’s lobbying firm has already chalked up some wins.
Utility giant Southern Co., which hired Miller in March 2017 to lobby the Energy Department and others on nuclear energy issues, was awarded $3.7 billion in conditional loan guarantees for its troubled nuclear reactor project in Georgia.
By Tim Loh | June 1, 2018 01:38PM ET | Bloomberg First Word
Largest U.S. power grid sees “any federal intervention” in markets that would force customers to buy electricity from specific power plants as “damaging” to markets and “costly to consumers”
“There is no need for any such drastic action,” PJM Interconnection, which stretches from Chicago to Washington, says in emailed statement
PJM hasn’t received any official document from U.S. Energy Department
PJM analysis of recently announced coal, nuclear plant retirements shows “no immediate threat to system reliability”
The report, by Synapse Energy Economics, is entitled Powering Ohio: A Vision for Growth and Innovative Energy Investment, and highlights five areas for growth: (1) Attracting investment from corporate clean energy leaders; (2.) Electrifying transportation, with a focus on electric vehicles; (3.) Building new clean electricity generation, like wind and solar power; (4.) Boosting Ohio's energy productivity through energy efficiency; and (5.) Investing in a 21st century electric grid. (As the photo above from downtown Cleveland shows, Ohio's Lake Erie shore has some of the best wind power potential in North America.)
Such visions are an antidote to FirstEnergy's desperate appeal to President Trump and Energy Secretary Perry for $8 billion in public bailouts, per year, to prop up 80 coal and nuclear plants in the PJM grid across 13 states and Washington, D.C., including its own dangerously old Davis-Besse and Perry atomic reactors in Ohio, and Beaver Valley Units 1 and 2 in Pennsylvania. More.
A group of Japanese mothers and their children recently participated in a speaking tour in France and one mother, Akiko Morimatsu, (pictured above with her son) testified before the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. The mothers urged Japan to comply with UN recommendations to reduce "allowable" radiation exposure levels from 20 milisieverts a year back down to 1 milisievert, the rate before the Fukushima nuclear accident.
In France, the mothers also visited the CRIIRAD laboratory where a soil sample from a children's playground in Japan revealed alarmingly high levels of radioactive contamination.
Read the story of their visit and Mrs. Morimatsu's UN testimony.
June 20, 2018
