The U.S. Department of Energy; nuclear by nature, forever?
by Ann Garrison
On March 11, 2009, Barack Obama's Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, announced his support for a new generation of nuclear power , but Terry Macallester, writing five days later, on March 16, 2009, in Common Dreams, warned that these new power plant designs could, by 2075, produce enough plutonium to make a million nuclear bombs, and cause nuclear anarchy.
The next day, March 17, 2009, New York Times ran Stephanie Cooke's well-reasoned, but, nevertheless curious, op-ed about Barack Obama and Steven Chu, beginning thus:
"PRESIDENT OBAMA has made clean and efficient energy a top priority, and Congress has obliged with more than $32 billion in stimulus money most ly for conservation and alternative energy technologies like wind, solar and biofuel. Sadly, the Energy Department is too weighed down by nuclear energy programs to devote itself to bringing about the revolution Mr. Obama envisions."
I rarely participate in global warming panic because it's become, more than anything else, an excuse for environmental aggression and deceit, including clean coal, bio-fuels, and carbon trading, a.k.a., indulgences. And for the hugely toxic and carbon intensive global boom in uranium mining and milling, nuclear enrichment, nuclear power, and thus---let's face it--nuclear weapons.
For the past two years, Barack Obama, John McCain, and even George Bush postured about climate change, clean coal, and carbon-free nuclear, along with the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, especially House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, San Francisco's born-again nuclear evangelist, even as they voted, over and over to fund the fraudulent War on Terror, at a cost that no doubt could have funded a Solar and otherwise Sustainable New Deal.
Today, 02/05/2009, the U.S. Senate is debating $50 billion in vaguely described energy loan guarantees that could, without more legislative precision, eliminate private capital risk to clean coal and nuclear power corporations.
Australia's Antinuclear.net visually deconstructed the myth of carbon-free nuclear, last year, as so many of our politicans, and uranium-rich Australia's politicians, advanced it.
---Annie,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
by Scott Ludlam — last modified 2007-10-29 03:08Uranium mining threatens Aboriginal culture and land rights at many sites across Australia. In this film, traditional owners speak out against the mining companies which bring sickness to the land. Uranium Dreaming tells the story of the industry almost nobody wants.
In 1945, the year of the tragic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nobel-laureate physicist James Franck headed a committee of scientists at the University of Chicago that desperately tried to prevent the use of the bomb and also earnestly proposed ways to prevent nuclear weapons from endangering human civilization. The committee stated in its report, that the best way to stop the spread of nuclear weapons would be to prohibit the mining of uranium. "
(Note: This particular paragraph leaped out at me from within this fascinating piece, which I first found on the Friends of the Congo website, http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/ . I could not agree more with physicist James Franck and thr committee that came to this conclusion.—Annie)
Uranium Enrichment Plant Predicted to Have $5 Billion Impact on E. Idaho Economy
Posted on: Monday, 19 May 2008, 03:00 CDT, to "Red Orbit"
By Shifrin, Simon
"The decision by French-owned energy firm Areva Inc. last week to build a $2 billion uranium enrichment plant near Idaho Falls will provide a huge boost to the eastern Idaho economy with an estimated $5 billion worth of direct and indirect effects over a 30-year period, local economic development officials say.
The Regional Development Alliance of Idaho Falls conducted an economic impact study that estimates $3 billion in indirect and induced benefits to the regional economy through 575 indirect jobs created to service the plant and its employees; additional sales of raw materials, equipment, maintenance and transportation; and additional housing, banking and other consumer resources.
The effects will be felt not only through the 1,000 construction jobs created to build the plant over a seven-year period and the 250 permanent employees who will earn salaries starting at $68,000 per year, but also by additional jobs and sales in a wide range of industries. The sectors expected to gain the most include wholesale trade, truck transportation, industrial process supply and the food and beverage industry, according to the study."
Australia, like the United States and Canada, is not only a former British colony, with consequent privilege, but also home to the second largest known uranium reserves in the world. So its nuclear politics are essential to understanding the global maneuvers of the rest of the world's major nuclear players.
(However, anyone who cares to search the Web for "known world uranium reserves" will find that this is a subject of enormous controversy. Some even suggest that the uranium content of the world's oceans could somehow be filtered out, though I must say that desalination plants to create more fresh water would be a far greater contribution to collective self-care.)
Much of Australia seems to have been settled by British convicts granted both freedom from prison and white skin privilege in exchange for advancing the claims of the British Empire, which decimated the native, "aboriginal" Australian population, by, according to the WIkipedia, as much as 90%, by disease, by theft of the land that they'd lived on sustainably, and by direct violence, between 1788 and 1900. (http://tinyurl.com/5dssux )
On March 11, 2009, Barack Obama's Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, announced his support for a new generation of nuclear power , but Terry Macallester, writing five days later, on March 16, 2009, in Common Dreams, warned that these new power plant designs could, by 2075, produce enough plutonium to make a million nuclear bombs, and cause nuclear anarchy.