Nuclear
Power is NOT Green or Clean
nuke waste may soon find its way to your backyard
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Professor Al Gedicks opposes the nuclear power resurgence in Wisconsin because it’s dangerous, does little to reduce global warming, and harms Indian communities. May 10th this year State Representative Phil Montgomery (R-Green Bay) is introducing a bill, trying to lift Wisconsin’s block on building new nuclear plants. Nick Vander Puy and Sandy Lyon from the Superior Broadcast Network talk with anti-mining activist Dr. Al Gedicks who thinks nuclear power is not green or clean. |
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The nuclear power industry is trying to improve it’s image by promoting itself as a solution to global warming. Right now there are three aging nukes operating in Wisconsin at Point Beach and Kewaunee. A nuclear power plant hasn’t been built in Wisconsin since the nineteen seventies. That’s because after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania Wisconsin enacted a nuclear moratorium law in 1984. But on May 10th this year State Representative Phil Montgomery (R-Green Bay) is introducing a bill, trying to lift Wisconsin’s block on building new nuclear plants. Nick Vander Puy and Sandy Lyon from the Superior Broadcast Network talk with anti-mining activist Dr. Al Gedicks who thinks nuclear power is not green or clean.
Patrick Moore is a former Greenpeace activist . He’s now working for the nuclear industry.
Moore is going around the country saying environmentalists ought to embrace nuclear energy as a clean alternative to dirty gas and coal. He says nuclear energy doesn’t produce carbon dioxide and doesn’t contribute to global warming.
But Professor Al Gedicks says this ignores facts about uranium mining and processing.
“But uranium mining, milling, and enrichment which are the preconditions for having nuclear power in the first place emit enormous amount of CO2 emission because they use fossil fuel energy in the mining which is a very energy intensive process. They use it in the milling process which is a very energy intensive. And most importantly they use it in the enrichment process which uses lots and lots of fossil fuels particularly burning of coal which emits the largest amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
There’s still tremendous uncertainty about how to safely dispose high level nuclear waste. And right now there’s more than a million metric tons of radioactive piling up in Wisconsin on the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan. The stuff is lethal for thousands and thousands of years. The federal government thought they’d be able to store it long term in the desert near Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But opposition from the western Shoshone people, other conservationists, and some nuclear regulatory officials makes the Yucca Mountain storage site highly unlikely.
Actually, back in the early nineteen eighties, before Yucca Mountain in Nevada was selected, northern Wisconsin was in the running for a high level nuclear waste dump. Now, it’s likely it be again.
“So the likelihood is Yucca Mountain will not go through which means that under existing federal legislation the Department of Energy has to come up with second site. And the Wolf River batholiths is high on the list for a second site which may in fact turn into a primary site if Yucca Mountain drops out of the picture and the same objections that were voiced by citizens and tribes in the nineteen eighties are still as relevant in the year 2007, even more so because we know a lot more about the deadly effects of radiation that can trigger any amount of health problems than we did in 1980 and that the smallest levels of waste that could be associated with placement of nuclear waste in the Wolf River batholith would be a major health and environmental threat to the citizens in the surrounding communities as well as the citizens and tribes in the entire ecosystem in the Wolf River area.”
In fact, back in the nineteen eighties, Menominee Indian elder Hillary “Sparky” Waukau said a high level nuclear dump would get built near the Wolf River only over the dead bodies of the Menominee Warrior Society.
Professor Gedicks’ points out uranium mining has been particularly deadly to Navajo and Pueblo Indians, and thousands of white miners in the American southwest.
“The vast majority of the uranium in this country is on Indian land. It is now and has been since 1945 when the atomic age began and most of that uranium in the United States has come from the lands of the Navaho or the Pueblo Indians who are now suffering five times the rate of cancer lung cancer because their people were the first people who went into those mines because their people were the first people who went into those mines in the fifties, sixties, and seventies and are now coming down with cancer and other types of diseases which are a direct result of being exposed to deadly and health altering levels of radiation and between the Navaho and the Pueblo in the southwest and the Shoshone in the State of Nevada you have a classic case of environmental racism. In other words, the disproportionate effects of the nuclear industry being felt by the people who gain nothing through the mining of uranium or the disposal of nuclear waste.”
The Special Committee on Nuclear Power wants to repeal Wisconsin’s nuclear moratorium law. They’re going to report to the Joint Legislative Council in Room 411 south Madison Capital building, Thursday morning May 10th at 8:30AM.
I’m Nick Vander Puy for the Superior Broadcast Network.
Nuclear Power is Not Green or Clean
an editorial for the Wisconsin State Journal written by Dr. Al Gedicks
The nuclear industry is now trying to change negative public perceptions of nuclear power by promoting itself as the solution to global climate change. A recent column by Theodore J. Iltis proclaimed "Keep America green: Go nuclear" (WSJ 3/20/05). Iltis says that environmentalists who are concerned about the increase in greenhouse-gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels should embrace nuclear power because it does not produce carbon dioxide and thus does not contribute to global climate change. This commonly held view, endlessly repeated by proponents of nuclear power ignores the fact that without uranium there is no nuclear power. The mining, milling and enrichment of uranium into nuclear fuel are extremely energy-intensive and result in the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. The most intense mining and milling activity in the United States has been concentrated on the lands of Navajo and Pueblo Indians in the Grants Uranium Belt of northwest New Mexico.
Before uranium can be used in nuclear power plants it must undergo a process of enrichment. Uranium enrichment plants are the largest industrial plants in the world and consume enormous amounts of electricity. Far from being "clean", each 1000 megawatt-electric nuclear plant requires the equivalent of a 45 megawatt-electric coal plant--which annually burns 135,000 tons of coal--to supply its enrichment needs alone. The enrichment plant at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for fifty percent of global warming. During its operation the enrichment plant at Piketon, Ohio consumed 10 percent of Ohio's electricity, more than the entire city of Cleveland.
Proponents of nuclear power likewise ignore the substantial emissions of radioactive radon gas and other radioactive elements from the mining and milling of uranium ore in underground and open pit mines. The Navajo and Pueblo Indians, along with several thousand white miners were never told of the dangers from exposure to radon gas when they first entered those underground mines in Arizona and New Mexico in the 1950s. At least 450 former uranium miners have already died of lung cancer, five times the national average.
For those communities living next to uranium mines there is the additional problem of exposures from radioactive tailings, the waste that remains after the uranium has been extracted from the ore and processed into yellowcake. The thorium in the tailings piles has a radioactive half-life of 80,000 years. In other words, while nuclear power plants will produce power for only about 40 years, the effects of mill tailings will remain for thousands of future generations. There are over 200 million tons of these tailings in large piles around uranium mines and mills and they are emitting radioactive elements into the air and water. Communities near these tailings piles report a high rate of miscarriages, cleft palates and other birth defects, bone, reproductive, and gastric cancers as related health effects of uranium mining and exposure to contaminated air and water.
And what about nuclear waste disposal? A typical nuclear reactor will generate 20 to 30 tons of high-level nuclear waste annually. There is no known way to safely dispose of this waste, which remains dangerously radioactive for a quarter of a million years. Iltis says the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is an excellent choice for storage. The Western Shoshone Indians strongly disagree. They claim the land on which the federal government tested its atomic weapons and now plans to store 77,000 tons of military and power plant waste still belongs to them under the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863 . The federal government has tried to force the Western Shoshone to accept payment for the land and thus forfeit their claim to it. The tribe sued the federal government in March 2005, alleging the Yucca Mountain project would violate the treaty. To date, no Western Shoshone members have accepted payment for their land.
The failure of nuclear proponents to address the disproportionate impact of nuclear activities on Native American populations has its origins in an environmental racism which justifies exposing certain groups to hazardous environmental conditions in the name of national security, economic progress or to avoid the perils of global climate change. Nuclear power is not green. It is not clean. And it is a continuation of the environmentally racist policies of the nuclear industry.
Al Gedicks is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and the author of Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations.
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Nuke Watch sends this information
Help keep more nuclear
reactors and radioactive
waste out of Wisconsin
Please contact your State Legislators and urge them to VOTE NO on any repeal of state statute 196.493 ― a common sense law that protects the public from unnecessary pollution and nuclear waste.
If passed, the repeal bill would encourage more nuclear power in Wisconsin and increase the likelihood that the state will become a national high-level nuclear waste dumpsite.
If passed, the repeal would eliminate two legal requirements that must now be met before new reactors can be built in Wisconsin:
1) That a federal nuclear waste storage site must be in operation; and 2) that reactor-generated electricity must be economically advantageous to the ratepayer compared with alternatives.
A special Nuclear Power Committee has recommended repeal of these precautionary, conservative requirements. Their effort is part of an industry push for more reactors and waste nationwide. Pro-nuclear propaganda has it that nuclear power is “cheap” and “carbon free.” But nuclear waste management will cost hundreds of billions of dollars for at least 300,000 years; and the mining, milling and production of reactor fuel creates millions of tons of carbon pollution that the industry ignores.
The proposed Yucca Mountain dump site in Nevada is unfit and should never open. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission member said Feb. 7, 2007 that the Yucca project must be scrapped. This would put Wisconsin on the list of potential dump sites, especially if tons of new waste is produced by new reactors.
The time to express your opinion is now, before the Wisconsin Legislative Council takes a vote ― possibly in May. Please call, write, email and/or visit your legislators as soon as possible.
Nukewatch
P.O. Box 649, Luck, Wisc. 54853
(715) 472-4185
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