[blind-democracy] Re: Evan: nuclear power

  • From: "Evan Reese" <mentat1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2018 21:17:03 -0500

Indeed, we would still have a big environmental footprint even if profit were completely removed from the equation. It's a matter of our relative technologically primitive state. As our technology advances, our environmental footprint will decline, but will never reach zero, as long as humanity is around.
Evan

-----Original Message----- From: Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2018 8:21 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ; Carl Jarvis
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Evan: nuclear power

Carl, the despoiling of the environment has a lot more to do with the
primacy of profit than it does with population. Of course, the earth,
like any other biome does have its carrying capacity whatever that
capacity might be, but if human needs were the prime consideration for
developing what we have available the environment would be in much
better shape.

_________________________________________________________________

Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
―  Isaac Asimov


On 11/4/2018 3:00 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:

First of all I've read a great number of books and articles, and sat
in far too many discussion groups that beat all around the subject of
whether or not we should expand our use of nuclear power.  To my way
of thinking this is the wrong discussion.  Yes, we do need to solve
our energy problem.  But the answer is not whether oil or Sun or Wind
or Nuclear Energy will solve our need.  The problem is far simpler.
It's called Population Control.  If we go back just a short 200 years
and look about the Globe, we see beautiful forests, pristine lakes and
rivers, an abundence of whild life,  rivers chocked with fish, a land
of plenty...an entire globe of plenty.  You could, if your Time
Machine reaches back that far, walk beaches uncluttered by cigarette
butts, gum wrappers, condoms, or plastic bags and containers.  The few
roads were clear of litter and you would find not a singal rusty car
or broken cook stove or refrigerator dumped in the vacant lots.  And
the noise polution?  Just a flock of North American Parrots flying
overhead.
Too many people.  That is the problem.  Of course countries like Saudi
Arabia and Israel are doing what they can do to lower the numbers of
people.  And of course our Uncle Sam is helping by the sales of war
machines and ammunition.
But still, we are at about 7 billion people, many struggling just to
get a drink of fresh water or a cup of rice.
The question we attack should be how to humanely reduce our world
population at least by half.  Of course this problem will solve itself
if we are unable to do so.  Famine, war and disease will make the
Black Plague look like the sniffles if we don't take steps to avert
self destruction.

Carl Jarvis

On 11/4/18, Evan Reese <mentat1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, everybody here posts articles, and I did post one already, so in
response to your eminently reasonable post, here's an article:
Why I changed my mind about nuclear power: Transcript of Michael
Shellenberger's TEDx Berlin 2017
November 21, 2017
By Michael Shellenberger
If you are really open to other views, I hope you'll read it and consider.
*
Like a lot of kids born in the early 1970s, I had the good fortune to be
raised by
hippies. One of my childhood heroes was Stewart Brand. Stewart is not only
one of
the original hippies, he’s also one of the first modern environmentalists of

the
1960s and 70s. As a young boy, one of my favorite memories is playing
cooperative
games that Stewart Brand invented as an antidote to the Vietnam War.
I’m from a long line of Christian Pacifists known as Mennonites. Every
August, as
kids, we would remember the US government’s atomic bombing of Japan by
lighting candles
and sending them on paper boats at Bittersweet Park.
After high school, throughout college, and afterwards, I brought delegations

of people
to Central America to promote diplomacy and peace and to support local
farmer cooperatives
in Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Over time, as I’ve travelled around the world and visited small farming
communities
on every continent, I’ve come to appreciate that most young people don’t
want to
be stuck in the village. They don’t want to spend their whole lives chopping

and
hauling wood. They want to go to the city for opportunity — at least most of

them
them do — for education and for work.
What I’ve realized is that process of urbanization of moving to the city is

actually
very positive for nature. It allows the natural environment to come back. It

allows
for the central African Mountain Gorilla, an important endangered species,
to have
the habitat they need to survive and thrive.
In that process you have to go vertical, and so even in places like Hong
Kong you
can see that with tall buildings they can spare the natural environment
around the
city.
Of course, it takes a huge amount of energy to go up, and so the big
question of
our time is how do you get plentiful, reliable electricity without
destroying the
climate?
I started out as an anti-nuclear activist and I quickly got involved in
advocating
for renewable energy. In the early part of this century I helped to start a

labor
union and environmentalist alliance called the Apollo Alliance and we pushed

for
a big investment in clean energy: solar, wind, electric cars.
The investment idea was eventually picked up by President Obama, and during

his time
in office we invested about $150 billion to make solar, wind and electric
cars much
cheaper than they were.
We seemed to be having a lot of success but we were starting to have some
challenges.
Some of them you’re familiar with. Solar and wind generate electricity in
Germany
just 10 to 30 percent of the time, and so we’re dependent on the weather for

electricity.
There were other problems we were noticing, though. Sometimes these energy
sources
generate
too much
power and while you hear a lot of hype about batteries we don’t have
sufficient
storage even in California, where we have a lot of investment and a lot of
Silicon
Valley types putting a lot of investment in battery and other storage
technologies.
While we were struggling with these problems, Stewart Brand came out in 2005

and
said we should rethink nuclear power. This was a shock to the system for me

and my
friends. Stewart was one of the first big advocates of solar energy anywhere

during
the early 1970s. He advised Governor Jerry Brown of California.
But he said, look, we’ve been trying to do solar for a long time and yet we

get less
than a half of a percent of our electricity globally from solar, about two
percent
from wind, and the majority of our clean energy comes from nuclear and
hydro.
And according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nuclear
produces
four times less carbon emissions than solar does. That’s why they
recommended in
their recent report the more intensive use of renewables, nuclear and carbon

capture
and storage.
Let’s take a closer look at Germany. Germany gets the majority of its
electricity
and all of its transportation fuels from fossil fuels. Last year Germany got

40 percent
of its electricity from coal, 13 percent from nuclear, 12 percent from
natural gas,
12 percent from wind, and six percent from solar.
Keep in mind that you don’t just have to go from 18 percent solar and wind
to 100
percent solar and wind. To replace the entire transportation sector with
electric
cars you’d need to go from 18 percent renewables to something like 150
percent. Germany’s
done a lot to invest in renewables and innovate with solar and wind, but
that’s a
pretty steep climb — even before you get to the question of storage.
Let’s look at last year. Germany installed four percent more solar panels
but generated
three percent less electricity from solar. Even when I’m in meetings with
energy
experts and I ask people if they can make a guess as to why they think that

is, and
you’d be shocked by how many energy experts have no idea.
The reason is just that it wasn’t very sunny last year in Germany.
Well, that probably meant that it was windier, right? Because if it’s not as

sunny
then maybe there’s more wind and those things can balance each other out?
In truth, Germany installed 11 percent more wind turbines in 2016 but got
two percent
less of its electricity from wind. Same story. Just not very windy.
So then you might think, “Well, we just need to do a lot of solar and wind
so that
when there’s not a lot of sunlight or wind we can get more electricity from

those
energy sources.”
That’s what Germany is trying to do. Its plan is to increase the amount of
electricity
it gets from solar by 50 percent by 2030, which would take you from 40 to 60

gigawatts.
But if you have a year like 2016, you’ll still only be getting nine percent

of your
total electricity from solar. And this is the biggest solar country in the
world.
Germany is the powerhouse of renewables.
The obvious response is we’ll just put it all in batteries. We hear so much

talk
about batteries. You would think that we just have a huge amount of
storage.
Environmental Progress took a look at our home state of California and we
discovered
that we have just 23 minutes of storage for the grid — and to get that 23
minutes
you’d have to use every battery in every car and truck in the state. (Which,

as you
can imagine, is not super practical if you’re trying to get somewhere. And
Germany
might be a little different but not very different from California.)
Most people are aware that to make this transition to renewables, Germany
has been
spending a lot more on electricity. And German electricity prices rose about

50 percent
over the last 10 years. Today, German electricity is about two times more
expensive
than electricity is in France.
You might think, look, that’s a small price to pay to deal with climate
change. And
I would agree with that. Paying a bit more for energy — at least for those
of us
in the rich world — is a decent thing to do to avert the risk of
catastrophic global
warming.
But when you compare French and German electricity, France gets 93 percent
of its
electricity from clean energy sources, mostly hydro and nuclear while
Germany gets
just 46 percent, or about half as much clean energy.
Here’s the shocking thing: German carbon emissions have gone up since 2009,

and up
over the last two years, and may go up again this year. And while German
emissions
have gone down since the 1990s, most of that is because, after
reunification, Germany
closed the inefficient coal plants from East Germany. Most of its emissions

reductions
are just due to that.
Let’s look at last year. One of the ways you can reduce emissions quickly is

by switching
from coal to natural gas, which produces about half as much emissions. Coal

to gas
switching would have resulted in lower emissions except for the fact that
Germany
took nuclear reactors off-line. And when it did that, emissions went up
again.
There’s still question about the future: if we do a lot of solar and wind,
won’t
it all work itself out?
One of the biggest challenges to solar and wind has come from somebody in
Germany
who is not a pro-nuclear person at all. He’s an energy analyst and economist

named
Leon Hirth. What he finds is that the problem I described earlier — where
you have
too much solar or wind and you don’t know what to do with it — reduces their

economic
value.
The value of wind drops 40 percent once it becomes 30 percent of your
electricity,
Hirth finds, and the value of solar drops by half when it gets to just 15
percent.
One of the things you hear is that we can do a solar roof fast — just one
day to
put up the thing — whereas it takes five or ten years to build a nuclear
plant. And
so people think that if we do solar and wind we can go a lot faster.
But the speed of deployment was the subject of an important article in the
journal
Science
last year, which was coauthored by the climate scientist James Hansen. They

found
that even when you combine solar and wind you just get a lot less energy
than when
you do nuclear. That goes for Germany as well as the United States. They
just compared
ten years of deployment for the two technologies and it’s a stark
comparison.
Well, I can tell what you’re thinking, because it’s what I was thinking: it

sounds
like I might need to rethink my views of nuclear power. But what about
Chernobyl?
What about Fukushima? What about all the nuclear waste? Those are really
reasonable
questions to ask.
When I was starting to ask them, there were other people who were starting
to change
their minds. One of the ones I was most impressed by, and who was very
influential,
was George Monbiot.
Monbiot wrote a column shortly after Fukushima where he went through the
scientific
research on radiation and concluded, “The anti-nuclear movement to which I
once belonged
has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health.”
I write some pretty harsh things sometimes, but this was a pretty strong
column.
He was talking to a lot of scientists who study radiation.
One top British scientist who studies radiation is Gerry Thomas. She started

something
called the Chernobyl Tissue Bank out of her concern for the accident. She’s

a totally
independent professor of pathology at Imperial College in London.
I called her and said, “I’d like to present on the science of radiation but

I’m not
a radiation scientist, so can I just steal your slides? If you let me, I’ll

put your
picture on them.”
The first thing she points out is that most ionizing radiation — that’s the

kind
of radiation that is potentially harmful that comes from a nuclear
accident — is
natural.
I was like, “That sounds alright. I like natural foods. Natural radiation
from hot
springs.”
Gerry said, “No, actually, natural radiation is just as potentially harmful

as artificial
radiation.”
What’s striking is that the total amount of ionizing radiation we’re exposed

not
just from Chernobyl and Fukushima but all of the atomic bomb testing in the

sixties
and 70s totals just 0.3 percent. Most of the radiation we’re exposed to
comes from
the earth, the atmosphere, and the buildings around us.
Let’s look at the big one: Chernobyl. This was the event that led me to be
anti-nuclear
and become an anti-nuclear activist.
The United Nations has overseen these very large research efforts involving

hundreds
of scientists around the world who do this research. So the possibility of
somebody
fudging the data or covering something up is pretty low in that environment,

because
there are so many credible scientists at different universities doing the
research.
This was a pivotal moment for me. Chernobyl is the worst nuclear accident
we’ve
ever
had. Some people say it’s the worst accident we’ll ever have. I don’t need
to make
a statement that strong. But they literally had a nuclear reactor without a

containment
dome and it was on fire. It was just raining radiation down on everybody. It

was
a terrible accident.
But when they start counting bodies, what they come up with is 28 deaths
from acute
radiation syndrome, 15 deaths from thyroid cancer over the last 25 years. As

horrible
as it sounds, thyroid cancer is the best cancer to get because hardly
anybody dies
from it. It’s highly treatable. You can have a surgery to remove the thyroid

gland
and take thyroxine, which is a synthetic substitute. In fact, most of the
people
who died were in remote rural areas where they couldn’t get the treatment
they needed.
If you take the 16,000 people who got thyroid cancer from Chernobyl, they
estimate
160 of them will die from it. And it’s not like they’re dying of it right
away. They’ll
die from it in old age. That’s not to say it’s okay, but it’s to put it in
some context.
And there’s no evidence of any increase in thyroid cancer outside of the
three nations
most affected, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
There’s no evidence of an effect by Chernobyl on fertility, birth
malformations,
or infant mortality; nor for causing an increase in adverse pregnancy
outcomes or
still births; nor for any genetic effects.
I think this last one is the most striking thing:
there’s no evidence of any increase in non-thyroid cancer including among
the cohort
who put out the Chernobyl fire and cleaned it up afterwards.
I’m still surprised by this finding, and so I put the link to the web site
on that
slide, because I don’t think you should take my word for it. Reading about
Chernobyl
was, for me, a big part of changing my mind.
What about Fukushima? It was the second worst nuclear disaster in history
and a lot
smaller than Chernobyl. There have been no deaths from radiation exposure,
which
is pretty amazing. Meanwhile, 1,500 people died being pulled out of nursing

homes,
hospitals — it was insane. It was a panic. The Japanese government shouldn’t

have
done that. It violated every standard of what you’re supposed to do an
accident.
You’re supposed to shelter-in-place. In fact, by pulling people out of their

homes
and moving them around outside they actually exposed more people to more
radiation.
And you have to put that in comparison of the other things that were going
on, like
the 15,000 to 20,000 dying instantly from drowning — pinned down by many
different
technologies, by the way — from that tsunami.
So while there was no increase in thyroid cancer, there was the stress and
fear from
believing you were contaminated despite the evidence showing that that
wasn’t
the
case at all.
Some scientists did an interesting study. They took a bunch of school
children from
France to Fukushima and had them wear dosimeters, which is what we call
geiger counters
now.
You can see here that when those kids go through the airport security system

their
radiation exposures spiked. When they flew from Paris to Tokyo on the
airplane their
radiation exposures spiked. They went through the French embassy’s security

system
their radiation exposures spiked.
When they went to the city of Tomioka, which received a lot of radiation
from the
accident, it was just a tiny blip compared to the security systems.
Let’s put this in an even larger context. If you live in a big city like
London,
Berlin, or New York, you increase your mortality risk by 2.8 percent, just
from air
pollution alone. If you live with someone who smokes cigarettes your
mortality risk
increases 1.7 percent.
But if you were someone who cleaned up Chernobyl, your mortality risk
increased just
one percent. That’s just because there wasn’t as much radiation exposure as

people
thought.
I’m from the state of Colorado in the United States where we have an annual

exposure
to radiation about the same as what people who live around Chernobyl get.
This is really basic science and is right there on their web site but nobody

knows
it. Only eight percent of Russians surveyed accurately predicted the death
toll from
Chernobyl, and zero percent accurately predicted the death toll from
Fukushima.
Meanwhile, there are seven million premature deaths per year from air
pollution and
the evidence against particulate matter only gets stronger. That’s why every

major
journal that looks at it concludes that nuclear is the safest way to make
reliable
electricity.
All of this leads to an uncomfortable conclusion — one that the climate
scientist
James Hansen came to recently: nuclear power has actually saved 1.8 million

lives.
That’s not something you hear very much about.
What about the waste? This is the waste from a nuclear plant in the United
States.
The thing about nuclear waste is that it’s the only waste from electricity
production
that is safely contained anywhere. All of the other waste for electricity
goes into
the environment including from coal, natural gas and — here’s another
uncomfortable
conclusion — solar panels.
There’s no plan to recycle solar panels outside of the EU. That means that
all of
our solar in California will join the waste stream. And that waste contains

heavy
toxic metals like chromium, cadmium, and lead.
So how much toxic solar waste is there? Well, to get a sense for that, look

at how
much more materials are required to produce energy from solar and wind
compared to
nuclear. As a result, solar actually produces 200 to 300 times more toxic
waste than
nuclear.
What about weapons? If there were any chance that more nuclear energy
increased the
risk of nuclear war, I would be against it. I believe that diplomacy is
almost always
the right solution.
People say what about North Korea? Korea proves the point. In order to get
nuclear
power — and it’s been this way for 50 years — you have to agree not to get a

weapon.
That’s the deal.
South Korea wanted nuclear power. They agreed not to get a weapon. They
don’t
have
a weapon.
North Korea wanted nuclear power. I think they should have gotten it. We
didn’t let
them have it, for a variety of reasons. They got a bomb. They are testing
missiles
that can hit Japan and soon will be able to hit California.
So if you’re looking for evidence that nuclear energy leads to bombs you
can’t
find
it in Korea or anywhere else.
Where does that leave us? With some more uncomfortable facts. Like if
Germany hadn’t
closed its nuclear plants, it’s emissions would be 43 percent lower than
they are
today. And if you care about climate change, that’s something you at least
have to
wrestle with — especially in light of the facts I’ve presented on the health

impacts
of different energy sources.
I’d like to close with a quote from somebody else who changed his mind about

nuclear
power, and somebody else who was a huge childhood hero for me, and that’s
Sting:
“If we’re going to tackle global warming, nuclear power is the only way to
generate
massive amounts of power.”
Thank you for listening.
*
Evan

-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2018 12:45 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Evan: nuclear power

No, it's just that if you're unaware of the continuing devastation that has
resulted from that accident, saying that the damage from fossil fuel energy
is more dangerous, is an opinion based on inadequate information. My point
was that the damage done to that area of the world has been downplayed. No
one can ever liv in the immediate area again. People have been permitted to
move back to nearby areas, even though there is still evidence of dangerous
radiation there. Those people and their children and their children's
children may be negatively affected in ways that we aren't aware of. You
haven't heard about the hundreds of workers who died, trying to seal off
the
under water radiation which is, in fact, still leaking, nor about the real
possibility that the radiation reached Tokyo, nor about the fact that some
of it reached our Pacific shores a few years ago. No one is writing about
the fact that some of our nuclear energy plants were designed identically
to
the one in Japan. I've read statistics about the danger of the plants, but
you never see that information on TV or read it in the corporate press or
hear it on the radio. The reason is not that it isn't important news. It's
that it isn't in the interest of the nuclear industry, which has a powerful
lobby, for the public to know the facts about the danger. Many years ago,
there was a nuclear energy plant in Suffolk County on eastern Long Island
at
Shoreham. Thank God, after public pressure, it was closed. There were many
problems with it. Had there been an accident. There's no way that all of us
who lived on Long Island could have left quickly enough to be safe. There
just aren't enough roads, nor could the Long Island railroad handle the
situation. And this plant was located about 65 miles from Manhattan.
Radiation spreads. There were, at the time, about 8 million people living
in
the 5 boroughs of New York City. There's an old, leaky nuclear plant at
Indian Point on the Hudson River, not far from New York City now. There's
been public pressure to close it for years. Our Corporate Democratic
Governor Cuomo who is very friendly to Wall Street, as is our corporate
friendly Democratic Senator Schumer, has been resisting closing that plant.
But perhaps, while I've been otherwise engaged withother dangers and
injustices, that plant has been closed. I'd be very relieved if it were.

Miriam

-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2018 10:56 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Evan: nuclear power

Oh, so I gotta pass a test before you will consider my viewpoint worthy of
consideration?
Do you ask people who agree with you what they know about a subject before
you consider their views as legitimate? I would bet not.
Evan


-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2018 10:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Evan: nuclear power

iOK. So what do you know about the aftermath of that nuclear accident in
Japan?

Miriam

-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2018 9:57 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Evan: nuclear power

Once again, if someone disagrees with you, it's not because they might have
a legitimately different perspective, it's only because they've been
manipulated by the so-called "corporate" media, not because they might
actually have a different point of view.
What would be the point of discussing the issue if you come at it with that
kind of attitude?
Evan

-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2018 9:50 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Evan: nuclear power

I belatedly found part of one of Evan's emails which I managed not to see
or
forgot about or something. So, I would just like to mention the nuclear
accidents that took place at Three Mile Island, in Russia, or was it
Ukraine? And in Japan.  We have no reasonable method for dealing with
nuclear waste, and we have no reasonable way of dealing with the results of
nuclear contamination. What has happened in Japan is a nightmare, but the
corporate media has been downplaying it. There have been serious
informative
articles about it in the alternative media for years, and a few good novels
have been written about the problem in the past few years. But for the
majority of Americans, out of sight, out of mind. This method of
manipulating the public works beautifully. Intelligent people who want to
be
informed about what is happening, can be diverted from the most disturbing
information. And by the way, these nuclear plants in the US are old and
falling apart, and they're heavily subsidized by the government because,
apparently, they don't do well in that free market that all the promoters
of
capitalism praise. It's interesting that our government also subsidizes
fossil fuel companies. Now what good is a low carbon footprint when the
water and vegetation and earth are irradiated and will remain so for
thousands of years? How is supporting nuclear  waste more environmentally
friendly than carbon emissions?

Miriam

Evan wrote
How many people have died as a result of nuclear power, as opposed to
say, coal mining, or oil drilling? Now solar power is probably safer,
and I guess wind power might be up there, although I can think of ways
people could be injured or killed working with or on windmills. I'll
stack the safety of nuclear power against any of the fossil fuels
though. And yes, I do support subsidies of nuclear power. It will help
us get off carbon emissions faster. For the same reason, I support
subsidies for renewable energy. It's also worth noting that, "...
according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nuclear
produces four times less carbon emissions than solar does. That's why
they recommended in their recent report the more intensive use of
renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and storage."

http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/11/21/why-i-changed-my-mind-a
bout-nuclear-power-transcript-of-michael-shellenbergers-tedx-berlin-2017














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