France's atomic power industry is a failed radioactive flame. Its 58 reactors are unpopular, unsafe, uneconomical, dirty, direct agents of global warming, weapons proliferators and major generators of atomic waste for which there is no management solution.
But self-proclaimed "green advocate" Thomas Friedman seems to think otherwise. In his just published New York Times op ed "Real Men Tax Gas" Friedman applies the term "wimp" to those who fail to fight global warming. But in true corporate style, he can't face the hard truths about France's industrie atomique. To wit:
1) In denial verging on psychosis, Friedman says France has "managed to deal with all the radioactive waste issues without any problems or panic." In fact, France's unsolved waste problem has thousands of ultra-hot fuel rods building up at reactor sites, just like here. Its hugely expensive attempts to reprocess spent fuel cause devastating radiation releases into the English Channel and elsewhere, prompting continual demands from around Europe that they stop.
2) Friedman says "France today generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants." But he ignores "wimpy" French public opinion that has turned decisively against building new reactors while strongly approving new wind production. The big "Non" to new nukes stems in part from massively inefficient, unreliable reactors, some of which have recently been forced shut because they are overheating the rivers meant to cool them. Is this Friedman's "macho" solution to global warming?
3) Friedman complains that the US has "not been able or willing to build one new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even though that accident led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or neighbors." Friedman misses those 2,400 "wimpy" central Pennsylvania families who sued for widespread death and disease they suffered after TMI's radiation releases showered their homes and fields. The utility responsible quietly paid out more than $15 million in secret settlements.
Friedman has also missed important new findings by nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen and epidemiologist Stephen Wing indicating far more extensive TMI radiation releases and far more widespread health impacts than previously believed.
4) Friedman complains that "we're too afraid to store nuclear waste deep in Nevada's Yucca Mountain -- totally safe -- at a time when French mayors clamor to have reactors in their towns to create jobs." But Yucca's ability to store anything except rusting rail lines is as yet untested. The earthquake fault that runs through it is tangible and visible. So is perched water that threatens to rain down on any radioactive waste stored there. Yucca is surrounded by dormant volcanoes -- and by 80% opposition from "wimpy" Nevadans angry for a wide variety of economic, health, safety and geological reasons. Nobody in France is planning on storing high level radioactive waste in their town squares and nobody else -- here or there -- wants it.
5) Friedman says "the French stayed the course on clean nuclear power, despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and we ran for cover." France's first shot at a "new generation" reactor -- in Finland -- is an engineering, economic and ecological catastrophe. French taxpayers are enraged about funding an Olkiluoto project that's years behind budget and billions of Euros over budget. Anne Lauvergeon, the chief of AREVA -- France's nuclear front group -- told me (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v43ahQHvObI) she blames Finland's regulatory framework for her woes. But a parallel project at Flamanville, France, isn't faring much better. AREVA's fortunes have plummeted, throwing the government-controlled agency into deep financial crisis.
6) Friedman goes on to laud "Little Denmark" for imposing "a carbon tax, a roughly $5-a-gallon gasoline tax." He fails to credit its "wimpy" but fiercely effective No Nukes movement, which has kept Denmark totally free of atomic reactors, while moving it further into wind power percentage-wise than any other nation on Earth. Angry Danish opposition has helped force neighboring Sweden to shut its Barsebaeck reactors, upwind from Copenhagen.
Friedman's bizarre reactor advocacy reflects a corporate mindset too wimpy to embrace the true Solartopian solution to our energy crisis. Mycle Schneider, Paris-based author of WHAT FRANCE GOT WRONG (http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2053958) in NUCLEAR ENGINEERING INTERNATIONAL, gets it right: "For least cost and greatest security, the energy future lies in affordable, distributed, superefficient technologies, smart grids and sustainable urbanism. France's centralised, autocratic nuclear policy symbolizes the opposite."
The true green technologies of a Solartopian Revolution are proven, ecologically sound and economically essential. They are also ready for rapid installation.
But they are decentralized and subject to community control rather than corporate domination. While Friedman and his moneyed elite continue to grasp at the failed, centralized straw of atomic energy, technology and history have passed them by.
"Real men" -- and women -- know we will never get to a green-powered Earth by trying to ride a dead radioactive horse -- even if it's French.
Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA: OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at http://solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and senior editor of freepress.org, where this piece first appeared.
People hear "nuke" and they go crazy, but the cold hard reality is that any sensible plan to reinvent the way energy is distributed in America and the world has to have a significant nuclear component.
Ask Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore:
http://www.greenspirit.com/logbook.cfm?msid=228
He recycles common wisdom and presents as it as his discoveries. Love Matt Taibbi for humiliating this fraud.
Remote power, including Big Wind and Big Solar, and including "community level" Big Wind and Big Solar is incredibly harmful to the environment and the economy, whereas point of use solutions reducing usage and increasing generation within the built environment are absolute wins on every level - from water waste to concrete and steel emissions to democratic ownership to more and better jobs, to property values, open spaces, global warming, energy security, and on and on...
Since the DOE determined, more than 6 years ago, that 190% of the US' electricity consumption could easily be met on existing rooftops and in-city brownfields, using only super-cheap thin film PV, there is no excuse for any Big Energy intervention in renewable energy policies.
it is past time for a generous feed in tariff which guarantees at least 10% ROI to all of us who do the right thing by producing more clean, non-lethal power than we use on our own rooftops.
The love affair with the automobile opens a surprising path to sharply reducing the need for nuclear (or fossil fueled) power plants.
Revolutionary new technology will make possible electric cars that need no recharge - as well as hybrid engines that might need only one gallon of water for each thousand miles of driving.
See the article: 4 Steps to Revive the Auto Industry and the Economy on the website: http://www.aesopinstitute.org
These breakthroughs lead to cars and trucks that need no conventional fuel or recharge. Later, more advanced versions will become power plants when parked, wirelessly selling electricity to the local utility.
The science is not yet in the textbooks and will understandably be greeted with extreme skepticism. However, independent laboratory validation of one remarkable breakthrough has taken place at Rowan University. It produced far more heat than can readily be explained by existing science, clearly suggesting a new source of energy is involved. The experiments can and should rapidly be repeated at national laboratories and other universities.
The Rowan validation began the process of proving that new technology can allow a barrel of water to replace 200 barrels of oil!
Radically new technologies will seductively let the love affair with vehicles change much of what is currently believed about energy.
Who will not buy an electric car that needs no recharge, or a hybrid fueled by a gallon of water each thousand miles? And forget Nukes!
By John Marshall Dudley
Summary
Theory predicts that it should be possible to violate the second law of thermodynamics. An experiment was constructed to evaluate the theory, and it was found to produce power in the form of electricity from the kinetic energy of molecules of air at room temperature. The experimental power produced by the device over a temperature range of 20 - 55 C was within 5% of that which the theory predicted across the entire range.
Other sources of the power, such as electrochemical were evaluated and eliminated as possibilities.
See also
Advances in Physics The Fluctuation Theorem
By, Denis J. Evans and Debra J. Searles
Quantitative predictions made by the Fluctuation Theorem regarding the probability of Second Law violations have been confirmed experimentally, both using molecular dynamics computer simulation and very recently in laboratory experiments.
Amory Lovins says expanding nuclear increases global warming because it's "neutral" carbon footprint ignores the cost of mining and processing uranium. Peak uranium is 2040, unless we build lots of plants, then it's 2015.
Meanwhile, and perhaps most significantly, Lovins says that the markets have already decided: unless it's heavily (government) subsidized, nuclear doesn't make economic sense. Conservation and renewables are what private enterprise favor.