[Sustain] Article: Nuke "surge" against renewable solution to global warming in California

[Eric Brooks]

http://www.counterpunch.org/wasserman07172007.htmlJuly 17, 2007


  /California's New Nukes War/


  Nuclear Surge

By HARVEY WASSERMAN

A major pro-nuke "surge" against the renewable solution to global 
warming is about to erupt in California.

State assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) has moved for a statewide vote 
to allow new nuclear power plants to be built in the Golden State. He 
wants to repeal the 1976 law requiring a solution to the nuke waste 
problem before new reactors are built. A business cartel says it wants 
to build a new reactor near downtown near downtown Fresno. (For more 
information on the California situation, visit http://www.a4nr.org/)

So the nation's biggest state may soon be at war over new nukes. In 
essence, it's King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes and Gas) versus Solartopia. 
The core issue is who will control our energy: corporations, or the public.

The irony is that we stand at the brink of the greatest technological 
revolution in human history. But we're being dragged away from it by Big 
Money's push for a technology with fifty years of proven ecological 
disaster and financial failure.

Green energy is poised to remake our world.

Wind power is the cheapest form of new generation now available. There 
are sufficient wind resources between the Mississippi and the Rockies to 
generate, with available technology, 300% of the electricity we use. 
There's enough in North Dakota, Kansas and Texas alone to do 100%.

Solar technologies ranging from green architectural design to desert 
power towers to photovoltaic cells that go on every rooftop are booming 
toward a multi-billion-dollar mainstay of our electric supply. Bio-fuels 
based on sustainable, organic practices can transform our transportation 
sector. Tidal, wave, geothermal, ocean thermal and a wide range of other 
green production processes stand at the brink of epic profitability.

Meanwhile, increased efficiency and revived mass transit are the 
cheapest, cleanest ways to salvage the energy we waste. In concert, 
these 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0975340247/counterpunchmaga>revolutionary 
green technologies are poised to bring us to Solartopia, a 
post-pollution planet powered totally by energy harvested in harmony 
with our Mother Earth. They promise an abundance of efficient supply 
with the power to boom our economies and save our ability to survive on 
this planet.

But here's the hitch: renewable energy has the "flaw" of tending toward 
community control. In the long run, a true Solartopian revolution must 
involve re-shaping our corporate culture into one based on 
sustainability, accountability and grassroots democracy. Though some 
astute corporations are cashing in, in the long run green technologies 
are the door to decentralizationand economic democracy. A green-powered 
Solartopia will own its energy supply at the grassroots. Wind, solar, 
bio-fuels-they hold the keys to community control.

Against all that, new nukes are the ultimate weapon of mass distraction. 
There have been numerous rationales put forth for building more 
reactors. Except to an entrenched corporate power elite, none of them 
make any sense.

Some advocates claim new reactors can fight global warming. In fact, 
through their own "normal" emissions, in the construction process, in 
mining, milling and enriching fuel, in decommissioning, in managing 
radioactive waste, in accounting for inevitable catastrophic accidents 
and terror attacks, in weapons proliferation, and much much more, atomic 
reactors are a global warming nightmare.

Some also claim nukes will generate cheap electricity. But fifty years 
of proven failure (the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, 
Pennsylvania in 1957) says exactly the opposite. Overall, the nuke power 
experiment has been a trillion dollar disaster, with explosions, 
melt-downs, cost overruns, expensive failures, massive subsidies, 
undoable insurance, deregulatory bailouts and much more on the debit sheet.

Overall, at its ultimate corporate root, the new nuke push is a coup 
d'etat, a rightist putsch to prevent the community ownership of our 
Solartopian energy supply.

The irony in California could not be more obvious. The only way the 
industry can build new nukes is for the community to NOT require a 
solution to the radioactive waste problem.

The world was told fifty years ago that such a solution was "just around 
the corner." It was also told atomic energy would be "too cheap to meter."

These two biggest of all 20th Century industrial lies are about to be 
rationalized and atomized by a corporate King CONG desperate to hold power.

But the vision of Solartopia burns bright and real.

Humankind now possesses all the technology we need to solve global 
warming and bring us a world of post-pollution prosperity. The new nuke 
surge just declared in California is an early test in the larger war for 
a sustainable future.

The question about to be asked in California, and worldwide, is: Do we 
have the will to win Solartopia for ourselves and our children?

*Harvey Wasserman* helped co-ordinate media for the Clamshell Alliance, 
1976-8. He was arrested at Diablo Canyon in 1984 and at Seabrook in 
1989. He is author of "Solartopia: Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0975340247/counterpunchmaga>" He 
can be reached at: Windhw at aol.com <mailto:Windhw at aol.com>

-- 
"The past is the Textbook of Tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free" - Herman Melville

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.sfgreens.org/pipermail/sustainability/attachments/20070720/717de913/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: SolartopCovrSm.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 24975 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://list.sfgreens.org/pipermail/sustainability/attachments/20070720/717de913/attachment-0001.jpg