Celebrate!

Saturday, Japan is shutting down the last nuclear power generating station. Unlike the US, their licensing process includes an annual review in which public opinion is taken into account. Here, in America, we license our nuclear facilities for twenty years, often rubber stamping their permits with callous disregard for public opinion. When TMI (Three Mile Island) blew, our bucolic world in rural Pennsylvania was dosed with rad waste and the cover up continues today. Officials still claim that there was no reason to worry although massive quantities of radioactive material had been spewing from the plant for over two weeks before the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) was notified of a problem at the site. Allowing corporate interests to police themselves has not worked in Japan, nor has it worked here in the US. We just have a better handle on how to squelch public opinion. The last nuclear protest that I participated in was "overseen" by at least three dozen police from several jurisdictions. There were also intimidating and threatening gestures and actions from a handful of local residents who screamed insults and slogans that made my skin crawl. hearing of an entire nation banning together to practice true enlightened action in the face of evil and unconscionable danger makes this world citizen proud.

There is little that can be said about the ways we have chosen to do business in our neck of the woods. When the public began to understand that nuke waste is dangerous for tens of thousands of years and requires armed guards around the depots where it is stored, basically forever, the phrase "nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter." began to be bandied about. I'm not sure about you, but we still have a meter on our house. When increases in cancer were understood to be the result of being dosed with fallout, it was immediately compared to the radiation you would receive from sun tanning (which was thought to be "healthy" back then) or (for those with a desire to enter the "jet set") the amounts of radiation you would receive from taking a trans-Atlantic flight. If public opinion hovered just above fifty percent against, the next straw was added to the back of the public. Many who live in the townships that do have nuke facilities pay no property tax. Who wouldn't like that? The fact that no one will ever want to buy your house if it is in the shadow of a hazardous waste production facility, even knowing that they would pay no taxes on the property for life, makes no difference to those who have been convinced of both the need for and the safety of this insane way of making electricity.

I have readers in Japan, for them I say Bless You! Their public opinion has pushed the hand of government further toward sanity in one brief year than hundreds of thousands of protesters have done in the US in my fifty year lifetime! Even when what we warned about came true, the nuclear disarmament crowd was marginalized and the nuclear power opposition was painted as unpatriotic Communists (when that was the worst word in our political dictionary) or Socialists today. Caring about everyone as much as we care about ourselves is antithetical to capitalistic values I guess. I thought that we were a country of freedom but that our freedoms ended where they imposed on the noses of our neighbors. Not so in the case of generating electricity. We allow our freedom to flip a switch to impact hundreds of generations who have not yet been born. They will inherit the waste that has been created today with no means of paying back the bitter cost of stupidity with which we saddle them with our waste. Even as a child, I understood the odd disconnect between those who advocated for nuclear energy production and the facts. for all the touting of nuclear energy as "carbon-neutral" that claim is bogus. I have written of this before, so if you understand, jump ahead a paragraph or two. The litany of carbon-fueled activities and processes that are required to produce electricity through nukes is almost unfathomable. whether the Japanese understand it or not, they have taken a bigger step toward sustainability than they could possibly imagine.

First of all, massive amounts of fuel (carbon-based) need to be spent securing title to land that is "appropriate" for siting a facility that will be dangerous, works best near an inexhaustible source of water and requires sturdy bedrock to support the massive weight of a reactor core and the attendant containment facilities. Ideally, it would be near points of use, to keep transmission line costs down, then the construction requires hundreds of thousands of tons of limestone to be baked in kilns (also using carbon based fuel) for the cement that holds concrete together. Conventional fuels (read, carbon releasing) are pumped in to the facility in the form of backhoes, bulldozers, trucks, rock crushing and screening operations and you also need to keep the lights on in the design and drafting facilities. flying your representatives around to secure permits and lobby for leniency amongst the regulating agencies expends more jet fuel, etc. Riding herd on public opinion has a very real cost as well. Going to several dozen public hearings, putting out ad campaigns and negotiating settlements to placate local and regional opposition can require many resources and also hinge upon cheap carbon-based energy.

Then, there is the cost of fuel for the process. Naturally occurring "ore" is getting less and less available and what we have is at ever lower concentrations. Massive mining operations are required to get the raw material for fueling up a nuclear generating station. Once mined, again using carbon based energy, the ore must be crushed, refined, concentrated and transported from facility to facility to accomplish each of these critical steps. The next part requires even more energy and is called enrichment. This is what we are so mad at Iran for doing today. Massive centrifuges must be made to spin for years to extract enriched fuel for the process. These centrifuges are best energized by electricity, produced mostly from fossil fuel in our country. Finally the fuel needs to be pelletized and transported to the reactor.

When I was a child, I envisioned the entire process as similar to winding up a rubber band powered balsa wood airplane. The only difference is that the order of magnitude is much, much greater. The propeller is so much harder to spin that we scar the land as we spin it. We hemorrhage massive amounts of fuel in winding up the mechanism. We scar communities and create massive monolithic concrete structures that must eventually be disposed of as hazardous waste. Even during the period of "free flight" there are risks and costs that make the whole process seem more like a bad acid trip than I can express in mere words. I have always understood the threat from these facilities as equal to, if not greater than, the threat of nuclear weapons. Like the person driving while texting, you never know when their destructive power will be unleashed. At least with weaponry, you have to decide when and where to unleash the deadly power, accidents can happen any time, any place. Add to this the long-term consequence of producing extremely long-lived waste and you can see the whole house of cards come crumbling down.

What we were never told is that the entire charade began because we needed some of that waste to refine again, rendering even more of the landscape inhospitable for hundreds of generations, to get weapons grade material. Instead of just enjoying the "free flight" during the years of electricity generation, the whole game was to make the ultimate weapon. The gods and goddesses are smiling on the land of the rising sun. Today, tomorrow and for centuries to come we must continue to celebrate Japan's good sense and compassion. Not only for their people, but for the people of the entire planet! At their peak, the (I believe) 54 nuclear generating stations (I have also heard the number fifty) provided 1/3 of Japan's demand for electricity. In spite of this fact, the people of Japan decided to stop throwing money and their future down the rat hole of this dangerous and short-sighted form of electricity generation. The rest of the world needs to follow their lead and develop alternative and less destructive means of meeting our needs. Conservation, efficiency improvements and alternative methods of production are readily available to us all and we need to begin spinning the wheel in the directions we want to go, not backward to a time of decadent ignorance and the immorality of subsidizing dangerous and deadly industries that leave our children with unrivaled debt.

We all need to celebrate the wisdom with which Japan is pursuing sustainability. We also need to keep pressure on our own leaders to eliminate this relic of cold war thinking. No one is better off under a system that puts our nation and the rest of the planet under threat of catastrophe. Radiation from Japan is already here. Even though the government is trying to downplay the facts, we need to understand that the massive bolus of radiation that continues to leave Japan is not "less dangerous" because we are finding isotopes with short half lives. In some ways, that is indicating that the problems are far worse than we can imagine. Short half life materials, detectable over a year later indicate even greater and more concentrated plumes entering the atmosphere than we had calculated. spread the word, we have finally come full circle in the nuclear age. I personally find it somewhat ironic that the first place on earth to be decimated by nuclear attack has gone through a process that led them to fully embrace the devilish technology and then commit to ending the nuclear nightmare once and for all in just two or three short generations. This is the blink of an eye in the time span of radioactive waste and needs to be celebrated by every man woman and child on the planet!

Where Do They Find The "Experts"?

WARNING: If you care, this post is especially upsetting. If you feel vulnerable, hungry, upset already or tired, DO NOT READ IT! If however, you need to get your juices flowing or a bit of inspiration & ammunition for tomorrow's WALK FOR A NUCLEAR-FREE FUTURE, April 23rd 2011, between the Kewaunee nuclear facility and the Point Beach reactor site, read on! I'm sure that I'm not the only one feeling this level of frustration.

Today, Earthday was in the news, pretty much all day. I normally listen to Wisconsin Public Radio and they were not much different. Having participated in every Earthday since it's inception, I thought that I was reasonably aware of the environmental issues that confront us, the history and ethical dilemmas that are most often trotted out to stop real or meaningful change from taking place. The "experts" that I heard were apologists for the nuclear industry, folks encouraged by the "additional" natural gas reserves that are becoming available through hydrofracking and people who are still banging the tired old drum that global warming is still unproven and that oil dependence is a necessary evil. I used to consider WPR to be one of the best public broadcast services in the country but if this is the best they can do, then they don't deserve to be funded with tax dollars. Now, we have a whole year to prepare for next year's Earthday shows. Do you think we could put together a set of programs by then that would cover environmental issues from an ecological perspective? Corporate interests rule the air 365 days each year. Especially here in Wisconsin, where the idea of Earthday was first dreamed up, we should at least be able to hear educated and inspired programming about the dire consequences of continuing to pollute from those who are educated, truthful and committed to changing the future for the better.

We have illegal dumping, hazardous waste being injected into the ground, permit violations, polluting industries, unregulated emissions of dangerous chemicals, deaths occurring from fly ash (a waste product from burning coal) fugitive emissions from coating and plating factories and paint shops, and virtual ignorance about all of these issues on the part of the general public, yet the programming today was focused on how rosy a situation we find ourselves in. My experience is either quite different or there is a separate United States, where these purported experts reside, hiding out there somewhere. My city of about 100,000 lies at the bottom of a sixty-mile-long valley that holds over one million individuals. We have smog, though the locals don't like to call it that. We have hazardous air alerts. During these times, strenuous work is supposed to be avoided but most laborers are granted no reprieve by their employers.  Our fish are tainted and the rivers that flow through town are dangerous to touch during the heat of summer. Admittedly, there have been some improvements, but our governor has been to town to see what he can do to stop the further clean up of the river because it is "too costly" to dredge the toxic compounds out of the sediments. Industries continue to benefit from the despoiling of our "commons" and the public is expected to tow the line and continue to pay taxes that support business while public health is degraded, programs are cut back for the truly needy and the far right continues to turn their backs on any and all social responsibility. The cowboy up mentality is coming back to defy logic and proportion.

Gone are the days when unbridled individualism ruled the high country. Nowadays, if we all took a shit down by the creek, we would soon find that we were living along  a shit river. Perhaps I'm expecting too much. Maybe the environmental movement has been infiltrated by corporate apologists. I just can't imagine how we could let them rule the air on the one day each year we are supposed to be getting ourselves educated about what we can do as individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities to solve the pressing problems that daily threaten our health and welfare. I got more and more angry throughout the day and tried my best to forgive the utter lack of comprehensive knowledge evidenced by the litany of guests. Late in the day, one of the hosts tried to make the case that because many of the environmental issues were so complex, that this made them hard to solve. in defense of the guest, the woman responded that no, this is not the case. She made the point that all ecological issues converge on a single point. We all have to eat and in the realm of food production we can find the intersection of virtually every other issue that one can think of. Feeding ourselves, and making sure the food is wholesome and nutritional ,can go a long way to healing the planet. The simplicity of the issues was also mentioned. You don't need to know what a part per billion is to know that some things cause sickness and death and other things do not. Of course you can kill yourself with salt, but that is a vital nutrient. there is not benefit that can come from eating PCB, dioxins or car "piddle". Even if you give a toxic substance a cute name, it can't transform it into something wholesome.

Ko-towing to the wealthy has allowed many of the most insidious problems to increase exponentially. Waiting for the world to change might be a catchy song title, but it is no way to save a planet. Making excuses for continuing to degrade the air, water and soils can only lead to death and pain, injury, plummeting property values and dislocation. The recent changes in policies that could have reduced pollution, operating costs and utility prices, as well as providing opportunities for living more sustainably on the Earth have been a living nightmare from which we may never wake up. The issues that are most on the minds of people who make every day Earthday were barely on the table for discussion today and one wonders why? It seemed to me that the non-experts had done more for the planet than those who were cluttering up the airwaves with pablum and ameliorating public outrage at our lack of commitment to these essential issues. Perhaps it is too much to ask that we should try. In a country that allows doctors to kill over 200,000 individuals per year with medical mistakes, a land that wages war at will against imagined foes, a country that has imprisoned half the adult male population of a single "ethnic" group because of ill-conceived drug policy, expecting a rational approach to healing the environment is too much to ask. It just gets a little disappointing when one hears the same rhetoric about how "business will be negatively impacted" if we make them exhibit a conscience, how we have to pick between jobs or the environment or that we would lose market share in the world economy if we started doing the right things. The extremely wealthy can still afford to buy a bit of heaven. as long as they have their millions to spend on their retreats, the rest of us can just live in the hazardous waste sites that are our cities. If I could swim in our river, eat the fish or breathe the air without feeling ill, perhaps I would consider the problems solved, but I'm coming on to fifty and have never enjoyed all of these things where I have lived. In the old days, I could go on vacation a few times each year and at least get a taste of parts of the world that were still relatively clean and unspoiled. Now, my vacations are far less frequent and the return only reminds me of how little I want to breathe the air, drink the water and sometimes I wonder if I should even grow my own food here under the plume of poison that wafts over my house. One company alone, in my city, admits to discharging over a million pounds of toxic compounds into our air. If we are doing so well, why can't people living in Green Bay, Wisconsin catch a break? 

Hazardous Air Alert in 50 of Wisconsin's 72 Counties

The massive high pressure cell that has been sitting over Wisconsin for the past week has filled with particulates. Colder, dense air aloft has acted like a dome lid on a ball jar and the relatively motionless bolus of air that is trapped near ground level has been filling with pollutants for nearly a week. This cell is expected to stay here through the weekend and may continue to influence our weather here until early next week. We are not told what to do to prevent this from happening again, although there are several that come to mind. instead we are told not to let our elderly, or the children to exert themselves. People with heart and lung ailments are encouraged to stay home, and even young and healthy individuals are supposed to curtail strenuous activities.

Today, we unceremoniously exceeded the EPA's limits on particulates over the majority of the state. Several days ago we experienced a "fog" so intense and localized that a few dozen cars crashed in two piles along the highway. I saw the steam over a local paper mill's sewage treatment plant blotting out the sun for over a mile, and the fog that blocked the view of the highway for the poor folks who crashed was from steam from either cooling towers of a local gas powered electric generating station, or a similar paper mill, upstream of where I live.

As long as we do not change, we will continue to have more and more frequent extremes associated with our weather, the climate and the ability of our earth to handle the types of abuse that we dish out. I have never understood why our system allows some to profit from the destruction of the ecosystem that we all depend on for our survival. The three dozen crashed cars will all be replaced by insurance companies, but the cause of the crash, man-made air pollution will remain below the radar of those paying the bills. The traumatized bodies will remain. What is the true cost of our action? What is the true cost of inaction?

I remember when the particulate levels would be exceeded in one, two or three counties. Back then, Capitalists across the state said immoral and ignorant things like "Who cares, that's where the Blacks live." or "Some pollution can't be avoided." Even today people will say, that's the smell of money instead of being outraged that they are being forced to breathe toxic compounds. Now, over half the state is covered by hazardous air and the next few days it will only get worse!
Some of us will never understand how some people made it out of Kindergarten without learning that their freedom ends where the other person's nose begins!

We have all heard the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra, but the first and often the most important "R" is rarely mentioned. Reject. When thing are not re-use-able, re-cycle-able or it is difficult to reduce the use of said item, reject it. The time has come for us to act. We stand at a unique point in time where we can find a path to sustainability, or perish. Many of our resources, which I prefer to call Gifts from the Gods, have been pushed to the point of no return. The longer we wait to reverse present trends, the less likely we are to survive.

The most rewarding and spiritually enlightening part of trying to find a path to sustainability is finding out that even the smallest change can make a major difference in my quality of life. Each time I give back to Mother Earth, rewards follow, but often from unexpected places. When I take my waste oil in to the recycling station, I often meet other interesting people who encourage me to make life better in other ways. Taking a day to clean out the hazardous chemicals that were in my home when I bought it allowed me to learn about recycling fluorescent tubes in ways the reduce environmental pollution. Once the ball is rolling, it tends to gain mass and momentum. Each and every time I learn a new technique or method to reduce my "footprint" it becomes just another step on a long path to sustainability.