Will there be a nuclear power renaissance in the United States, as a host of rosy-glassed prognosticators have predicted? Not as long as it remains such an abysmal investment opportunity, Matthew Wald writes in Technology Review’s November-December issue.

Wald, a New York Times reporter, contends that nuclear has come a long way in reliability and efficiency but still carries some serious financial baggage. “As the possibility of an accident that panics or injures the neighbors has diminished,” he writes, “the likelihood has grown that even a properly functioning new reactor will be unable to pay for itself.”

Wald cites three factors, all in flux, that make nuclear a huge financial risk. One is the sheer cost of building a new reactor, $4,000 per kilowatt of capacity using optimistic math, which is more than coal ($3,000) and far more than natural gas ($800). Another is the future competitive landscape in energy, and thus the price of electricity. And finally, no one is certain of the future price of fossil fuels, especially natural gas, which could change the whole equation.

The upshot is that prospective builders want government help in the form of federal loan guarantees—help that is not currently forthcoming. “The odds are probably not good enough for the nuclear industry to place a bet with its own money,” Wald concludes. “Only the government can agree to back up that bet, and has yet to do so.”

Elsewhere on the Technology Review website is another chink in the reactor for the nuclear renaissance crowd: The Physics arXiv Blog reports that the world’s supply of uranium is running short, citing a detailed analysis of the global nuclear industry by Michael Dittmar of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

“Countries that rely on uranium imports such as Japan and many Western countries will face uranium shortages, possibly as soon as 2013,” the blog states. “Far from being the secure source of energy that many governments are basing their future energy needs on, nuclear power looks decidedly rickety.”

Source: Technology Review (subscription or payment required), Physics arXiv Blog

Image by Topato, licensed under Creative Commons.

Republicans for Environmental Protection may sound like one of those fake advocacy groups that corporations invent for lobbying purposes, but it’s an actual organization that truly is dedicated to protecting the environment. David Jenkins, REP’s vice president for government and political affairs, tells Sierra magazine in its Nov.-Dec. issue that the group’s motto is “Conservation is conservative,” and that it’s gotten a better reception from party members than he might expect:

“Last year was the first time we had a booth at the Republican National Convention. And you know, delegates there are the dedicated core. I was expecting to have to defend my position, but I was absolutely stunned. Constantly I heard, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. The party needs to do better on the environment.’”

Jenkins says that a climate bill with “with strong, constructive input from Republicans will be stronger than one Democrats would draft on their own” and suggests the GOP could “score some political points” by standing up against mountaintop removal coal mining, which “offends everybody’s environmental sensibilities.”

REP's staff and members write opinion pieces, grant interviews, and bend legislators' ears. Its website also hosts columns by policy director Jim DiPeso, who blogs as The Green Conservative at The Daily Green. DiPeso recently celebrated the nation's wild grasslands as worthy of wilderness protection and prodded the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in an open letter to get on board with climate change legislation.

REP still has its work cut out: Project Vote Smart notes that only 15 Republican members of the House of Representatives have expressly endorsed the group, and only one senator has done so: Susan Collins of Maine. Meanwhile, Sen. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican, is still huffing, puffing, and embarrassing his colleagues with his delusional climate-change denialism.

Sierra suggests such politicians are out of step the with party rank and file: Although 45 percent of Republican voters polled by Zogby had a favorable view of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which the House passed in June, only 8 of 178 House Republicans, or 4 percent, voted for it.

That’s barely half the number of the GOP House members who endorsed REP—which makes me wonder just how deep those “conservative” values run.

Sources: Sierra, Republicans for Environmental Protection, The Daily Green, Project Vote Smart, Washington Post 

Coal mining companies in West Virginia are blowing up mountains to get to the coal inside, destroying the surrounding environment and the drinking water in the process. Nearly 1 million acres of forests and some 2,000 miles of streams in West Virginia have been damaged or destroyed during the last two years. The 20 minute documentary Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining showcases the destructive practice, including the flash floods and the environmental aftereffects caused by the mining companies.

“The impacts are temporary,” say the pro-mining voices interviewed for the film. That’s hard to believe, though, when images of destroyed mountains flash across the screen. The documentary, produced by Yale Environment 360 and MediaStorm, is clearly anti-mountaintop removal, but the producers take pains to interview people from both sides of the debate. It’s hard to have sympathy for the mining companies, however, when locals accuse them of destroying the environment, “with no thought of tomorrow or yesterday.”

For more on someone fighting the mountaintop removal mining, read about Judy Bonds, one of Utne Reader’s 50 visionaries who are changing the world.

(Thanks, @angelaishere)

Source: Yale Environment 360

Sit down on a porch with someone from the American South and you’ll learn why the region is renowned for its storytelling tradition. In the book Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (University Press of Kentucky), authors Silas House and Jason Howard tell the story of mountaintop removal coal mining through the voices of 12 Appalachians who’ve been directly affected by this devastating practice. Each subject is introduced by a vivid profile, and then House and Howard get out of the way and let them speak. Studs Terkel, no slouch himself in the oral history realm, has called Something’s Rising “oral history at its best,” and I have to concur: Although I was familiar with the mountaintop removal issue, these personal accounts brought it home for me in an incredibly powerful new way. I recently spoke with House and Howard about their book, the growing movement against mountaintop removal, and the outlook for the future.

This book is largely an oral history. Why did you choose to let your subjects tell their stories in their own words?

Howard: We chose to go with oral histories because we felt that the art of storytelling is something that mountaintop removal is destroying. Mountaintop removal isn’t only destroying the land and water and trees and animal habitat and mountains and things like that; it’s also destroying peoples’ lives and Appalachian traditions and culture. For generations, these mountains have sheltered us and provided us with stories and protection. The storytelling is something that’s been lost today because as those mountains are leaving, our culture is leaving, too. It’s becoming more homogenized. So it’s a political statement in doing that. It’s also a tribute to people’s words.

House: We wanted to allow people to tell their own stories in their own words, without any filters whatsoever—without turning them into sound bites—so that it can all be put into complete context for the reader. There is a real storytelling tradition in this region, and we think that really comes through in these oral histories. It’s just our way of saying, look, this is another thing that could be scraped away forever if we don’t stop this.

One of the ongoing threads in the book is the social pressure against speaking out on this issue. There seems to be an unwritten rule in Appalachia that you don’t criticize the coal industry. Can you tell me a little bit about where that comes from, and whether it might slowly be changing?

House: That’s what happens when you live in a mono-economy, and the coal industry has been really good at creating a mono-economy. [We live in a] place whose natural resources are coal, timber, natural gas, and tourism. Well, getting out the coal, the gas, and the timber destroys your chances of tourism. And so you’re completely dependent on an environmental economy.

The coal company has been really smart over the years, saying over and over again, “If it wasn’t for us, you all wouldn’t have anything,” when in fact, there are other parts of Appalachia that are so blessed that they didn’t have coal, and they have survived and become more prosperous than the coal areas. I mean, you take a section of Appalachia like western North Carolina where there’s no coal, and it survives very well on tourism. That’s the main source of income, and it works very well for them—and it’s much less destructive than coal mining.

Howard: It comes from years and years, almost a century now, of being, for lack of a better word, brainwashed by the coal companies. The coal companies came in here and have used up our people, used up our resources—the resources have been shipped out for years. … You can go back and look at the fight for unionization in the ’30s and ’40s, which was a really bloody fight, and the coal companies tried to stamp that out. They had company towns, which were closed societies in and of themselves. They paid the miners in scrip, which wasn’t hard cash money. It was just a token, and that token could only be spent at the company store, which was owned by the company. The schools were owned by the company, the churches were owned by the company—so you had that whole mentality of just things being dominated by corporations.

And that legacy is still alive and well today in the mountains. So people’s feelings about coal are complicated: One the one hand, when you have your great-grandfather smothered by black lung, that has an impact on you. There’s a certain level of resentment there. That was my great-grandfather on my mother’s side. On my father’s side, my great-grandfather was a union organizer, and he was murdered in the coal mines. So there’s that side of it, that people feel like the companies just chew you up and spit you out. But then there’s the other side that, you know, you sort of realize that coal has sometimes allowed families to rise up out of poverty or at least ascend to the middle class. So it’s complicated, and there are all those pressures that are still alive and well today.

House: When you’re told something for 150 years, it gets in your DNA. You start to believe it, and it’s hard to get around that mindset after more than a century of being told that, which is what’s happened in this region. And to some extent, [the coal companies] have made that come true—they’ve made it so that it is hard to get other kinds of economy. I mean, who wants to come in and set up a big factory to employ a bunch of people when people from the company don’t want to come to a place that looks like a war zone that’s torn all to pieces and people are being killed left and right on the roads by overloaded coal trucks, et cetera? The only people that are benefiting from it are the corporations.

Howard: In the early 1980s, President Reagan was preparing to go to the Soviet Union for a visit, and when he got there, he went to Moscow and he saw these grand boulevards where people were out cheering. Actually what had happened is that the Soviets, in preparation for his visit, had put up all these false fronts on their deteriorating and decaying buildings—so Reagan didn’t actually see the real Moscow.

And I think that scenario is exactly what is happening in Appalachia today. The coal companies like to put up those big fronts for people, saying, oh, look, we provide jobs, we provide wealth, we provide health care. Don’t worry about that slurry pond up the road—it’s not going to break. Don’t worry about the stream that runs by your house; don’t worry about the blasting—it’s all OK, we’re going to take care of you. And people have bought into that for far too long. Luckily, now a lot of people are waking up and are realizing that that’s not the case. So it is still complicated, and it is still hard at times for people to stand up and speak out against the coal companies, but they’re doing it. So that’s good. It’s progress.

You guys aren’t just carpetbagging journalists. You both have Appalachian roots and coal miners in your family tree, don’t you?

House: Right. We’re both from central Appalachia and are both grandchildren of miners, and we grew up very much immersed in the world of coal mining. Both of us have very close family members who worked in the mines, we both have lived very close to mines. We’ve seen it from every angle. If you’re an Appalachian, you always have a love-hate relationship with coal, but it just became more and more obvious to both of us that this was wrong—and we felt it would be morally wrong to sit by and not say something about it.

Did the fact that you’re Appalachians grant you some access, perhaps make it easier to get inside these stories?

Howard: I think it did, because with the legacy of the coal industry—with people coming in from outside the region and exploiting our people and our resources and then turning around and leaving—some Appalachians are at first leery of outsiders. We didn’t have to go through that because we both have been raised in the mountains and we spoke the language, we knew the shorthand, and we knew the culture, inside and out. So I think that people were more open and free to say what was on their minds.

How did you come to team up on the book, and what did you each bring to the project?

Howard: I met Silas at a writer’s workshop about four years ago, when I was living in D.C. I’d gone to school up there and was working and was in the process of trying to move back to Kentucky. I had watched the anti-mountaintop removal movement from afar, and I moved back shortly after that workshop and got really involved. We began traveling together and working on songs together. We were both in a band called Public Outcry that went around and sang against mountaintop removal, which opened up a whole new audience.

We were seeing so many ordinary people—quote-unquote ordinary—who were fighting back and who were very courageous and brave and who deserved recognition. And so it was born out of that—out of attending community meetings and rallies and marches and singing—that we decided the book needed to be done. And we are both different types of writers. Silas is more known as a novelist, although he’s done a lot of really great nonfiction, so he brought a lot of storytelling elements to it. Whereas I am totally a nonfiction writer. I’m a journalist who’s written extensively for lots of different magazines, and I’m also a creative nonfiction essayist. So all of those things blend, and we sort of balance each other out. I also have a political background, having gone to school in Washington, D.C. and worked on Capitol Hill for a government agency and on some campaigns. So I knew that side of the issues.

Silas, you’ve gone from being a novelist to being an activist of sorts who has spoken at rallies. What’s it been like to come out of your literary shell and be part of a grassroots movement?

House: Well, it’s certainly not something that I wanted to do or ever saw myself doing. It’s just something that I felt like I had a responsibility to do. I’m still not comfortable calling myself an activist. I think that I’m just a citizen who’s saying what he believes in, and that’s about it. I think that’s all that any of us can do—and what we should all do.

It’s interesting that you bring up that you were in a band together, because I want to ask you about music. Appalachia has a strong musical culture, and in your book you interview two musicians, country artist Kathy Mattea and folk singer Jean Ritchie, who are involved in fighting mountaintop removal. What’s the role of music in this movement?

Howard: Well, the role of music in the anti-mountaintop removal movement is growing by leaps and bounds. First, in Kentucky, it started out being just totally a writer’s movement, and then a lot of artists got together and said, OK, we were successful with getting writers on board to get the word out about mountaintop removal—so let’s go to musicians. And there are a lot of different bands and solo artists out there who are singing about it. Public Outcry, the band that we were in, was one of them. Now you have two really amazing musicians from Kentucky who are getting really big names nationally: Ben Sollee and Daniel Martin Moore, who has teamed up to record a whole album to raise awareness about mountaintop removal, and it’s being produced by Jim James of My Morning Jacket, which is a huge band.

I think that music reaches a whole different demographic than writing. You can get people out to a live show or concert who maybe wouldn’t read an op-ed or a letter to the editor or go to a rally or a protest. Music is sort of comforting. It allows people to stay within their comfort zone, and I think a lot of artists are realizing that and in the process are challenging people in a back-door way.

House: This is a fight where the people are up against huge corporations. These huge corporations have coffers overflowing with money, and all the people have are words and music. That’s all we have to fight this fight, and I think that the words and the music are winning so far—and I think that’s an amazing thing, that music and the arts are that powerful. I think that you can take a song and get somebody to understand something that they may have never understood before. You take a song like “Which Side Are You On?” which was written in the 1920s and was basically saying, are you on the side of the people or are you on the side of these big companies? It was written in a coal camp in Eastern Kentucky in the 1920s, and since then it’s been used all over the world in all kinds of social justice movements. And it changed the world. So it’s amazing what a three-minute song can do, or what a piece of literature can do. As for myself, those are some things that I know how to do, so that’s the only way I have of fighting back: telling stories or singing songs.

I see the anti-mountaintop removal movement has had some allies from the entertainment world lately. The actress Ashley Judd spoke at a rally, and the Coen brothers made a parody of a clean coal TV ad. Is it encouraging to see a little help coming from Hollywood?

House: Yeah. In our culture, people listen to celebrities, and I think these celebrities who are getting involved are getting involved not because they want to toot their own horn, not because they want any more spotlight on them—it’s just that they, too, are citizens who are standing up for what they believe in. So I appreciate them for that, and it’s good that people who are more widely known are stepping up to the plate and saying this is wrong. There are lots of people within the country music world who are getting more involved, too, which is an amazing thing because country music depends a great deal on people who wouldn’t normally identify themselves as environmentalists, I don’t think. They would probably identify themselves as conservationists, but not as environmentalists—so that’s a great thing.

Religion plays into this, too: Some of the people profiled in your book have gotten involved in the movement in part because they believe it’s a sin to destroy God’s creation. Do you find that spiritual approach to be a powerful force in the movement?

House: I definitely think it is. The main thing is that a lot of churches in the region are sort of backwards in their way of looking at environmentalism, and they have this attitude of, well, it doesn’t matter anyway because, you know, God’s going to come back and set everything right, so there’s no use in us spending much time on fighting things like this. But then you have churches within the region who are saying, no, we have to be stewards of the land, and we have been charged to do this in the Bible—it’s clearly set out in the Bible that we are to be stewards of the land and to protect it. And so it is a real moral issue for lots of people, and they’re getting more and more involved in the fight and standing up for the land—and also speaking out against the greed. Because that’s what this is—it’s an issue of greed. There’s absolutely no reason a company would do this unless it was just to make a bunch of money. They’re certainly not doing it for fun. They’re doing it because it’s the easiest way for them to make a huge amount of money as quickly as possible. So I think that a lot of churches are stepping up and pointing out that this is wrong, and that it can’t go on—it’s not morally right.

Howard: We’re seeing more and more churches and pastors and priests and laypeople getting involved. A couple of years ago, we went on a religious leaders’ tour in Kentucky. It was a very hot day, and we hiked up to the top of this mountain and looked over at this valley fill that was right under us. The coal company saw us and started blasting, and the sirens went off and everyone sang “Amazing Grace”—so it was really powerful and ironic. But on that trip there was a nun who accompanied us, and she was in her 80s. On that hot day, she was so persistent in climbing to the top of that mountain. I just remember sitting and looking at her struggling to cross little ditches and to grab hold of trees to pull herself up, and I just marveled at her. It was just like her faith was pulling her along.

And that’s just one story. Appalachia is a spiritual region, and there are lots of people out there who are like that nun, who just hate what mountaintop removal is doing to creation.

Are you hopeful that things are changing under the new administration?

House: I think it’s been more hopeful than not. The Obama administration is doing so much better than the Bush administration. This is not a partisan issue. I mean, the Clinton administration wasn’t much better on mountaintop removal than Bush the second. And so it’s not about party, but I do think that Obama is thinking things through in a much better way, and he’s getting educated on the subject as much as he can, and that’s really all we can ask of a president. It’s certainly more than Bush did. He didn’t try to get educated at all—he just did everything he could to make it as easy for them to mine as possible. So I think things are much more hopeful than they were.

Howard: I’m cautiously optimistic about the new administration. We have a few troubling signs, like the whole debate over who will be the Office of Surface Mining director. But by and large, the Environmental Protection Agency has finally got its teeth back after eight years of being reined in and of utter corruption. They have announced that they will be looking at and reviewing these mountaintop removal permits with the strictest standard, and that they will be following not only the letter but the spirit of the law. We of course would like to see a total ban on mountaintop removal, but I’m a realist and I know that we’re not there yet. Coal is still here, and it’s something we’re going to have to transition away from, and that’s going to take time. But I am hopeful.

Mountaintop removal foes have held several big marches and engaged in civil disobedience in recent weeks. So the battle goes on.

House: It does, and I think it’s going to heat up. There’s going to be more civil disobedience, mainly because when you sit by and you watch the law uphold laws being broken, sometimes you have to break the law to bring attention to that. People’s lives are at stake here. And it’s not just about creeks and owls and trees—and all those things are important—but it’s even more so about human beings. It’s about children and people who don’t have clean air to breathe—and we’re talking about the water. I mean, of all things to mess with, you don’t ever, ever mess with the water. It’s mind-boggling to me that we’re having to put forth bills that protect our water.

Have you engaged in any civil disobedience on this issue, or do you have plans to?

House: I have to some degree, but yeah, I plan to. I’ll do what it takes to protect my children. And that’s what I think it’s about—this is a matter of life and death, and we just have to do what we have to do to protect the place and the people.

Images of Silas House and Jason Howard courtesy of  University Press of Kentucky ; billboard image courtesy of  Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition .

 

 

Check out the fascinating natural wonder that functions as the keeper of millions of gallons of radioactive waste. Miller-McCune's Matt Palmquist journeyed underground to a salt formation in southeast New Mexico that is home to the world’s sole functioning “deep geologic nuclear waste disposal site.” The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) has been highly effective and accident free in its decade of existence, with one researcher boasting that it’s “safer than working at Toys R Us.” Bonus: There’s a video on the WIPP site if you’re interested in a visual overview of the storage process.

Source: Miller-McCune

Image by dsearls, licensed under Creative Commons.

Derrick Jensen is an environmentalist who sure knows how to rile up the environmentalists. The radical green author and Utne Visionary has launched a new column in Orion magazine, Upping the Stakes, and its first installment, “World at Gunpoint,” has set off a tempest on Orion’s website, landing 174 comments on 22 web pages when we last checked.

What did Jensen do to spark this upwelling? He suggested that mere “green living” lifestyle choices aren’t going to save our asses, and that much bolder actions are necessary to confront environmental devastation, which he likens to a gunslinging murderer:

If someone were rampaging through your home, killing those you love one by one (and, for that matter, en masse), would the question burning a hole in your heart be: how should I live my life right now? I can’t speak for you, but the question I’d be asking is this: how do I disarm or dispatch these psychopaths? How do I stop them using any means necessary?

Not all the respondents take issue with Jensen: Some hail his line of thinking, and others admit to deeply conflicted feelings. Which to me means that he’s asking important and necessary questions, taking the dialogue to a deeper lever. I eagerly await his next column, which will be online July 7.

Source: Orion

With a significant climate change bill on the brink of passage in the House of Representatives, I’m embarrassed to say that one of my home-state legislators, Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, is proving to be a major obstacle to the bill. Peterson, a farm-region Democrat who’s long bucked the party line and common sense on issues like gun control (he hates it), ethanol (he loves it), and global warming (he says it'll be good for farmers), is digging in his heels, using his position as chairman of the House Agriculture Committee to hold up and water down the Waxman-Markey bill.

Peterson, the Wall Street Journal reports, “wants the party’s leaders to soften the climate bill’s impact on coal-burning power plants, scale back existing regulation of ethanol, and make other changes that, if adopted, could steer huge sums of money to farmers who engage in environmentally friendly practices.”

One of the most maddening things about Peterson’s obstructionism, Chris Bowers writes on Open Left, is that major green groups aren’t calling him out on it. The League of Conservation voters, which has called itself “the national political voice of the environmental and conservation community,” in 2004 named Peterson to its “Dirty Dozen” list for having “repeatedly voted to let corporate polluters off the hook.”

Yet, Bowers writes, “there is absolutely no information on the LCV website about Collin Peterson’s obstructionist efforts,” despite a home-page call to “strengthen and pass” the climate change bill. “They have no press releases on the subject. There isn’t a single blog post mentioning either Collin Peterson or the Agriculture Committee. … why is the LCV apparently doing nothing to Collin Peterson as he is escalating his efforts to weaken the most important piece of environmental legislation in decades?”

This is where you come in. If you’re concerned about climate change and you’re sick of seeing baby steps taken where big, bold strides are needed, then contact Peterson right now. But be smart about how you do it: He’s inclined to ignore you.

“I am very interested in hearing your views on issues of importance to you,” his website proclaims. However, “Due to the large volume of U.S. mail, e-mail and faxes I receive, I am only able to accept messages from residents of the Seventh Congressional District of Minnesota.”

Well, that’s just great. The guy is a key player in the most global of all issues, and yet he pretends that his sole role in Congress is as a provincial legislator, beholden only to his constituents and no one else. (A call to his press secretary, asking for an explanation of this bizarre assertion, went unreturned.)

Here’s my suggestion: Use the phone. An e-mail is easily ignored and a fax easily thrown out. (Recycling seems like a long shot here.) If Peterson’s staff has to personally answer a flood of calls urging him to stop standing in the way of common sense, it’s going to have some sort of impact. If they ask you where you’re from, which they surely will, simply tell them that you’re a concerned resident of planet Earth.

At the risk of sounding like a blaring late-night infomercial, CALL NOW!!! Open Left reports that 9:30 a.m. Thursday is the cutoff for amendments to the legislation.

Peterson’s D.C. office number is (202) 225-2165. Do it.

UPDATE (6/24/09): Politico reports that last night, bill sponsor Rep. Henry Waxman struck a deal with Peterson in which Peterson "got every concession he was seeking," according to Open Left's analysis. I guess recalcitrance and provincialism have their political rewards. In my opinion, it's still worth calling Peterson to let him know you disapprove of his obstructionist tactics and his weakening of the bill.

Sources: Treehugger, Wall Street Journal, Open Left, Politico