Month: March 2011

As we all know by now, the Fukushima plant’s inability to withstand natural forces has resulted in the poisoning of water and land in the surrounding area and the emission of radiation into the atmosphere that is now detected in parts of the United States.  And the reactors are still not under control, the potential damage to humans and other living things still not contained. 

While everyone around the world is asking, “Could it happen here?,”  our governments (outside of Germany) and the nuclear industry minimize the risks and boast about new technologies.

I’ve only read opponents of nuclear-generated electricity use the expression “It can’t happen here,” always to describe the attitude of proponents.  I know of no proponent of nuclear who has used this exact idiomatic expression, at least not since a massive Japanese earthquake began a chain of events that caused an as-yet uncontrollable meltdown of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant. 

I thought I would share some of the facts I have culled from my reading about the Fukushima incident, the reactions of both opponents and proponents of nuclear-generated electricity, and the comparisons between Fukushima and U.S. nuclear plants presented by both sides:

• Of the 104 nuclear-powered electrical generating plants in the United States, 53 (more than half) have the same basic reactor design as the Fukushima reactors.
• One of the biggest problems at Fukushima is that the fuel rods are not covered by enough water.  The uncovered rods spew radioactivity into the environment. And it turns out that on average, the rods are piled twice as high in U.S. nuclear plants than at Fukushima. As anyone with common sense will realize, the higher you pile the rods, the more water you will need to cover them, the more likely there will be insufficient water (all other things being equal)  and the greater the potential problem if the rods are uncovered.   
• After power failed in the plant, which meant, among other things, that there was no way to pump water to the spent nuclear rods, Fukushima ran out of battery power in about eight hours.  Virtually all U.S. nuclear-generated electrical power plants—93 in all—have batteries that last a mere four hours.

These three facts are enough to convince me that the overall the safety and the standards of safe operation at U.S. nuclear-generated power plants are about what they are in Japan.   That conclusion in turn begs a few important questions:  Could a U.S. plant be hit with a natural disaster like the one that hit Japan—a major earthquake followed by a tsunami?  Would it take less than an earthquake-tsunami to do the damage? What other weaknesses in design or operations are there that we won’t know about until something bad happens

My current reading, Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter, makes me raise another very frightening question.  The massive amount of evidence that Dikötter presents builds a solid case for the idea that during the Chinese so-called “Great Leap Forward” in 1958-1960, the mores and practices supporting the social and economic system seemed to crumble away in a matter of months because of the crazy policies of the communist party.  Standards of safety and maintenance were loosened to the degree that equipment and factories quickly became inoperable and some unreal number of manufactured and finished goods—maybe a third—were so shoddy that they were unusable.  New dams and irrigation projects failed everywhere because of shoddy construction.  Corruption and falsification of reports was endemic.

What if such a total breakdown occurred in a country that generates electricity using nuclear power?  The thought of what could happen is almost too horrific to conjure.

I’m not going to mince words: It was a grave mistake for our country to lead a military action against the forces of Libya’s ruler since 1969, Muammar Gaddafi.  And after the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was also a sign of collective lunacy among our policy makers and politicians.

Here’s what’s wrong with the move, which of this writing consists of massive bombing with the promise of ground forces in which the American role is still undefined:

There is no goal. What does this French-British-American-led war hope to accomplish?  Free elections? Less repression and a more open economic system? Overthrow?  What’s the plan when Gaddafi falls? Who replaces him? Remember the thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars lost because we didn’t have a plan in Iraq.  Remember, too, the utter destruction of Iraq and the death of 151,000 Iraqis. (by the count of the Iraqi Family Health survey; other estimates, by the way, range as high as 600,000!) 

Why Libya and not other dictators? As we Jews would say at the Passover Seder, ma nish tanah?, which roughly translates into “Why is this any different?” Why haven’t we invaded North Korea or Iraq for mistreating their people?  Why haven’t we invaded Saudi Arabia for keeping its people in totalitarian darkness?  Why didn’t we invade Guatemala and Nicaragua in the 60s and 70s, and in fact lent support to the regimes that were suppressing the people?  What about our good old buddy and financier China?  To those who say their difference is the degree to which Gaddafi is hurting, even torturing, innocent people in his crackdown on protest, my response is: Before we get into another dirty and potentially endless war, perhaps we should first prosecute those in our own country who approved of and created our reprehensible torture gulag.

I think what’s happened is that the U.S. (Hillary?) made a deal with Europe, who really needs Libyan oil much more than we do, and China to be the world’s policeperson, in return for unnamed economic concessions.  But that surmise merely locates the source of the lunacy.  It doesn’t tell us what the leaders of the so-called free world were thinking when they decided to plunge headlong once again into the internal battles of sovereign nations on other continents.

There is a lot we could and should be doing to help the Libyan rebels short of invasion. But it seems as if our government prefers to shoot first and ask questions later.  

When a Guy Chapman responded to my blog entry on ending nuclear-generated electricity by citing a 1975 Chinese Dam accident in which 26,000 died and another 140,000 may have starved to death later, I thought I would ignore it. 

But yesterday in many newspapers across the globe, Gwynne Dyer, a legitimate international journalist, repeated the ridiculous argument central to Chapman’s response, that nuclear is unfairly treated and held to a higher standard than we hold other ways of generating electricity. 

Now I have to analyze what looks like one of the major rhetorical strategies that the nuclear industry and its supporters will employ to explain away the growing disaster at Fukushima.

The way this argument goes, hundreds of miners die every year and only 5,000 died at Chernobyl, which of course ignores the thousands of malformed children born or those who developed thyroid and other cancers afterwards and the hundreds of thousands of early deaths that have occurred and we know will occur over the coming decades.

There are five problems with the argument that other electrical-generating industries kill more people and get a free pass:

1. It’s not true that the other industries get a free pass:  After the 1975 Chinese hydroelectric disaster, the heads of those in charge rolled and the dam was entirely rebuilt.  We see what’s happening to Massey and its CEO in the wake of the West Virginia coal accident: investigations and indictments.
2. You are comparing apples to oranges:  In both the hydroelectric and the coal comparison, the authors compare the total fatalities of many accidents or of the very worst imaginable accident to the immediate fatalities of what may or may not have been a severe nuclear plant accident. 
3. The failures leading to most of the coal and hydroelectric accidents resulted either from human error, poor maintenance or bad technology, all of which can be corrected with existing technologies and higher inspection standards, which virtually all nations are now dedicated to achieving.  But while human error and inferior design have led to most nuclear accidents, too, the unavoidable safety hazards of nuclear are inherent in that it produces harmful radiation, which is impossible to store safely and lingers for tens of thousands of years.
4. A hydroelectric or coal accident affects only the immediate surroundings, whereas the nuclear accident can infect water and food hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
5. It is possible to implement all the steps to ameliorate hydroelectric or coal damage to the natural and human environments within the course of a few decades at the most.  Ameliorating not only the damage from a nuclear accident, but the waste nuclear produces takes far longer than the recorded history of mankind to this date.   

One thing that all these technologies have in common is the need for governmental support to produces inexpensive electricity.  If governments made coal-powered generating plants use equipment that is now available to “scrub” most of the noxious wastes from burning coal to generate electricity, the price of electricity would rise significantly.  Virtually all hydroelectric projects have government support.  In the case of nuclear-generated electricity, the industry would not even exist without the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the financial liability of companies that generate electricity through nuclear fission to the equivalent of the cost of a fender-bender. If we were to repeal the Price-Anderson Act, I’m betting virtually every nuclear power plant in the United States would shut down in 10 years.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t provide support to electricity-producing industries.  What I am saying is that we should immediately end all governmental support of nuclear-generated electricity and invest that money into cleaning up and making safer existing technologies and commercializing solar, wind and other renewable alternatives. 

At the time of this writing, we have just learned that the heroic efforts of Japanese nuclear-generated electrical power workers have failed and the last remaining workers have evacuated the Fukushima nuclear power plant.  It seems all but certain that some amount of poisonous radiation will escape the containment and carry into the atmosphere to silently harm millions of people. 

The nuclear electrical generation industries in Western Europe, China and the United States have responded admirably by inspecting and closing plants on a temporary basis.  But that doesn’t change the fact that they have a flawed and pernicious technology that represents a dead end in the development of alternative energy.  

It took a forceful act of Mother Nature to demonstrate the inherent dangers of depending on nuclear energy to generate electricity. 

I can understand why many of those cognizant of the danger of continued global warming should have recently warmed up to nuclear-generated electricity, which does not empty carbon into the environment and by that measure has a “clean bill of health.”

But consider these facts about nuclear-generated electricity, facts that have not changed in the 60 years that power plants have been generating energy while accumulating harmfully radioactive nuclear wastes:

• The half-life of some radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants is 25,000 years.  That means that in 25,000 years half the radioactivity will dissipate, and then in another 25,000 years another half of it will dissipate.  The challenge then is to build waste disposal facilities that will last through more than 25,000 years of natural disasters, evolving languages, government changes, lunatic leaders and the downfall of civilizations.   If the waste facilities are built to withstand all but a massive natural disaster that happens only every 100 years (the Katrina event or an earthquake), it must weather 250 such events, just to get through one half life cycle.
• There are two theories regarding the dangers of radiation: the threshold theory, which avers that radiation never is harmful until exposure is above a certain level.  The alternate view is called the cumulative theory, which states that the effects of radiation accumulate so that every X-ray you take adds to the possibility of future side effects.  No one knows for sure, but the nuclear-generated electrical power industry works under assumption that the threshold theory is right.  But it seems to me that until we know for sure, the cumulative theory—the one used by medical professionals—is the safer one for the public.
• Most people know about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now the Japanese reactors, but in total there have been more than 15 serious accidents, meltdowns and partial meltdowns since the dawn of the nuclear power generation age in the early 50’s.  That’s an average of one every four years.  The source I’m using cites no major accident in 11 years before the recent earthquake and tsunami leveled parts of Japan, but that is not enough time to say the technology has gotten safer, especially in light of these recent events. 

Did you know that if a Japanese style reactor disaster were to occur in the United States, the nuclear industry’s liability is likely inadequate to clean up a major mess, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, passed in 1957 and extended several times?  By limiting the liability of the nuclear industry,  the federal government has transferred the true cost of delivering nuclear-generated electricity from the companies that generate the electricity to society in general. 

And did you know that in the early 50’s, experts presented white papers outlining how to commercialize nuclear and solar power to President Truman (our worst president and one of the most evil men in recorded history for ordering the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki)?  Truman rejected the solar option and poured billions into subsidizing nuclear-based businesses.   

And did you know that in the 1970’s, some 40 years ago, Barry Commoner proved that if the U.S. army insisted that all their field batteries were photovoltaic (which means the energy is generated by solar power), then cost of manufacturing would come down to the point of making photovoltaic cells a competitive source of energy?

The relentless pursuit of the nuclear option pretty much ended in the United States after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but a few years back, as soon as we realized that the twin challenges of energy dependency and global warming were entwined, politicians, think tanks and the news media began generating  support for nuclear-generated electricity again.   

With such a bad record of safety and no real way to store dangerous wastes, why is there still such a fascination with nuclear power? Why waste more money on this inherently dangerous technology instead of working on more energy-efficient technologies and the development of solar, wind, hydraulic (water) and biomass energy?

The answer, I believe, lies in the difference between the language typically used to describe the subject of the blog entry—nuclear power—and the more accurate phraseology I have employed—nuclear-generated electricity.

All nuclear power can do is make electricity and send that electricity to a centralized grid that delivers it to industrial, commercial and residential users.     

Government leaders everywhere tend to like generating electricity centrally, instead of providing the energy at the source of use (which by definition wastes less energy), as you could with rooftop solar panels or solar-generated electricity stations in neighborhoods, and as you do with natural gas powered vehicles.

But why do many leaders in virtually all governments love nuclear power?  My speculations:

• Industries with few participants are easier to deal with and easier to integrate into industrial policy decisions.
• It takes big organizations to operate and finance electrical generation and our leaders hobnob all the time with the leaders of big organizations, in their spare time and during campaigning.  If you don’t believe me, check the social schedule of all our presidents and ex-presidents since Richard M. Nixon.  What that means is that our leaders are always hearing the views of big organizations and tend to think in terms of “big” when they want to get something accomplished.
• It’s the big companies and their owners and large shareholders (and in particular of nuked-out utility companies and the financial institutions backing them) lining the pockets and campaigns of our elected officials.
• Especially at the dawn of the nuclear age, governments have liked the fact that nuclear generation of electrical energy is a peaceful use that in part justifies their horrifying and macabre weapons research and manufacture.  

Yes, our governments love nuclear-generated electricity because they love electricity, they love big projects, they love central control, easy access to major economic players, and an easy source of campaign funds and future endowed university chairs.  They love it because they love their nuclear weapons.

Other energy sources can deliver some of these benefits to short-sighted or corrupt government leaders, but none can deliver all of them in one pretty little glowing package.

I always love to peruse the photos, jobs and wages of the 150 or so people that Parade Magazine features in its annual review of people’s wages in the United States.  This year, only a sampling of the featured made it to the print addition.  To see the full survey, you have to go to the website and click through 157 slides (and thereby have a chance to ignore 157 sets of online ads!).

The print edition continued Parade’s pursuit of all things celebrity.  The one full article was about an actor in a situation comedy about a white collar workplace titled “The Office.” The three sidebar articles on the one full page of people and what they earn compared the lives of three real people with television characters with the same jobs, all from situations comedies.  Parade titled these sidebars “TV vs. Reality.”

If you wanted to learn something other than the fact that an Indiana park superintendent likes his real job as much as Amy Poehler likes her play job on “Parks & Recreation,” you had to slog through 157 slides online.

Fortunately, I’ve done the work for you.  Here is a graph that clusters the various amounts people earn in increments of $5,000, except at both ends of the graph, i.e., the amounts at the extremes are $10,000-$20,000 per year; $100,000-$110,000; $110,000-$125,000; $125,000-$250,000; to a million; and over a million. Remember that we are talking about individual, not household, income:

Based on four great divides on the graph I identified, I created four income categories:

1. Struggling: Under $40,000 in annual income
2. Today’s middle class: $40,000-$80,000
3. Today’s upper middle: $80,000-$125,000
4. Wealthy: More than $125,000

I also divided the people into four groups, as noted on the graph:
A: Artists, craftsmen, musicians, entertainers

G: Government and public employees

X: Private-sector employees

B: Business owners

I did not put anyone making less than $10,000 a year on the chart, as these were all part-timers or volunteers, with a sprinkling of a few more A-types.  Note that Parade segregated celebrities into their own article, which differs in the past when the earnings of an Oprah or a Michael Jordan made it seem as if the only way to riches was to become an entertainer or professional athlete. 

Here is the chart.

 

Before commenting, I first want to address the issue of whether the Parade list reflects reality.   Parade itself says that the median annual income in the U.S. is $28,580; median means that half of all people make less and half make more.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics tells us that mean income, what we call average, is $43,460.  When mean is significantly larger than median, it usually means that a few big numbers are driving the average up.  In income terms, that means that a very few people are making a lot of money, while most people make very little. 

 

Just looking at the chart it seems as if the Parade survey pretty much reflects reality, as far as mean and median incomes go.  While I am concerned that there are no Fortune 1,000 executives or high-powered attorneys on the list, there is a wide spread of different professions, so let’s assume that the Parade list is a reasonably accurate reflection of the current salary situation in the United States.

 

What can we learn?

 

First and least is that you better not try to earn a living as an artist, crafts person, entertainer or writer unless you intend to be very successful.

 

It’s also interesting to note that the public sector has a far more equitable distribution of wealth, with most public sector employees making what I call middle or upper middle class incomes and only one that barely makes it into the bottom echelon of the wealthy.  In the private sector, by contrast, if you want to make it into the upper middle class or be wealthy, then you had better own a business.  In fact, if we took out the artists and public employees, we are left with a graph in which there is a very uneven distribution of wealth between employees and business owners.

 

Right-wing politicians and the news media want to hammer public workers as a chief cause of our deficit problems.  Instead, perhaps we should emulate the public sector model.  We know that public workers tend to be more well-educated than private sector employees, plus the public employee is more likely to be unionized.  So the key to obtaining an upper middle class income, but not get rich, may be to get more education and join a union. 

 

Am I a delusional paranoid liberal, seeing a conspiracy in every corner?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten the subjective impression that our elected officials and other leaders on all levels of government were inundating the marketplace of ideas (AKA the news media) with demands and plans to cut budgets, especially in the areas of education, social service programs and health care. I perceive seeing very little mention of raising taxes in the media as a means to address budget deficits, even though taxes on the wealthy are at a historic low. 

How could it be, I have wondered to myself, that no one is talking about raising taxes? 

Then I remember that when “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair released a survey showing that 61% of Americans wanted to raise taxes on the wealthy to address our budget woes, it made it into a mere 44 online media, according to Google News.  Not among these brave few media outlets were the Wall Street Journal, nor the New York Times. 

In other words, it’s the will of the people to raise taxes on the wealthy. But it seems as if the news media, our elected officials and our think tank gurus are ignoring the people’s will.

Does my impression stem from my biases as an aging progressive feeling abused by the right wing?  Or is our national marketplace of ideas working to keep taxes low on the wealthy while cutting important government programs, even if that means greater unemployment, more human suffering and a continued deterioration of our infrastructure of bridges, roads, mass transit systems and schools?

As Kai Ryssdal, American Public Radio’s cheery purveyor of smiley-face capitalism likes to say, “Let’s do the numbers!”

Google News reports that over the past month, roughly February 9-March 9, 2011, there were 8,827 distinct stories in online news media that mentioned the term “cut spending.”  There were only 4,059 stories that mentioned the term “raise taxes.”

But it’s worse than that.  I estimate that on average, every story that mentioned “cut spending” was on 1,428 websites or online media outlets; stories mentioning “raise taxes,” by contrast, made it onto an average of only 80 websites or online media outlets each.

Here’s the methodology I used to determine the number of times that each story appeared: Each search revealed dozens of pages of stories.  I counted the number of media running the 20 stories on the first two pages.  I disregarded the top total for each search term and took the average total of the other 19.

Here are a few more interesting comparisons, all of which show that whatever our elected officials, economic experts, think-tank scholars are saying, reporters and editors actively seek to fill deficit reduction discussion with talk of spending cuts, with almost near silence about raising taxes:

• On the first two pages of the search results, nine of the 20 stories about cutting spending appeared in more than 1,000 Internet locations; for raising taxes, it was only one.
• The headline of the most widely-disseminated story to mention raising taxes was the wishy-washy “Obama plans to cut taxes, and raise them, too” and was in 11,090 places. No other story about raising taxes was in even 700 places.  By contrast, the headline of the most widely-disseminated story to mention cutting spending was the very aggressive “Boehner to Obama: Cut spending more,” which also made it to 11,090 places.
• If you extrapolate the results of the first 20 pages over the entirety of all the stories that Google News reports for both of these search terms over the past month, we find that someone could have seen stories about cutting government spending about 12.6 million times.  Do the same math for raising taxes and you get a total of about 325,000 stories over the past month.  In other words, for every story in which the idea of raising taxes is mentioned, there are probably about 39 mentioning the idea of cutting spending.

39 to one! Think about it!  For example, imagine being in a room.  On one side of the room one person sings as loud as she can and on the other side of the room 39 people sing a different song, again as loud as they cam.  Who would you hear?

One could argue that the results are biased because of the stories in the large number of wacky right-wing websites and groups, all funded by a number of very wealthy people, the most notorious of whom currently are the Koch brothers.  First of all, not that many of those right-wing publications are on the list of media from which Google News pulls its stories.  And the bias created by those that do make the list just proves the broader point that money now controls the outcome of most elections. 

So my impression was accurate, and the news media is for the most part in bed with those who want to cut spending on needed programs, ignoring the will and best interests of the vast majority of people.