Category Archives: History

Get a job —Lowndes County to waste site workers

Continuing to ignore its responsibilities to protect public health, safety, and well-being, the Lowndes County government proceeded with its plan to trash rural residents’ waste collection sites, and told part time workers there to get a job.

Jason Schaefer wrote for the VDT today, Trash centers dumped: Final week to make trips to county recycling centers,

The Lowndes County Board of Commissioners near the end of 2012 voted to approve a contract with Advanced Disposal to serve as the sole waste company to conduct curbside trash pick-up in unincorporated Lowndes County. Some citizens remain critical of the change in service, which will cost $12.80 per month, and many are trying to get their last loads to the collection/recycling centers before they close….

Full-time employees at the recycling stations, which are already employees of Public Works, said County Clerk Paige Dukes, will be moved to different positions within the department. Part-time employees will need to find new jobs.

Why might citizens be critical? Continue reading →

I-75 as the Governor Melvin Ernest Thompson Memorial Highway?

Did you know the legislature is likely to rename much of Interstate 75 through Lowndes County in honor of a former governor, and spend $4,500 for signs to do so?

The Valdosta Daily Times, Lowndes County

NOTICE OF ROAD FACILITY DEDICATION

Notice is given that there will be introduced at the regular 2013 session of the General Assembly of Georgia a resolution sponsored by Senator Tim Golden, 121 State Capitol, Atlanta, Georgia 30334, (404) 656-7580, to dedicate the portion of Interstate 75 in Lowndes County from the West Hill Avenue exit to the North Valdosta Road exit as the Governor Melvin Ernest Thompson Memorial Highway in honor of his achievements, accomplishments, and contributions to Lowndes County and to the State of Georgia; and for other purposes. The estimated cost of such dedication is $4,500.00.

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1/19/13

And such a bill has been introduced in the Georgia House (not the Senate) as HR 47, Governor Melvin Ernest Thompson Memorial Highway; Lowndes County; dedicate, sponsored by (1) Shaw, Jason 176th, (2) Carter, Amy 175th, (3) Black, Ellis 174th, (4) Sharper, Dexter 177th, (5) Houston, Penny 170th.

Here's the part that ties Gov. Thompson to here:

WHEREAS, Governor Thompson was instrumental in the success of the City of Valdosta and Lowndes County, where his leadership as a founding member of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority spearheaded much of the urban development and planning for Valdosta and the surrounding areas, including the Azalea City Industrial Park; and

And establishing Industrial Parks was a cutting-edge idea: in the 1950s.

The bill adds:

Continue reading →

Rural AIDS: poverty the cause, solar power part of the solution

Director Lisa Biagiotti spent two years travelling around the South interviewing people about AIDS to make a film, deepsouth. She found rural AIDS is a bigger and faster-growing problem than AIDS in center cities, yet most health and prevention funding goes to urban areas. The root cause seemed clear to her: poverty. Here’s some deeper dirt (literally) on rural poverty in the U.S., and one thing we know can help with that: distributed solar power, for jobs, for reduced electrical bills, and for energy independence. What politician wouldn’t want jobs for their constituents?

The director said the screening at VSU at the end of November drew more people than the day before in Little Rock. There were clearly more than 150 in the audience in Valdosta. It’s a topic very relevant to here, as Dean Poling wrote in the VDT 26 November 2012,

Organizers note that Georgia is ranked sixth highest nationally for its cumulative number of AIDS cases reported through December 2009. More than 40,000 known HIV/AIDS cases were reported in Georgia as of 2010.

The South Health District’s 10 counties, which include Lowndes and surrounding counties, report 950 confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS, while many more are likely infected and risk becoming sick because they are not being treated. More specifically, there are about 460 reported cases in Lowndes County.

In reporting these numbers, HIV is the virus (HIV disease) and AIDS is the medical diagnosis made by a doctor of the symptoms, according to South Health District.

It’s a great movie and I highly recommend it. Director Biagiotti spent a substantial amount of her own money and two years to make this film, yet there are aspects she could only note in passing, such as incarceration. She can’t be expected to have researched every aspect; maybe somebody else can step up and help follow more threads.

The movie starts with some maps about poverty and AIDS in the South. It did not, however, look outside the South for poverty. Here are better poverty maps, from the CDC:

Continue reading →

How to get fast Internet service —Susan Crawford

Susan Crawford has a plan for getting us fast Internet access for jobs, community, education, and health care.

Susan Crawford wrote for Wired 2 October 2012, We Can’t All Be in Google’s Kansas: A Plan for Winning the Bandwidth Race, about how the incumbent telephone and cable companies that provide our Internet access aren’t going to help:

They have no incentive to do so. Because they never enter one another’s territories, they don’t face the competition that might spur such expansion.

Instead, incumbent internet access providers such as Comcast and Time Warner (for wired access) and AT&T and Verizon (for complementary wireless access) are in “harvesting” mode. They’re raising average revenue per user through special pricing for planned “specialized services” and usage-based billing, which allows the incumbents to constrain demand. The ecosystem these companies have built is never under stress, because consumers do their best to avoid heavy charges for using more data than they’re supposed to. Where users have no expectation of abundance, there’s no need to build fiber on the wired side of the business or build small cells fed by fiber on the wireless side.

If the current internet access providers that dominate the American telecommunications landscape could get away with it, they’d sell nothing but specialized services and turn internet access into a dirt road.

So what is her plan?

Continue reading →

Captive cable audience —Susan Crawford

Affordable high-speed Internet access would bring us jobs, community, “online commerce and services, the ability to reach world markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate” and “a wealth of economic activity and information” writes Susan Crawford, a very savvy and experienced communications law professor who has been recommended by many as a potential chair of the FCC, who also explains why we aren’t currently getting it.

The Diane Rehm Show 10 January 2013, Susan Crawford: “Captive Audience”, and that’s the title of her book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, excerpted here:

The sea change in policy that led to the current situation has been coordinated over the past twenty years by legions of lobbyists, hired-guneconomists, and credulous regulators. The cable companies have no incentive to upgrade their core network hardware to ensure that advanced fiberconnections are available to every home throughout the country. Communications companies describe globally competitive high-speed access as aluxury, just as the private electricity companies did a century ago.

Yet communications services are now as important as electricity. Today if you asked American mayors what technology they most want for their city, the majority would say, “affordable high-speed Internet access.” And they want these networks not simply for the jobs created to construct them but because the Internet brings the world to their community. High-speed Internet access gives towns and cities online commerce and services, the ability to reach world markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate. It brings a wealth of economic activity and information. But despite these manifold benefits, Americans continue to treat such services as the exclusive domain of private monopolies and as luxuries obtainable only by the wealthy.

Not coincidentally, the United States has fallen from the forefront

Continue reading →

Failed concrete: the bane of nuclear reactors

Let’s not forget the failed concrete on which Plant Vogtle’s unprotected stranded reactor vessel is supposed to sit.

A week before the reactor vessel train wreck, news stories said concrete pouring was delayed due to “noncompliant rebar”. Thomas Clements elaborated for the Aiken Leader 14 January 2013, Vogtle AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Vessel Discovered Unprotected, Stranded in Savannah Port since December 15 Shipment Failure,

Due to chronic delays in the pouring of “nuclear concrete” for the basemat of the AP1000 units at Vogtle and VC Summer, it remains unknown when or if any reactor vessels can actually be placed into the excavated holes at the sites. A January 10 meeting of the NRC confirmed that another basemat-related “license amendment request” (LAR) was soon to be filed by SCE&G for its AP1000 project and that the target date for granting of the LAR was March 18. It appears that the Vogtle project has fallen behind the V.C. Summer project and no strategy for the filing of a similar and necessary LAR by Southern Company is known.

Concrete, the long-time bane of Seabrook Station and also what’s keeping Crystal River shut down because nobody wants to pay the billions of dollars it would take to fix it.

 

What say we call the whole thing off, like Dominion Power did with its existing Kewaunee nuke, and TEPCO and NRG did with their plans for new South Texas nukes.

 

Maybe it’s a sign that meanwhile Google has invested a billion dollars in wind and solar and gotten 2 gigawatts of power, almost as much as the 2.2 GW the two new Vogtle nukes were supposed to produce, except Google’s solar and wind projects are online on time, and for less than just the cost overruns at Vogtle.

The Georgia legislature is in session. You can contact your legislator or the PSC today about toppling Southern Company’s three-legged nuclear regulatory-capture stool and fixing that 1973 Territoriality Law so we can get on with solar and wind in Georgia, for jobs and energy independence, and oh by the way clean air and plenty of clean water.

-jsq

Centralized Nuclear Bad Investment?

A writer for Forbes spells out the question of nuclear investment: how can something that expensive, over-budget, late, and phenomenally risky be a good investment, especially when cheaper and faster energy sources are readily available?

Peter Kelly-Detwiler wrote for Forbes today, New Centralized Nuclear Plants: Still an Investment Worth Making?

Just a few years ago, the US nuclear renaissance seemed at hand. It probably shouldn’t have been. Cost overruns from Finland to France to the US were already becoming manifest, government guarantees were in doubt, and shale gas drillers were beginning to punch holes into the ground with abandon.

Then came Fukushima. The latter proved a somewhat astonishing reminder of forgotten lessons about nuclear power risks, unique to that technology: A failure of one power plant in an isolated location can create a contagion in countries far away, and even where somewhat different variants of that technology are in use. Just as Three Mile Island put the kaibosh on nuclear power in the US for decades, Fukushima appears to have done the same for Japan and Germany, at a minimum. It certainly did not help public opinion, and at a minimum, the effect of Fukushima will likely be to increase permitting and associated regulatory costs.

He goes into detail: they take too long (while gas and solar got cheaper), they’re extremely expensive to build and run, and they’re all-or-nothing investments.

I was going to compile this list of recent nuclear financial failures, but he saves us all the trouble:

Continue reading →

Vogtle reactor vessel sitting unprotected at Savannah port

What happened to Plant Vogtle’s new reactor vessel after it was in a train wreck a week ago? It went back to Savannah port and sits there unprotected and unguarded.

Thomas Clements wrote for the Aiken Leader 14 January 2013, Vogtle AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Vessel Discovered Unprotected, Stranded in Savannah Port since December 15 Shipment Failure,


Tom Clements, Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

The reactor pressure vessel (RPV) for the chronically delayed Vogtle AP1000 reactor construction project near Waynesboro, Georgia sits stranded and seemingly unprotected in the port of Savannah. The special railroad car carrying the 300-ton vessel had unknown mechanical problems on December 15 on exiting the port. The NRC has said that the vessel only got one-quarter mile before a sound was heard and the car stopped. Plans by Westinghouse and Southern Company to move the vessel are unknown. It is also unknown if the railroad car can be repaired and used or if the railroad company which owns the line is concerned that the rail car might break down again on its line in an in accessible place. Meanwhile, the apparently unguarded reactor might be subject to sabotage and sits in apparent violation of NRC quality assurance and “administrative control” regulations.

The article includes links to several more pictures taken 13 January 2013 by Tom Clements of Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, such as this one with the bridge clearly visible:

Continue reading →

Georgia legislature still trying to suck up Tennessee River water

Because Atlanta can’t get a grip on its water usage, the Georgia legislature is still trying to suck up Tennessee River water. If the legislature is willing to try that, how long before they try sucking up our Floridan Aquifer water for Atlanta?

Prefiled in December to be up early as the Georgia legisture starts meeting today, is a bill to try to move the northern border of Georgia to match an eighteenth century boundary that just happens to include a bit of the Tennessee River in Georgia. HR 4, Georgia and Tennessee; boundary dispute; propose settlement, was filed by Rep. Harry Geisinger, R – Roswell, District 48, and says in part:

WHEREAS, the State of Georgia proposes to the State of Tennessee that the dispute be resolved by the states agreeing that the current boundary between the two states reflecting the flawed 1818 survey be adopted as the legal boundary between the states except for an area described as follows which shall be made a part of the State of Georgia by which Georgia shall be able to exercise its riparian water rights to the Tennessee River at Nickajack:

Georgia is already in a three-decade-long dispute with Alabama and Florida over the Chattahoochee River. Does adding a dispute over the Tennessee River seem like a good idea to you?

And how can we best stop Atlanta from coming for our Floridan Aquifer?

-jsq

The water is not lost. —Forrest H. Williams

Valdosta resident Forrest H. Williams replied in the VDT today to my op-ed of 6 January. His information seems a bit out of date. For example, he cites Progress Energy’s Crystal River nuke as a good example, when it’s been down since 2009 and is still producing zero percent power, both according to the NRC. Readers of this blog know that the blog version of my op-ed already links to sources for everything I said. I may respond more later, but no doubt there are other people who want to get involved in this discussion. And I do thank Forrest H. Williams for airing the sort of disinformation that is out there, so others can dispel it.

Oh, and saying water that is evaporated is not lost is like saying trees that are burned are not lost. Evaporated water is not available for agricultural or wildlife or drinking water use, and thus is indeed lost.

Continue reading →