CNN reported in 2010 on Shell Bluff, Georgia, near Southern Company’s nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle. Why is there so much cancer in such a small population? Why are not just the older folks, but younger folks, dying? Who is looking into all this before Southern Company builds two new reactors? Um, not clear. Does that seem right to you?
Here’s the video:
-jsq
If you happen to be in Atlanta, there's a movie premiere this afternoon! Southern Company has made a movie out of its corporate biography, Big Bets, and is showing it today.
1:30 PM 16 July 2012
The Fox Theatre Atlanta
660 Peachtree Street NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30308
Oh, sorry, SO didn't send you a ticket? Well, I hear there will be people standing outside with signs starting around 1:30 PM. Maybe you'd like to join them. And if you're not in Atlanta, maybe you'd like to do something where you are.
Here's a preview of the movie, starring FDR: as the villain!
This appears to be the entire book online as a PDF. It starts in on FDR on page 100:
FDR had become known in utility circles as a “dangerous man” for advocating state ownership of power projects and denouncing the “sins of wildcat public-utility operators” and the “Insull monstrosity” with insinuations that all utilities were guilty of betraying the public's trust. He also proclaimed the rights of any community unhappy with its service to take over private utility operations and develop their own power sites—a “birch rod in the cupboard” to be used when good service was not provided by private companies.
Imagine that, generating your own community power! Imagine it, but you can't do it. Southern Company and Georgia Power fixed that in the 1973 Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act.
What you won't see in the movie or read about in the book, Big Bets,
is much about the
bet-the-farm risk of nuclear power (bond-rater Moody's phrase),
or
how much water nuclear uses,
or
the profit opportunity of renewable energy such as solar and wind power.
You can see some shareholders ask SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning about
some of those things in
these videos from the shareholder meeting back in May.
If you run into him at the movie premiere, maybe you can check in
with him on whether any of his answers have evolved, for example,
does he still think SO won't get to solar or wind power this decade?
Or
maybe you’d like to ask Southern Company some questions online.
-jsq
ENENews reported today that Just 0.8% of children in 2001 Japanese control group had thyroid cysts or nodules — 36% in Fukushima study. Is that a risk we want in Georgia from the new nukes at Plant Vogtle? How about we deploy wind and solar instead, faster, cheaper, and on time, plus solar or wind spills do not cause thyroid cysts.
Now you may say there’s little chance of similar problems in Georgia, since Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning assured us 
Plant Vogtle is 100 miles inland where there are no earthquakes. Still, the same could have been said of Chernobyl. And TEPCO back in 2001 reassured everyone that tsunamis were not a problem for Fukushima.
Economics, as in the stealth tax rate hike, $8.3 billion loan guarantee,
cost overrun passthrough boondoggle sucking up money that could be going to make Georgia a world leader in solar and wind for jobs, energy independence and profit, is the main point.
But let’s not forget the health risks of nuclear power, from Three Mile Island to Chernobyl to Fukushima. Or Southern Company’s Plant Hatch, for that matter, leaking radioactive tritium into the ground water 90 miles from here. No tsunami and no earthquake was required to produce that leak. It’s our money and our families’ health Southern Company is experimenting with.
-jsq
Only a few months ago, Cobb EMC pulled out of Power4Georgians and their coal plant plans; now Snapping Shoals EMC does the same. The sidewalk is indeed snapping up behind coal in Georgia. As once again customers of an EMC decide to run for its board. Southern Company and Georgia Power, are you listening? Not just about coal; also about those new nukes.
The insurgent candidates have a facebook page, Smart Energy for Snapping Shoals.
PR yesterday from Georgians for Smart Energy, Snapping Shoals EMC Backs Away From Risky Coal Plant Venture
Continue readingDoes your insurance policy explicitly list fracking damages among the things it covers? If not, you’re probably not covered, and especially if your insurer is Nationwide. And if your drinking water catches on fire, that’s probably not even considered damage to your property. Remember, natural gas through fracking (plus nuclear) is what Southern Company and Georgia Power (and therefore all the smaller electric utilities in Georgia) are moving to instead of coal.
The River Reporter reported Wednesday, Nationwide insurance: no fracking way
National Casualty (Insurance) Company, part of the Nationwide group of insurance companies, has announced that hydraulic fracturing operations are prohibited in relation to properties it insures.
The company has determined that the exposures presented by hydraulic fracturing are too great to ignore. Risks involved with hydraulic fracturing are now prohibited for General Liability, Commercial Auto, Motor Truck Cargo, Auto Physical Damage and Public Auto (insurance) coverage. The company said it would not bind risks with this exposure, and any policies currently written with the exposure would be non-renewed (following state requirements).
Among the prohibited risks involved in fracking operations listed by the company are contractors involved in fracking operations, landowners whose land has been leased to lessees with fracking operations, frack sand and frack liquid haulers and site prep (dump trucks, bulldozers) or leasing of tanks.
On Thursday they posted (part of) Nationwide’s response:
Continue readingThe air is, after all, a bigger body than any body of water, and one that affects us all. A judge in Texas agreed that air should have the same legal protection as water.
Philip Bump wrote for Grist 10 July 2012, Texas judge rules that the atmosphere is protected under the public trust doctrine
Last May, a group of teenagers filed a series of lawsuits seeking to force the federal and state governments to take action on climate change. A key argument made in the lawsuits is that the atmosphere is a public trust — or, as described in one brief, that it is a “fundamental natural resource necessarily entrusted to the care of our federal government … for its preservation and protection as a common property interest.”
Yesterday, a state district court judge in Texas agreed.
Key issue from the plaintiffs' press release:
In deferring to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's (TCEQ) decision to deny the Plaintiffs' petition for rulemaking while other ongoing litigation over regulations ensues, the Judge concluded that the TCEQ's determination that the Public Trust Doctrine is exclusively limited to the conservation of water, was legally invalid. …
Which is not only good for air, but indicates that water already is legally a public trust.
-jsq
What's missing in AP's reporting and analysis of nuclear cost overruns?
AP published this Tuesday, News Guide: Nuclear industry facing cost pressures, perhaps as a companion to its story of the same day, Building costs increase at US nuclear sites. Like that story, the news guide is full of accurate and useful information about nuclear cost overruns, and even this good bit of analysis:
Q: Why do building costs matter to customers?
A: Because customers ultimately pay for the construction costs as part of their monthly power bills. The more a plant costs, the more customers will pay.
Yep, Georgia Power customers are already paying through that stealth tax, the construction work in progress (CWIP) charge for new nuke electricity they won't get for years if ever.
Yet something is missing. Can you spot it?
Hint:
Q: How does that compare with building coal- or gas-powered plants?
Good question, and AP correctly answers that nuclear plants are far pricier than coal or gas plants.
But are those three the only sources of energy? Where is the comparison to solar and wind power?
Well, maybe AP won't do it, but here it is already, Georgia Power deploys 1 MW solar; could have done 330 MW by now. Short version: for less than the amount of federal loan guarantees for Plant Vogtle, Southern Company could have built Georgia more solar energy production per capita than Germany, the world leader, has.
Why are we letting Georgia Power and the Southern Company pour our money down that pit near the Savannah River when they could be spending it to deploy solar and wind for more jobs, energy independence, and more profit for Georgia Power and SO? Oh, and clean air and plenty of clean water, too.
-jsq
So if Southern Company expected cost overruns at Plant Vogtle, 
why didn’t they make a better estimate in the first place? What incentive do they have not to continue running up the cost and delaying completion, since they get to keep charging Georgia Power customers for construction, including for cost overruns, while floating $8.3 billion in federally guaranteed loans? Where is the financial integrity in all that?
AP reported yesterday, and even Fox News carried it, Building costs increase at US nuclear sites. They’re not talking about housing prices near the sites, either.
America’s first new nuclear plants in more than a decade are costing billions more to build and sometimes taking longer to deliver than planned, problems that could chill the industry’s hopes for a jumpstart to the nation’s new nuclear age.
Licensing delay charges, soaring construction expenses and installation glitches as mundane as misshapen metal bars have driven up the costs of three plants in Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina, from hundreds of millions to as much as $2 billion, according to an Associated Press analysis of public records and regulatory filings.
Those problems, along with jangled nerves from last year’s meltdown in Japan and the lure of cheap natural gas, could discourage utilities from sinking cash into new reactors, experts said. The building slowdown would be another blow to the so-called nuclear renaissance, a drive over the past decade to build 30 new reactors to meet the country’s growing power needs. Industry watchers now say that only a handful will be built this decade.
“People are looking at these things very carefully,” said Richard Lester, head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Inexpensive gas alone, he said, “is casting a pretty long shadow over the prospects” for construction of new nuclear plants.
AP continues with a list of late and over-budget nuke projects, including Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle $800 million over and seven months late, TVA’s Watts Bar plant $2 billion over and 3 years late, Duke’s Plant Summer
SCANA and Santee Cooper’s Summer Station
$670 million over and a year late.
Southern Co. and others in the nuclear business say cost overruns are expected in projects this complex…
So why are they wasting our money on nukes when they could be deploying a lot more solar and wind on time and on budget?
…and that they are balanced out by other savings over the life of the plant. Southern Co. expects Plant Vogtle will cost $2 billion less to operate over its 60-year lifetime than initially projected because of anticipated tax breaks and historically low interest rates.
Get that? “anticipated tax breaks” that leave we the taxpayers Continue reading
Stateside some of the lengthiest parts of a solar installation are finding an installer and getting them to get around to making an estimate. A Japanese retailer is leverage google maps to do all that online.
Asahi Shimbun wrote today, Rakuten to market home solar power systems via mouse click
Online retailer Rakuten Inc. will begin selling residential solar
power generation systems this month priced about 40 percent lower than similar conventional products.
Customers can get a price estimate by accessing the new Rakuten Solar website and clicking on the roof of their house on an aerial photo provided by Google Maps, the company said July 9.
The company will be able to cut costs by eliminating the distribution process.
Prices for a detached house will start at 950,000 yen ($12,000), including installation costs. Taxes are not included.
That’s very reasonable. Although the story doesn’t say what sort of size in kilowatts DC or kilowatt hours AC that $12,000 would buy.
A bit more on how it works, and whether we could do that here:
Continue readingWater, the next oil: many big companies have already been betting on that for years now. Do we want privatize companies controling our water supplies for their profit, running up prices at our expense? We can prevent that, and we should get on with it.
Jeneen Interlandi wrote for Newsweek 8 October 2010, The New Oil: Should private companies control our most precious natural resource?
…privately owned water utilities will charge what the market can
bear, and spend as little as they can get away with on maintenance and environmental protection. Other commodities are subject to the same laws, of course. But with energy, or food, customers have options: they can switch from oil to natural gas, or eat more chicken and less beef. There is no substitute for water, not even Coca-Cola. And, of course, those other things don’t just fall from the sky on whoever happens to be lucky enough to be living below. “Markets don’t care about the environment,” says Olson. “And they don’t care about human rights. They care about profit.”
Well, that couldn’t happen here. Or could it? What about this:
Many of us have no idea where our water comes from….
Do you know what’s upstream of you, that might be getting into your water? Do you know what’s downstream of you, that your runoff migh be getting into? If you’re like me, you’ll have to look that up.
Remember what Ben Copeland said: Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee “all have their straws in that same aquifer.” The Floridan aquifer, which is the source of most of our drinking water. Our rivers and streams help replenish the Floridan aquifer, but we’re using it up faster than rain falls.
The article goes on about Bolivia privatizing water as a condition of “austerity”, until Continue reading