Tag Archives: Nuclear

Fukushima Floating Wind Begins

Japan’s TEPCO is deploying the offshore wind solution we need in Georgia. It’s big baseload, Georgia Power and Southern Company, just like you like!

Martin Foster write for Wind Power Monthly 25 June 2013, Work starts on Fukushima floating project: JAPAN: Installation of wind turbines in the testing phase of the biggest offshore floating project to date will finally get under way this week, 20 kilometres off the coast of Fukushima.

Two 2MW downwind floating turbines are scheduled to be towed from shipyards belonging to Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding in Chiba prefecture to Onahama port on 28 June, according to a new schedule released by Takeshi Ishihara a civil engineering professor at the University of Tokyo and technical adviser to the project.

These are the floating wind farms designed to survive tsunamis and typhoons. A typhoon is the Pacific Ocean version of a hurricane. How about we tether some of these to the continental shelf off the coast of Georgia? Then they plus solar onshore could replace Plants Vogtle and Hatch the same way these wind turbines plus solar inland are replacing Fukushima Dai-ichi.

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Twice French GDP and soil contamination as big as France plus Germany: the real cost of a bad French nuclear accident

Sixty hurricane Katrinas or 112 Sandys is the cost EDF, the French company that wants to build a new nuke at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, avoided revealing through “fabricated” reports that “very seriously underestimated the costs of” a potential serious nuclear accident in France. The real cost would range from 0.76 trillion to 5.8 trillion euros ($1 trillion to $7.62 trillion dollars). For comparison, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of France is about 2.11 trillion euros, according to the World Bank. So a Chernobyl- or Fukushima-style accident in France would cost ⅓ to 2¾ times French GDP. No country can afford that.

Not even the U.S., whose GDP is $14.99 trillion or $11.41 euros, so such an accident, esp. if it happened in the densely populated eastern U.S., as for example in Maryland, could cost half the GDP of the United States. That’s way beyond the $68 billion cost of Hurricane Sandy or $125 billion for Hurricane Katrina. One nuclear accident could cost more than twice the $4 to $6 trillion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.

Wolf Richter wrote for Business Insider 14 March 2013, French Nuclear Disaster Scenario Was So Bad The Government Kept It Secret,

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French, German, and Spanish nukes unreliable in heat

Invest in nukes for hot water in rivers damaging plants and animals while there’s less water for agriculture and cities and droughts and summer heat waves cause power shortages. That’s Europe’s experience. Or we could profit by their experience and get on with reliable renewable solar and wind power.

The Guardian, 12 August 2003, Heatwave hits French power production,

France has shut down the equivalent of four nuclear power stations as the heatwave eats into the country’s electricity generating capacities. With temperatures in French rivers hitting record highs, some power plants relying on river water to cool their reactors have been forced to scale back production.

Julio Godoy wrote for OneWorld.net 28 July 2006, European Heat Wave Shows Limits of Nuclear Energy,

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If missing docs sunk San Onofre, will Doosan document-forging sink Vogtle and Summer?

If documents can doom the San Onofre nuke and maybe the NRC Chair, how about forged Doosan documents and Plant Vogtle?

Matthew L. Wald wrote yesterday for The Caucus, Tussle Over Nuclear Plant Documents May Sink N.R.C. Appointment,

The botched repair job that doomed a California nuclear plant has created a political whirlpool that may be close to claiming another victim: the chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The issue is no longer the plant itself, San Onofre, which the majority owner, Southern California Edison, announced on June 7 it would permanently close. The problem now is that Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, who is chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a longtime critic of nuclear power, has been seeking documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about Continue reading →

Southern Company only building nukes because they’re not paying, we are –Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy said he’d be for nukes if they were safe or economical, but they are neither, while solar and wind are both. After calling the pro-nuke movie Pandora’s Promise a hoax, he addressed “safe” by pointing out the movie’s claimed former anti-nuke leaders were never leaders while major nuclear utility executives are indeed now anti-nuke leaders. (For example, I met former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman in DC where he was testifying against nukes.) Then Kennedy tore into Southern Company’s three-legged nuclear boondoggle and pointed out solar and wind are winning even against massive distortions in the economic playing field caused by public service commissions letting regulated utilities make the rest of us pay for their profits on uneconomic nukes.

Andrew Revkin posted on Youtube 19 June 2013, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Director of Pandora’s Promise Spar Over Nuclear Power,

The last nuclear power plant constructed in the world was in Finland. It cost about $11 billion a gigawatt. Now I’m involved with construction right now of one of the largest power plants that’s in north America which is in the Mojave Desert, and it’s a solar thermal plant, and it’s costing about $3 billion a gigawatt….

There’s no individual and there’s no merchant utility that will build a nuclear power plant, because they’re so expensive. You can’t make money on it. The only ones who will build them are regulated utilities like the Southern Company in Georgia… because they make money by spending money. They get reimbursed for their capital costs plus 12 or 15% per year. So they’ll construct it once they get approval from the public utility commission. Then they want to spend as much money on their capital costs because they’re not paying for it. You and I are paying for it.

I don’t think Bill Gates, or I saw Paul Allen was one of the funders of this film, that they’re going to spend their own money building one of these [nuclear] plants….

You could make energy by burning prime rib, but why would you take the most expensive way to do it.

And by last fall, the cost per gigawatt of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels was already under $3 billion per gigawatt so distributed solar PV makes just as much sense as massive desert thermal solar, and both make far more economic sense than nuclear. Plus costs of solar PV keep going down, pushing solar deployments up like compound interest, while nukes always take years to build and always cost more than budgeted. Southern Company is the king of nuke cost overruns, going 26 times overbudget per unit on Vogtle 1 and 2 and already 19 months late and about a billion dollarsoverbudget on Vogtle 3 and 4. Then there are the safety issues: a failed nuke can be Chernobyl or Fukushima and many nukes leak radioactive tritium into groundwater and vent radiation into the air, while a failed solar plant is a bunch of glass.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr wants a level playing field for solar and wind I got into the [solar] industry to show that there was an alternative and that the alternative was economically viable. And not only that, on a level playing field, if we weren’t giving them the subsidies to the incumbents, our technologies would beat them and soundly. They simply couldn’t compete.

He called the movie’s claims that solar and wind don’t work one of the movie’s many big lies because even without a level playing field we already built more solar and wind power in this country last year “than we did all of the incumbents combined”. Plus you’ve got to fuel fossil or nuclear plants, not to mention the toxic waste issues, while once you build solar or wind “it’s free energy forever”. Kennedy also pointed out the electric grid in the U.S. could be rebuilt to deliver solar and wind power as needed for less than has already been spent on breeder reactors that are no longer in use. The filmmaker made no attempt to rebut any of Kennedy’s points about existing solar and wind technologies that already beat nukes, coal, and natural gas, instead going on about pie-in-the-sky modular reactors.

This all illustrates why the Georgia Public Service Commission needs to stop letting Georgia Power and Southern Company suck radioactive profits at the public teat and make them get on with replacing coal with solar instead of letting old coal plant sites sit unused for more than a decade. Oh, and GA PSC needs to halt the Plant Vogtle nuke boondoggle, which is even worse than Southern Company’s Kemper Coal plant in Mississippi as a huge transfer of wealth from the people of the state to a monopoly.

GA PSC: Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia)

A monopoly that is supposed to be regulated as a public service. By the Public Service Commission whose Commissioners accept massive campaign contributions from employees and law firms of the utilities they regulate. It’s time for GA PSC to bat away the haze of coal smoke and the radioactive taint that surrounds them and go to bat against corruption and for the people of Georgia.

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Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

Garry Gentry read the WWALS Watershed Coalition letter at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better….

There is no need to use our Floridan Aquifer water to build more baseload power plants while Georgia lags behind Michigan, Massachusetts, and even tiny New Jersey and Maryland in solar power.

WWALS calls on the PSC to ask Georgia Power to conserve our water and to bring jobs to south Georgia through solar power and wind off the Georgia coast.

You can read the complete letter. Here’s the video:


Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.

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Energy efficiency is cost-effective –Another @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

Someone made a very good case for the cost-effectivness of energy efficiency for saving money, health, and comfort, at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013. He didn’t start by saying his name, and I had a camera battery replacement about that time, but most of his talk is here.

Here’s the video:


Energy efficiency is cost-effective –Another
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.

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Geothermal and net zero –Unknown @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

“I’d like to see Georgia Power… provide a geothermal and solar net zero energy concept for the project that could act as a demonstration project for them as well,” said someone unknown from Putnam County, at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013. (This is why to always say your name when you speak.) Could have been Putnam County Commissioner Alan Foster. He also asked for a convention center, golf course, and lakefront activities area, and naturally at least one Public Service Commissioner latched onto the golf course. The speaker said his “vision” involved privatization. Seems to me the problem is the existing privatization of the GA PSC.

Here’s the video:


Geothermal and net zero –Unknown
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE), 244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.

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Moving on and finances –Billy Webster, Putnam County Commission @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

“This year we’re not even going to be able to hold the line on the millage rate,” said Billy Webster, Putnam County Commissioner, at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013. He wants Georgia Power to do something to help reinvent the Plant Branch property. He asked GA PSC to help Putnam County do that.

Here’s the video:


Moving on and finances –Billy Webster, Putnam County Commission
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.

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Water and Economy –Bill W. Sharp, Vice Chair, Putnam Development Authority @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

Bill W. Sharp, Vice Chair of the Putnam Development Authority noted Georgia Power had water permits and asked three things at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013:

  1. Currently Georgia Power has a permit to use water from Lake Sinclair. We would ask to use this permit for the for the economic development of Putnam County.
  2. We would ask you to encourage Georgia Power to assist in bringing new industry to our area through their vast network of economic development.
  3. …commit to maintain the current full level of Lake Sinclair and Lake Oconee in order to continue the developments around the lake.

Chairman Eaton said the PSC was in a difficult position. Sharp said he understood business and praised Georgia Power yet again, but:

From our standpoint we’d like them to help us get on with life and make life better in Putnam County by helping us find this development. Let’s go out and create some new ideas. And they can do that. And we’d like you to encourage them with your power and your prowess.

Here’s the video:

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