March 21 is D-Day in the U.S. for the anti-nukers.
Harvey Wasserman writes at Huffington Post:
The year 2012 has opened with news that Fukushima’s radioactive cloud may already have killed some 14,000 Americans, according to a major study just published in the International Journal of Health Services.
Germany and Japan, the world’s third and fourth largest economies, along with numerous others countries, have definitively turned away from the “Peaceful Atom.”
But it hasn’t yet been buried. That’s up to us. And 2012 is the year to do it.
We are already very close. The mythical “Nuclear Renaissance” has been gutted by Fukushima, low gas prices and the escalating Solartopian revolution in green energy. Solar panels, wind turbines, sustainable bio-fuels, geo-thermal, ocean thermal, increased efficiency and much more have simply priced atomic energy out of the market.
There is virtually no private money to build new reactors — except where there are huge government subsidies and guarantees. In 2012 we must make those all go away.
Likewise, there are increasingly powerful grassroots movements focused on shutting reactors that still operate. Germany has shut 7, and the rest will be gone by 2022, if not earlier. In Japan, just 11 of more than 50 reactors now operate. Because local governments can prevent nukes from re-opening once they go down for refueling, Japan could emerge from 2012 without a single nuke on line.
The biggest US battle is at Vermont Yankee. March 21 is D-Day for forcing a nuclear corporation to honor a solemn contract it signed with a sovereign state, agreeing to shut down if the state doesn’t approve continued operations. The legislature wants the reactor shut, which Entergy now refuses to do…
Fukushima has taught us that as long as reactors operate, the apocalyptic clock is ticking.
With that in mind, and with the flow of green money turning into a financial tsunami, we can make 2012 the year nuke power finally dies.
It will require a serious push from the grassroots.
But we are ready to win a green-powered earth.
Has anybody not heared of radiation hormesis? Low levels of radiation are important for health. Numerous scientific studies support the theory—-is anybody listening?
Fukushima killed 14,000 Americans while killing no Japanese and causing much much less contamination than initially conjectured by alarmists at the time. Using that kind of science, we were all dead of various causes – or of Hiroshima alone – before we were even born. I chose to be alive and not buy fake science.
Where are the 14,000 dead Americans? This count is probably related to #10 on the top ten junkscience list. When you have a dose level and a death risk that has been extrapolated, you can calulate the number of deaths. However, no real dead people will ever be found.
What a nutbag. There’s no way Japan can decommission all it’s nuclear plants, not unless they want to turn off most of the lights. This is true for Germany as well. They can buy some surplus from the French (which generate most of their electricity from nuclear power), but not enough to replace it all. In the US we are pretty much in the same boat. People won’t sit in the dark freezing for long before they demand the plants be turned back on. Even the greenies.
Not to worry though. A new third generation nuclear power plant design has just been approved that will be far cheaper to produce and run. This will keep electricity prices from nuclear far lower than wind, power, or geomass for a long time to come. Which is a good thing because all those “sustainable” power sources have yet to prove that they can even produce enough energy in their lifetime to build their replacements, let alone provide any surplus for us to use.