03 December 22
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This global-warmed package comes wrapped in billion-dollar hand-outs for California’s infamously criminal electric utility industry.
While bailing out deadly nukes it demands the death of the rooftop solar industry and rips off ratepayers and taxpayers.
Diablo Canyon’s twin coastal reactors are four brief hours—-as the radiation flies—-north of Los Angeles. Surrounded by active earthquake faults, the cracked, crumbling fission generators opened more than 35 years ago with critical materials long-since branded as unacceptable by regulators and experts.
Diablo Unit One has long since been rated among America’s most embrittled, a core cancer rendering it dangerously vulnerable to apocalyptic disaster. Nuclear Regulatory Commission resident site inspector Dr. Michael Peck warned it could not withstand credible seismic shocks and should be shut. He is (surprise! surprise!!) no longer with the NRC.
In 2016 a consensus of state and local elected officials and regulators, union leaders, environmentalists, independent experts, consumer advocates and others agreed with Pacific Gas & Electric to shut Diablo in 2024-5. The orderly phase-out has proceeded, along with the planned phase-in of renewables to replace the power.
All has been profoundly successful.
But now California’s “liberal” Governor Gavin Newsom (who signed the 2016 deal) has rammed through the legislature an unclear extension for the two decrepit nukes. PG&E gets a $1.4 billion “forgivable” loan to keep them going despite escalating extreme danger.
The Biden Administration now wants to squander $1.1 billion federal dollars to help PG&E pay back the state.
California consumers are also expected to pay even if they use none of Diablo’s juice. The company is not required to upgrade vital safety, ecological or economic protections.
The rip-off has global impacts. Diablo’s Westinghouse designs date to the 1960s. They’re mirrored in France, where age and design flaws have shut more than half the 56-reactor fleet.
Neighboring Germany has profitably phased out 16 of its 19 reactors (the last three will close in April, 2023), replacing them with renewables. Pro-nuke France has chaotically shut twice as many at forced random, but still babbles about building more.
All fifteen of Ukraine’s reactors now face melt-down/explosions from unpredictable shelling and external power loss. Even as they shut, their spent rods demand constant cooling.
But Ukraine’s backup diesel generators have limited fuel. The central grid is under Russian attack. With far more radiation in the spent fuel pools than was in Chernobyl’s core (or was released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Ukraine’s nukes pose a horrific threat to the global ecology that could far exceed the 1986 explosions that killed more than a million humans worldwide, or the 2011 Fukushima melt-downs that continue to irradiate the Pacific.
Thus the extended gamble at California’s rotted, quake-challenged reactors reverberates throughout the planet.
And it gets worse. Both California and Germany have been successfully phasing in massive arrays of solar panels, wind turbines, battery backups, increased efficiency and other proven green technologies to displace their dying nukes.
But Newsom now wants to slash pay-backs for the rooftop panels that have been facilitating Diablo’s shut-down. As a whole, those photovoltaic cells generate more power than the nukes.
Private array owners who feed excess power back to the grid get paid a fraction of what the utilities charge for the same juice. But California’s Investor Owned Utilities want to slash even that, crippling the green industry.
The only beneficiaries are solar-hating utilities like PG&E, which has been twice convicted of mass-killing felonies, and which also stands to profit from the public’s $1.4 billion to keep Diablo running.
Nuclear reactors burn at 571 degrees Fahrenheit, emit carbon and other greenhouse gases, daily kill billions of marine creatures and threaten us all with catastrophic explosions and radioactive fallout.
Their collective presence in war and earthquake zones, crumbling from age and incompetence, threaten the survival of our species.
Californians must save rooftop solar ( https://solarrights.org ) and stop the Diablo bailout
( https://mothersforpeace.org ).
Germany’s successful and California’s interrupted phase-out plans have shown that the transition from fossil/nuke-based global suicide to sustainable Solartopian survival can be smoothly, cleanly, profitably managed.
The disasters in Ukraine and France—-as at Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl—-warn us that slowing that transition can only serve utility greed while spelling humankind’s doom.
Harvey Wasserman wrote Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth ( https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/solartopia-our-green-powered-earth-ad-2030-harvey-wasserman/1126755545 ) and The People’s Spiral of US History ( https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-peoples-spiral-of-us-history-harvey-wasserman/1141121627 ). Most Mondays at 5pm ET he co-convenes the Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition zoom (www.grassrootsep.org).
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