PG&E high-voltage power line broke near origin of massive California fire that forced thousands of evacuations

As reported by the Washington Post. If confirmed, this would be the third major wildfire in California in just the past couple years caused by Pacific Gas & Electric, including the most deadly in state history, at Paradise last year, that killed 85 people.

As the article reports:

As the wildfire torched Sonoma, and others spread in San Bernardino, Los Angeles County and elsewhere, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) railed against all three of the state’s investor-owned power companies, including PG&E, which has already been forced into bankruptcy in the face of billions of dollars in liability claims stemming from previous fires.

“I must confess, it is infuriating beyond words,” Newsom said, accusing the utilities of neglecting their infrastructure and leaving the state vulnerable to fires sparked by outmoded power lines.

His statements echoed those he made two weeks earlier, when PG&E shut off power to nearly a million customers.

“It’s more than just climate change, and it is climate change, but it’s more than that,” Newsom said. “As it relates to PG&E, it’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change, it’s about corporate greed meeting climate change, it’s about decades of mismanagement.”

Newsom sent a letter Thursday to the CEOs of San Diego Gas & Electric Company, Edison International and PG&E demanding better communication about when the utilities would implement precautionary power shut-offs.

“The only consistency has been inconsistency,” he wrote.

PG&E's twin-reactor Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in Avila Beach near San Luis Obispo is supposed to shut down for good by 2025, per an agreement hammered out between the nuclear utility, environmental groups Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, and the nuclear power plant's labor unions. However, even then, the high-level radioactive waste stored on-site will likely remain for years, if not decades.

PG&E also owns the Humboldt Bay atomic reactor in Eureka, CA, where high-level radioactive waste is similarly stranded.

Southern California Edison owns the permanently closed triple reactor San Onofre nuclear power plant in San Clemente, where irradiated nuclear fuel is likewise stranded.

And Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) owns the long-shuttered (by popular vote in direct response to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe) Rancho Seco atomic reactor in Herald, CA, with highly radioactive waste stored on-site with nowhere to go.

Vigilance needed against nuclear snake oil salesmen!

The nuclear power industry's PR machine has long tried to cynically hitch its wagon to the climate crisis. As but one recent example, WAMU (NPR's Washington, D.C. station) has been, yet again, running regular Nuclear Energy Institute, NuScale (a so-called Small Modular Reactor vendor), and other atomic sales pitches, during major climate protection events in the nation's capital. Unfortunately, those who should know better seem to be falling for it. The nuclear power lobby has long had its way with Congress, the White House, and federal agencies like NRC, DOE, EPA, etc. But the likes of climate scientist James Hansen, and even 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, have not only fallen for it, they have joined the promotions. Even CNN host Van Jones, Obama's green jobs czar, recently praised U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), a presidential candidate, for his "brave" stand in support of nuclear power. This, despite Booker's close association with Holtec International, whose CEO made racist statements against his own African American and Puerto Rican workforce in Camden, NJ, just a year ago, and whose consolidated interim storage facility for 173,600 metric tons of highly radioactive, irradiated nuclear fuel in southeastern New Mexico targets already heavily burdened Hispanic communities, not far from the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. As former EPA environmental justice head, Mustafa Ali, said on a Sept. 5, 2019 Democracy Now! interview, the high-level radioactive waste shipments to such targeted, environmentally unjust dump-sites out West, would themselves pass through countless low income, people of color communities en route, making this yet another environmental racism burden. As Beyond Nuclear founding president Helen Caldicott, to be given a PSR lifetime achievement award next month in D.C., put it 15 years ago, nuclear power is not the answer. As Dr. Brice Smith of IEER put it in 2006, nuclear power costs too much, and takes too long, to solve the climate crisis, and has a long list of insurmountable risks all its own, from nuclear weapons proliferation, to catastrophic releases of hazardous radioactivity, to the unsolved radioactive waste dilemma. And as Dr. Arjun Makhijani of IEER put it in 2007, carbon-free and nuclear-free is the roadmap for U.S., and even global, energy policy. Nuclear power cannot be allowed to hijack the Green New Deal! If it does, it would be an irreversible, fatal mistake. It will not solve the climate crisis. But it would waste the precious resources -- in time, and money -- needed to implement genuine clean energy solutions to the climate crisis, namely renewables like wind and solar, and energy efficiency, before it is too late.

Greta Thunberg on nuclear power

"Personally I am against nuclear power, but according to the IPCC [the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change], it can be a small part of a very big new carbon free energy solution, especially in countries and areas that lack the possibility of a full scale renewable energy supply - even though it's extremely dangerous, expensive and time consuming. But let’s leave that debate until we start looking at the full picture." ---Greta Thunberg, founder, Youth Climate Strike

https://m.facebook.com/gretathunbergsweden/photos/a.733630957004727/793436521024170/?theater&hc_location=ufi

Greta's nuanced statement accurately reflects what te IPCC report says. (Of course, it's a constant battle within the UN system against the nuclear power lobby, which has its clutches deeply into the IAEA, UNSCEAR, WHO, etc.!)

Yes, nuclear power IS dirty, dangerous, and expensive, she's right about that! See our pamphlet by that title:

Dirty, Dangerous and Expensive: The Verdict is in on Nuclear Power

(Ralph Nader says "Just recently, a well-desinged and documented pamphlet by Beyond Nuclear summarizes the case against nuclear power as 'Expensive, Dangerous and Dirty.' The clear, precise detail and documentation makes for expeditious education of your friends, neighbors and co-workers.")

But nuclear power also risks nuclear weapons proliferation, as we're now seeing in Saudi Arabia! That's a part of the "dangerous" aspect!

Studies show that a "mere" 100 Nagasaki bombs, "exchanged" -- as between India and Pakistan -- could cause a "Nuclear Winter," resulting in 2 billion (with a B!) famine deaths:

https://www.ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html

Climate catastrophe, in the other direction -- not global warming, but nuclear winter.

So this risk alone makes nuclear power a non-starter as a "climate solution."

But as Greta Thunberg put it above, nuclear power is "extremely dangerous, expensive and time consuming."

It would take too long, and cost too much, to put it mildly. It would not solve the climate problem. In fact, it would be a potentially fatal wrong turn, depending on how much money and time is wasted, while neglecting genuine climate solutions like renewables and efficiency.

And nuclear power has a long list of its own dangers, its own insurmountable risks -- weapons proliferation; potential large-scale accidents; the unsolved radioactive waste dilemma. These were the arguments laid out in Dr. Brice Smith of IEER's "Insurmountable Risks" in 2006.

To the list could be added: "routine" radiation releases; nuclear's own environmental injustice; nuclear's own carbon releases (radioactive waste management forevermore involves large-scale fossil fuel combustion, for one thing!); the list goes on...

As Dr. Arjun Makhijani of IEER showed clearly in 2007, our energy can be both carbon-free AND NUCEAR-FREE -- avoiding climate catastrophe, while also avoiding radioactive catastrophe. Arjun Makhijani won a Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) "Visionary Leadership Award" in November 2018.

Both of these IEER books are available at its website, along with many others!

As Dr. Helen Caldicott wrote in 2004, "Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer"!

Helen Caldicott -- Beyond Nuclear's founding president -- will be honored with a prestigious PSR "Lifetime Achievement Award" in Washington, D.C. in November 2019.

Re: Biden's climate plan

As reported by the Washington Post:

...Biden’s plan embraces two specific energy technologies that some of the 2020 rivals have eschewed.

One is a method of skimming heat-trapping carbon dioxide from smokestacks called carbon capture. Biden is vowing to boost existing tax breaks for the nascent carbon-capture sector, though environmentalists dismiss the technology as only a way of extending the life of the fossil-fuel industry.

The other is nuclear energy, a long-standing form of power generation that today constitutes the largest portion of low-carbon electricity in the United States. But the industry faces an uncertain future as cheaper forms of power, such as natural gas and renewable energy, eat away at its market share.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling for a complete phaseout of nuclear energy over concerns of radioactive waste storage and the risk of meltdowns. Biden instead wants to put money toward developing the new generation of small modular nuclear reactors in addition to addressing safety concerns.

Biden’s plan also does not mention a potential ban on fracking and has already been criticized by some environmentalists for not going far enough.

“This plan embraces dangerous nuclear power, environmentally-harmful biofuels, and foolish dreams of carbon capture and sequestration that will lock in our continued dependence on fossil fuels,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth Action, an environmental group, in a statement. “Like most candidate climate plans, it barely addresses agriculture and the U.S.’s international obligations as the world’s largest historic emitter.”

The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal

As reported by Naomi Klein at The Intercept.

Klein provides compelling comparisons and contrasts between the New Deal of Fraklin Delano Roosevelt, and the Green New Deal of Democrats U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of NY, and U.S. Senator Ed Markey of MA:

It’s also a reminder that the New Deal was a process as much as a project, one that was constantly changing and expanding in response to social pressure from both the right and the left. For example, a program like the Civilian Conservation Corps started with 200,000 workers, but when it proved popular eventually expanded to 2 million. That’s why the fact that there are weaknesses in Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s resolution — and there are a few — is far less compelling than the fact that it gets so much exactly right. There is plenty of time to improve and correct a Green New Deal once it starts rolling out (it needs to be more explicit about keeping carbon in the ground, for instance, and about nuclear and coal never being “clean”). But we have only one chance to get this thing charged up and moving forward.

And Klein is clear that nuclear power is a false solution to the climate crisis:

The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and pressure from experts who understand exactly what it will take to lower our emissions as rapidly as science demands, and from social movements that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of false climate solutions, whether nuclear power, the chimera of carbon capture and storage, or carbon offsets. (emphases added)

Update on February 14, 2019 by admin

See Greg Sargent's "Plumline" column in the Washington Post: "Republicans are trolling the Green New Deal. Here's how Democrats will troll them back."