Solar and wind projects are being built in more places around the globe more cheaply than any time in history. (photo: EcoWatch)
King
CONG vs. Solartopia
By Harvey Wasserman, The
Progressive
14 January 17
As
you ride the Amtrak along the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Diego,
you pass the San Onofre nuclear power plant, home to three mammoth atomic
reactors shut by citizen activism.
Framed
by gorgeous sandy beaches and some of the best surf in California, the dead
nukes stand in silent tribute to the popular demand for renewable energy. They
attest to one of history’s most powerful and persistent nonviolent movements.
But
250 miles up the coast, two reactors still operate at Diablo Canyon, surrounded
by a dozen earthquake faults. They’re less than seventy miles from the San
Andreas, about half the distance of Fukushima from the quake line that
destroyed it. Should any quakes strike while Diablo operates, the reactors
could be reduced to rubble and the radioactive fallout would pour into Los
Angeles.
Some
10,000 arrests of citizens engaged in civil disobedience have put the Diablo
reactors at ground zero in the worldwide No Nukes campaign. But the epic battle
goes far beyond atomic power. It is a monumental showdown over who will own our
global energy supply, and how this will impact the future of our planet.
On one
side is King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes, and Gas), the corporate megalith that’s
unbalancing our weather and dominating our governments in the name of
centralized, for-profit control of our economic future. On the other is a
nonviolent grassroots campaign determined to reshape our power supply to
operate in harmony with nature, to serve the communities and individuals who
consume and increasingly produce that energy, and to build the foundation of a
sustainable eco-democracy.
The
modern war over America’s energy began in the 1880s, when Thomas Edison and
Nikola Tesla clashed over the nature of America’s new electric utility
business. It is now entering a definitive final phase as fossil fuels and
nuclear power sink into an epic abyss, while green power launches into a
revolutionary, apparently unstoppable, takeoff.
In
many ways, the two realities were separated at birth.
Edison
pioneered the idea of a central grid, fed by large corporate-owned power
generators. Backed by the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, Edison pioneered the
electric light bulb and envisioned a money-making grid in which wires would
carry centrally generated electricity to homes, offices, and factories. He
started with a coal-burning generator at Morgan’s Fifth Avenue mansion, which
in 1882 became the world’s first home with electric lights.
Morgan’s
father was unimpressed. And his wife wanted that filthy generator off the
property. So Edison and Morgan began stringing wires around New York City,
initially fed by a single power station. The city was soon criss-crossed with
wires strung by competing companies.
But
the direct current produced by Edison’s generator couldn’t travel very far. So
he offered his Serbian assistant, Nikola Tesla, a $50,000 bonus to solve the
problem.
Tesla
did the job with alternating current, which Edison claimed was dangerous and
impractical. He reneged on Tesla’s bonus, and the two became lifelong rivals.
To
demonstrate alternating current’s dangers, Edison launched the “War of the
Currents,” using it to kill large animals (including an elephant). He also
staged a gruesome human execution with the electric chair he secretly financed.
Edison’s
prime vision was of corporate-owned central power stations feeding a for-profit
grid run for the benefit of capitalists like Morgan.
Tesla
became a millionaire working with industrialist George Westinghouse, who used
alternating current to establish the first big generating station at Niagara
Falls. But Morgan bullied him out of the business. A visionary rather than a
capitalist, Tesla surrendered his royalties to help Westinghouse, then spent
the rest of his haunted, complex career pioneering various inventions meant to
produce endless quantities of electricity and distribute it free and without
wires.
Meanwhile,
the investor-owned utilities bearing Edison’s name and Morgan’s money built the
new grid on the back of big coal-burners that poured huge profits into their
coffers and lethal pollutants into the air and water.
In the
1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal established the federally owned Tennessee
Valley Authority and Bonneville Power Project. The New Deal also strung wires
to thousands of American farms through the Rural Electrification
Administration. Hundreds of rural electrical cooperatives sprang up throughout
the land. As nonprofits with community roots and ownership, the co-ops have
generally provided far better and more responsive service than the for-profit
investor-owned utilities.
But it
was another federal agency—the Atomic Energy Commission—that drove the utility
industry to the crisis point we know today. Coming out of World War II, the commission’s
mandate was to maintain our nascent nuclear weapons capability. After the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it shifted focus, prodded by Manhattan
Project scientists who hoped the “Peaceful Atom” might redeem their guilt for
inventing the devices that killed so many.
When
AEC chairman Lewis Strauss promised atomic electricity “too cheap to meter,” he
heralded a massive government commitment involving billions in invested capital
and thousands of jobs. Then, in 1952, President Harry Truman commissioned a
panel on America’s energy future headed by CBS Chairman William Paley. The
commission reportembraced atomic power, but bore the seeds of a worldview in
which renewable energy would ultimately dominate. Paley predicted the United
States would have thirteen million solar-heated homes by 1975.
Of
course, this did not happen. Instead, the nuclear power industry grew
helter-skelter without rational planning. Reactor designs were not
standardized. Each new plant became an engineering adventure, as capability
soared from roughly 100 megawatts at Shippingport in 1957 to well over 1,000 in
the 1970s. By then, the industry was showing signs of decline. No new plant
commissioned since 1974 has been completed.
But
with this dangerous and dirty power have come Earth-friendly alternatives,
ignited in part by the grassroots movements of the 1960s. E.F. Schumacher’s
Small Is Beautiful became the bible of a back-to-the-land movement that took a
new generation of veteran activists into the countryside.
Dozens
of nonviolent confrontations erupted, with thousands of arrests. In June 1978,
nine months before the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, the grassroots
Clamshell Alliance drew 20,000 participants to a rally at New Hampshire’s
Seabrook site. And Amory Lovins’s pathbreaking article, “Energy Strategy: The
Road Not Taken,” posited a whole new energy future, grounded in photovoltaic
and wind technologies, along with breakthroughs in conservation and efficiency,
and a paradigm of decentralized, community-owned power.
As
rising concerns about global warming forced a hard look at fossil fuels, the
fading nuclear power industry suddenly had a new selling point. Climate expert
James Hansen, former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd
Whitman, and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand began advocating atomic
energy as an answer to CO2 emissions. The corporate media began breathlessly
reporting a “nuclear renaissance” allegedly led by hordes of environmentalists.
But
the launch of Peaceful Atom 2.0 has fallen flat.
As I
recently detailed in an online article for The Progressive, atomic energy adds
to rather than reduces global warming. All reactors emit Carbon-14. The fuel
they burn demands substantial CO2 emissions in the mining, milling, and
enrichment processes. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen has compiled a wide
range of studies concluding new reactor construction would significantly worsen
the climate crisis.
Moreover,
attempts to recycle spent reactor fuel or weapons material have failed, as have
attempts to establish a workable nuclear-waste management protocol. For
decades, reactor proponents have argued that the barriers to radioactive waste
storage are political rather than technical. But after six decades, no country
has unveiled a proven long-term storage strategy for high-level waste.
For
all the millions spent on it, the nuclear renaissance has failed to yield a
single new reactor order. New projects in France, Finland, South Carolina, and
Georgia are costing billions extra, with opening dates years behind schedule.
Five projects pushed by the Washington Public Power System caused the biggest
municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. No major long-standing green groups have
joined the tiny crew of self-proclaimed “pro-nuke environmentalists.” Wall
Street is backing away.
Even
the split atom’s most ardent advocates are hard-pressed to argue any new
reactors will be built in the United States, or more than a scattered few
anywhere else but China, where the debate still rages and the outcome is
uncertain.
Today
there are about 100 U.S. reactors still licensed to operate, and about 450
worldwide. About a dozen U.S. plants have shut down in the last several years.
A half dozen more are poised to shut for financial reasons. The plummeting price
of fracked gas and renewable energy has driven them to the brink. As Gundersen
notes, operating and maintenance costs have soared as efficiency and
performance have declined. An aging, depleted skilled labor force will make
continued operations dicey at best.
And
nuclear plants have short lifespans for safe operation.
“When
the reactor ruptured on March 11, 2011, spewing radioactivity around the
northern hemisphere, Fukushima Daiichi had been operating only one month past
its fortieth birthday,” Gundersen says.
But
the nuclear power industry is not giving up. It wants some $100 billion in
state-based bailouts. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently pushed through a
$7.6 billion handout to sustain four decrepit upstate reactors. A similar
bailout was approved in Ohio. Where once it demanded deregulation and a
competitive market, the nuclear industry now wants re-regulation and guaranteed
profits no matter how badly it performs.
The
grassroots pushback has been fierce. Proposed bailouts have been defeated in
Illinois, but then approved. They are under attack in New York and Ohio, but
their future is uncertain. A groundbreaking agreement involving green and union
groups has set deadlines for shutting the Diablo reactors, with local activists
demanding a quicker timetable. Increasingly worried about meltdowns and
explosions, grassroots campaigns to close old reactors are ramping up
throughout the United States and Europe. Citizen action in Japan has prevented
the reopening of nearly all nuclear plants since Fukushima.
Envisioning
the “nuclear interruption” behind us, visionaries like Lovins see a
decentralized “Solartopian” system with supply owned and operated at the
grassroots.
The
primary battleground is now Germany, with the world’s fourth-largest economy.
Many years ago, the powerful green movement won a commitment to shut the
country’s fossil/nuclear generators and convert entirely to renewables. But the
center-right regime of Angela Merkel was dragging its feet.
In
early 2011, the greens called for a nationwide demonstration to demand the
Energiewende, the total conversion to decentralized green power. But before the
rally took place, the four reactors at Fukushima blew up. Facing a massive
political upheaval, and apparently personally shaken, Chancellor Merkel (a
trained quantum chemist) declared her commitment to go green. Eight of
Germany’s nineteen reactors were soon shut, with plans to close the rest by
2022.
That
Europe’s biggest economy was now on a soft path originally mapped out by the
counterculture prompted a hard response of well-financed corporate resistance.
“You can build a wind farm in three to four years,” groused Henrich Quick of 50
Hertz, a German transmission grid operator.
“Getting
permission for an overhead line takes ten years.”
Indeed,
the transition is succeeding faster and more profitably than its staunchest
supporters imagined. Wind and solar have blasted ahead. Green energy prices
have dropped and Germans are enthusiastically lining up to put power plants on
their rooftops. Sales of solar panels have skyrocketed, with an ever-growing
percentage of supply coming from stand-alone buildings and community projects.
The grid has been flooded with cheap, green juice, crowding out the existing
nukes and fossil burners, cutting the legs out from under the old system.
In
many ways it’s the investor-owner utilities’ worst nightmare, dating all the
way back to the 1880s, when Edison fought Tesla. Back then, the industry-funded
Edison Electric Institute warned that “distributed generation” could spell doom
for the grid-based industry. That industry-feared deluge of cheap, locally
owned power is now at hand.
In the
United States, state legislatures dominated by the fossil fuel-invested
billionaire Koch brothers have been slashing away at energy efficiency and
conservation programs. Ohio, Arizona, and other states that had enacted
progressive green-based transitions are now shredding them. In Florida, a
statewide referendum pretending to support solar power was in fact designed to
kill it.
In
Nevada, homeowners who put solar panels on their rooftops are under attack. The
state’s monopoly utility, with support from the governor and legislature, is
seeking to make homeowners who put solar panels on their rooftops pay more than
others for their electricity.
But it
may be too little, too late. In its agreement with the state, unions, and
environmental groups, Pacific Gas and Electric has admitted that renewables
could, in fact, produce all the power now coming from the two decaying Diablo
nukes. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District shut down its one reactor in
1989 and is now flourishing with a wave of renewables.
The
revolution has spread to the transportation sector, where electric cars are now
plugging into outlets powered by solar panels on homes, offices, commercial
buildings, and factories. Like nuclear power, the gas-driven automobile may be
on its way to extinction.
Nationwide,
more than 200,000 Americans now work in the solar industry, including more than
75,000 in California alone. By contrast, only about 100,000 people work in the
U.S. nuclear industry. Some 88,000 Americans now work in the wind industry,
compared to about 83,000 in coal mines, with that number also dropping
steadily.
Once
the shining hope of the corporate power industry, atomic energy’s demise
represents more than just the failure of a technology. It’s the prime indicator
of an epic shift away from corporate control of a grid-based energy supply,
toward a green power web owned and operated by the public.
As
homeowners, building managers, factories, and communities develop an
ever-firmer grip on a grassroots homegrown power supply, the arc of our
128-year energy war leans toward Solartopia.
Harvey
Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at solartopia.org. His Green
Power & Wellness Show is at prn.fm. He edits nukefree.org.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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