Tickling The Dragon

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Lately I’m swearing a lot at the television. Especially at the vacuous blondes on local TV news, as they chirp out happy factoids from the talking points they must be getting from the nuclear industry.  But no amount of reassuring prattle can cover up the diabolical disaster underway in Japan as six reactors at two locations are in various stages of meltdown.

Another hydrogen explosion at the stricken Fukushima plant reactor-3 indicates the metal cladding around the fuel rods is melting, exposing the core in an escalating nightmare that makes it more deadly to keep people on site to monitor the deteriorating infrastructure.  As they desperately pump in seawater to cool the out-of-control core, the on-site monitoring systems rapidly deteriorate and it takes suicidal courage to stay there and do what is necessary to stop the unstoppable.

Just south of L.A. the San Onofre nuclear plant sits on the shoreline with an earthquake fault a half a mile away under the ocean.  But according to the plant manager featured on local TV news, we have nothing to worry about because the nuclear industry has built in redundant safety systems. 

And although we have just seen these redundant systems fail in Japan due to a massive earthquake followed by a tsunami, if you actually listened to the San Onofre spokesman’s cheerful blandishments, he admits his plant is only built to withstand an earthquake that is hundreds of times weaker than what just struck Japan.  And the thirty-foot seawall that is supposed to keep the tsunami at bay only faces the ocean, so presumably a wall of water can swirl around it and swallow the plant. 

In addition to the potential for a core meltdown, nuclear power plants have adjacent swimming pools containing spent fuel rods, and if those thin walls are breeched (by a terrorist with an RPG for example) even more fallout is released into the environment as the rods melt down. 

Incidentally, the stricken reactor-3 that just exploded at Fukushima burns MOX (mixed oxide fuel) that contains plutonium, the most deadly substance on the planet, so it’s spewing fallout that is lethal for fifty thousand years.

But the powerful nuclear lobby, that has just managed to get $36 billion in proposed loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors into President Obama’s State of the Union Address, is a veritable Lazarus in terms of rising from the dead after terminal accidents.  I remember how their propagandists slammed the prescient film China syndrome, just before reality intervened at Three Mile Island. 

Can they pull off a third "Nuclear Renaissance" after TMI, Chernobyl and now Japan?  Will Wall Street, that almost killed them off in the 1980’s, still buy their socialist subsidized stocks propped up by gullible politicians and sanctified by shameful environmentalists who drank the Kool-Aid of nuclear power as the panacea for dealing with global warming?

 With the Nuclear Regulatory Commission now in the midst of deciding whether to extend the reactor lifetimes of our 1960’s designed light-water reactors, if the worst-case scenario does unfold in Japan, will we hear a chorus of calls to shutdown our light-water reactors?  All of which are aging beyond design specifications. 

A relic like Indian Point, near a major population center and plants in earthquake zones, should be immediately shut down.  Since we are already adding megawatts from wind power every day, and there has been no additional megawatts from nuclear generated for decades, the writing is on the wall.  That is for those willing to see past the short-term self-serving lies of an industry that would not even be alive but for the Price-Anderson Act that indemnifies utilities and puts the taxpayer on the hook for nuclear accidents   

Will Japan’s economy go into another nosedive with stagnation returning as the nuclear miracle of safe, clean energy is buried forever?  Or will the small crowded country on the world’s most active earthquakes zone, decide to live without the dragon of nuclear power and live with the dragon lurking beneath in “the ring of Fire” they are sitting on. 

Maybe Japan will borrow from their rival the Chinese and grasp the combined concept of crisis and opportunity and become a global powerhouse of renewable energy.  They have already borrowed the worst from General Electric, eagerly subsidized and exported by our government, while we remain stuck, still sucking on the shaky Saudi teat. 

Reeling from the latest in a series of oil shocks with prices at the pump peaking, we can only helplessly watch as the nuclear genie spews forth fallout from man-made cauldrons releasing a poison named after Pluto, the Roman God of hell.