Jacqueline Cabasso Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation with other campaigners at The Hague.
Guest Blog from Jackie Cabasso in Europe
From 1948 – 1956 the United States detonated 67 nuclear weapons test explosions over the Marshall Islands, a tiny nation in the South Pacific. During this period, the equivalent of 1.7 Hiroshima-sized bombs were detonated daily. Several islands were vaporized, others will remain uninhabitable for thousands of years. Many Marshallese died, babies were born with birth defects never seen before, and residents of the islands are still battling with cancers and other radation related diseases.
From March 7 – 16 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, the judicial branch of the United Nations, will hear oral arguments in the Marshall Islands’ cases against the UK, India and Pakistan.* The cases concern whether the UK is complying with Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and whether India and Pakistan are complying with what the Marshall Islands contends, building on the 1996 ICJ opinion, is a customary international law obligation to pursue negotiations in good faith on nuclear disarmament, including cessation of the nuclear arms race.
Tony DeBrum, former Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands will be making opening statements on behalf of the Marshall Islands on Monday and Tuesday.
These hearings concern preliminary issues as to whether the cases are suitable for adjudication on the merits. While the cases will concern preliminary issues, the substance of the cases will certainly come up in various ways.
I will be in The Hague, working with Rick Wayman of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to support the Marshall Islands by doing media outreach and social media. Here’s how you can follow the hearings from wherever you are.
· Watch the hearings for yourself. Video webcasts will broadcast live and posted on the International Court of Justice website at: www.icj-cij.org/multimedia
If you’re in nearby Europe, please consider coming to The Hague to support the Marshall Islands by your presence in the courtroom. Three press releases issued by the ICJ (one for each of the cases) provide the hearing schedule and admission procedures to the court. There is no advance registration procedure.
Please help spread the word. WE STAND WITH THE MARSHALL ISLANDS: NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT HEROES!
*You may be wondering why only three cases only are going forward. In April 2014 the Marshall Islands filed lawsuits against all 9 nuclear-armed states. Regrettably, the United States, Russia, China, France, Israel and North Korea do not accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ and are ignoring the cases brought against them.
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Jacqueline Cabasso
Executive Director
Western States Legal Foundation
Working for Peace & Justice in a Nuclear Free World
www.wslfweb.org
www.disarmamentactivist.org
www.facebook.com/WesternStatesLegalFoundation
Twitter@JackieCabasso
San Onofre nuclear reactors between San Diego and L.A. were shuttered in 2013. Now the question is: What to do with 3,600,000 pounds of accumulated nuclear waste being stored on-site in a tsunami zone? Photo: EON
Why the Current Nuclear Showdown in California Should Matter to You
By James Heddle
EON – the Ecological Options Network
Sunset for Nuclear Power?
Does the dream of nuclear power still ‘look bright’ as one enthusiastic investment advisor gushed less than a year ago, or is it the “the dream that failed,” as the Economist asserted as far back as March of 2012?
Approaching 5 years this March 11 after the still on-going Fukushima nuclear disaster, the debate goes on, enveloped in a miasma of mis-, dis-, and conflicting information generated by industry ‘merchants of doubt,’ but rarely leavened by rational analysis of What’s Really What.
Its conclusion: Worldwide, despite a few troubled construction starts over budget and behind schedule, “The nuclear industry remains in decline.”
You’d never know it from the pro-nuclear happytalk and proposed subsidy and bailout bills being floated in Congress, but all around the world the global nuclear power industry is fighting for its life.
Nuclear Showdown in California
Nowhere is that battle closer to being decisively lost by the industry than in California, where the Sunshine State’s ‘last nuke standing’ – PG&E’s Diablo Canyon – faces a very uncertain future. A showdown between those who want to shut it down, and those who want to keep it going.
It is a microcosmic drama with all the elements of a movie thriller:
• A corrupt California Public Utilities Commission racked in scandals.
• A compromised Nuclear Regulatory Commission captured by nuclear interests.
• A resurgent peoples’ movement determined to shut Diablo down and responsibly manage the state’s thousands of tons of lethal radioactive waste.
• The growing vision of a nuclear-energy-free West Coast and a solartopian transition.
• A handful of atomic denialists clamoring clamoring to ‘save Diablo.’
• All this in the context of deepening climate change and the battle for decentralized, clean, renewable power.
A Diablo shutdown in California would be a shot heard in nuclear boardrooms around the world, and would continue this bellwether state’s reputation as being ‘no country for old nukes.’
A quick look at the history of California’s Nuclear Free Movement tells the tale.
Back last century, then-President Nixon predicted 1000 nuclear reactors in the US by the year 2000.
In the 60’s, PG&E announced plans to build 63 reactors every 25 miles up and down the California coast.
Thanks to informed popular resistance interventions in the courts, in the legislatures, and in the streets, that didn’t happen.
Only 10 of those planned power reactors ever got built: 1 at Humboldt Bay, 1 at Pleasanton, 1 at Santa Susana, 2 at Rancho Secco, 3 at San Onofre, and 2 at Diablo Canyon.
Today, only 2 are still in operation, those at Diablo Canyon.
From a planned 63 nuclear power plants in the 1960’s, down to 1 in 2015.
Not a bad track record for the effectiveness of informed non-violent, popular resistance…and a demonstration of the non-viability of nuclear energy – vulnerable as it is to public opposition, industry incompetence, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and what renowned energy expert Amory Lovins long ago called ‘a terminal overdose of market forces.’
The shutdown of San Onofre in 2013 was hailed as ‘a seismic event’ for the nuclear industry.
The man who said that was in a position to know whereof he spoke, because he had once been an executive in that very industry AND had played an important part as a consultant to Friends of the Earth in helping to get San Onofre shut down.
That would be Arnie Gundersen. His partner Maggie Gundersen, founded and is president of Fairewinds Energy Education, for which Arnie serves as Chief Nuclear Engineer. https://www.fairewinds.org/
The Fairewinds organization has emerged as a major player in informing the public about the risks of nuclear power and the real potential of what lifelong No Nukes campaigner Harvey Wasserman calls a solartopian transition to a renewable energy economy. https://solartopia.org/https://www.nukefree.org/
Since the San Onofre shutdown, and with a renewed sense of risk triggered by being on the frontline of Fukushima fallout, a resurgent Nuclear Free California movement has turned its attention to Diablo Canyon. There, two aging, embrittled reactors sited over 13 (count em) intersecting earthquake faults, in a seismically active state, in a tsunami zone (just like Fukushima), are being operated by a company under state investigation and federal indictment for safety negligence.
Back in 1981, history’s most massive non-violent blockade to that date, with thousands participating, occurred at Diablo in a valiant-but-futile attempt to prevent the plant’s start-up.
Today, the operating licenses for the plant’s two remaining reactors are set to expire in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Now, with its age, precarious location, serious environmental impacts, massive killing of marine life, public safety risks, PG&E negligence, seismic and tsunami vulnerabilities, lax regulatory oversight, economic viability and energy contribution all being called into question, pressure is building for shutdown of the plant’s two remaining reactors.
2015 began with a regional conference organized by a state-wide coalition and hosted by Mothers for Peace in the plant’s home county, San Luis Obispo, aimed at mobilizing public awareness and local, regional and national pressure for closure.
Gundersens and Wasserman both closed the year with well-attended speaking tours designed to encourage informed opposition to the plant’s continued operation.
PG&E officials themselves are on record as being unsure whether or not the beleaguered utility – ‘with a lot on its plate right now’ – will seek extension of the licenses.
However, John Geesman of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility reports that information obtained through legal discovery by his organization indicates that PG&E spent $9 million in 2015 and intends to spend $15 million in 2016 working toward relicensing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix-peILdAzY&feature=youtu.be
California’s Lt. Governor, Gavin Newsom – a former San Francisco mayor who chairs the state’s Land Commission, and is already running for Governor in 2018 – recently opined that “I just don’t see that this plant is going to survive beyond 2024, 2025. I just don’t see that.… And there is a compelling argument as to why it shouldn’t.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKeXy0O_Sjg
Nuclear Denialists Panic
That may be why, in what looks like the plant’s eleventh hour, self-styled ‘environmentalist’ and hyper-technophile Michael Shallenberger has founded the SaveDiabloCoallition https://www.savediablocanyon.org/ and launched a campaign claiming that (not even a Colbert could make this up) a Diablo shutdown would lead to an ‘environmental disaster.’
Charging that public fears of nuclear risks – based on incontrovertible evidence and undeniable past experience – are ‘overblown’ and ‘irrational,’ Shallenberger, with surprising media attention, has become a new mouthpiece for the view that, because of its ‘low’ carbon emissions, nuclear power is a ‘clean’ source of energy and therefore a major solution to climate change.
That was a view promoted at the recent CoP21 Paris climate talks by such luminaries as James Hansen. With no great result it turns out. The Ecologist reports: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-Ecologist-UK-Nuclear-renaissance-Failing-industry-is-running-flat-out-to.html
The nuclear power industry’s malaise was all too evident at the COP21 UN climate change conference in Paris in December. Former World Nuclear Association executive Steve Kidd noted:
“It was entirely predictable that the nuclear industry achieved precisely nothing at the recent Paris COP21 talks and in the subsequent international agreement. …
“Analysis of the submissions of the 196 governments that signed up to the Paris agreement, demonstrating their own individual schemes on how to reduce national carbon emissions, show that nearly all of them exclude nuclear power.
“The future is likely to repeat the experience of 2015 when 10 new reactors came into operation worldwide but 8 shut down. So as things stand, the industry is essentially running to stand still.”
The contention that nuclear energy is ‘carbon free’ is a piece of dis-information. Yes, relative to those of coal, oil, and gas, the total carbon emissions from the nuclear fuel chain is lowER. But, by no stretch of the data, are they zero.
When you add together all the fossil fuel-dependent earth-moving machines, transportation, milling and processing operations, security and grappling with transporting and storing tons of radioactive waste lethal for thousands of years, it becomes clear how big the actual carbon footprint of the nuclear energy industry really is.
But, not only does the nuclear fuel chain emit carbon at every stage, it also emits DNA and public health destroying radioactive pollution.
Every day, ‘routine emissions’ from every nuclear reactor in the world contaminate the surrounding environment and population with radiological pollution. It’s all about our genetic heritage, you see.
Pro-Nuclear HennyPennys
Like denialist counterparts in the asbestos, tobacco, oil and GMO industries, Shallenberger and his coalition colleagues poopoo the risks of their product. But they think the sky will fall if Diablo is shutdown.
“Last week,“reports Mother Jones’ Tim McDonnell https://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/diablo-canyon-nuclear-plant-climate-change
“in an effort to ensure that Diablo Canyon isn’t shut down in the near future, this new coalition sent a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown (D); the CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility that owns the plant; and five state regulatory officials. The letter warned that “closing Diablo Canyon would make it far harder to meet the state’s climate goals.” The 61 signatories include Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, climate scientists James Hansen of Columbia University and Kerry Emanuel of MIT, and the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.
Diablo Canyon currently produces twice as much power as all the state’s solar panels (California is the nation’s No. 1 solar state). Closing it, he said, would not only shave off one-fifth of the state’s zero-carbon energy, but potentially increase the state’s emissions by an amount equivalent to putting 2 million cars on the road per year. That’s because the power gap left by the plant’s closure would likely be filled by new natural gas plants—which is what happened when San Onofre was shuttered.
“What’s powerful about Diablo is the sheer size of it,” he said. “If you flip it [off], carbon emissions go up so much.”
That’s where the Porter Ranch gas leak and a little investigative background history come in.
Methane, Radon and a Missed Opportunity
You may have noticed that utilities are not all that happy about the advent of what futurist and international business consultant Jeremy Rifkin describes as ‘a new energy regime’ which is ‘decentralized, distributive and collaborative’ (and democratically managed in the public interest), because it threatens their investor-owned, centralized business model.
That’s why utilities around the country are fighting so hard to make rooftop solar and net-metering prohibitively expensive.
The California Energy Commission’s own data have shown for years that the state has a 40% surplus energy capacity. The piddling amount supplied by Diablo – Shallenberger says 8%%, others calculate 6% – could easily be made up by conservation, efficiency and the state’s huge untapped solar and geothermal energy potential in Imperial County, which the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has identified as one of the richest sources in the nation.
But when San Onofre shut down, where did the decision-makers turn for making up the difference? Not conservation, efficiency and renewables, but gas.
That’s where the Porter Ranch gas leak comes in.
Termed by famed whistleblower Erin Brockovith ‘The worst environmental disaster since the Gulf Oil Spill,” the world knows by now that the still-ongoing leak emits hundreds of tons of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere every day – according to the California Air Resources Board, the equivalent of “more than 1,411,851 cars.”
According to an on-going investigation by San Diego-based attorneys Mike Aguirre and Mia Severson, the post-San Onofre decision to switch to gas and therefore reliance on use and expansion of the Porter Ranch gas storage facility rather than available renewable sources was made behind the scenes in secret meetings by government officials.
Dependent on off-site power sources for its over-crowded waste storage pools, crammed with more accumulated waste in dry storage canisters (despite 7 decades of trying, there is still no federal radwaste repository on the horizon) every nuclear power plant is a time bomb in place awaiting a desperate, ruthless, tech- savvy terrorist. [For more on the radwaste storage issue, see Donna Gilmore’s SanOnofreSafety.org https://sanonofresafety.org/ ]
And, as Chernobyl and Fukushima amply demonstrate, every local nuclear disaster is a global nuclear catastrophe as well.
So, since we are all downwinders now, and the ‘save Diablo’ denialists’ hysteria to the contrary notwithstanding…Why Decommission Diablo? Let us count the whys:
Diablo’s Dirty Baker’s Dozen
• It has two aging reactors in a tsunami zone, just like Fukushima
• It’s located over a network of 13 active earthquake faults
• It’s out of compliance with fire regulations
• It’s out of compliance with seismic regulations
• It’s out of compliance with California’s Once-Through Cooling law
• It destroys sea life
• It releases toxic emissions in daily operation
• It’s a proven health risk to the surrounding population
• It has no emergency evacuation plan for the surrounding population
• A senior NRC inspector recently said ‘shut it down’ until seismic safety is assessed and was overruled
• It’s totally vulnerable to physical and cybernetic terrorist attacks
• Its energy output is not needed
• It is run by a company that punishes whistleblowers and is under indictment and investigation for safety abuses and corrupt practices.
Once a powerful citizens’ movement opposed Diablo’s start-up.
Now a resurgent movement of citizens is saying ‘Shut It Down’ and calling for a nuclear energy free West Coast.
A Nation of Downwinders
Fallout from Chernobyl registered throughout the northern hemisphere. Fallout from the still-on-going Fukushima nuclear disaster was detected across the United States and into eastern Europe. Radioactive contamination of the Pacific continues inching toward our shores.
Prevailing winds off the Pacific blow inland – south and southwest. Simulations of fallout from a Diablo disaster show Santa Barbara and L.A. both being in the potential path. Drifting east, fallout from a nuclear disaster in CA would first take out the central valley, a major food source for the world, then continue on cross-country in unpredictable swirls and pockets. We would literally become a country of downwinders.
The Real Implications of a Diablo Shutdown
On the other hand, a Diablo shutdown and the demise of nuclear power in California:
Would represent a double win for democratic choice and enlightened energy policy
Would be a victory and vindication for a non-violent movement that has persisted for over half a century
Would be one more stake in the heart of an international dinosaur industry thrashing about in its death throes and taking desperate measures to survive.
Would free up resources for, and stimulate a policy shift toward helping California again lead the way in a solartopian transition to a renewable energy future.
Because of CA’s image as an early adaptor bellwether state, policy-makers, legislators and investors around the country and the world take notice.
And, with more and more shutdowns of aging reactors around the country being announced each month, it would help speed the day – listen for the approaching hoofbeats – of decommissioning coming soon to a reactor near you.
Worldwide, as Dr. Jim Green observes in the recent Ecologist article, “…with over 200 reactor shut-downs due by 2040, the industry will have to run very hard indeed just to stay put.”
Former U.S. Sec. of Defense, William J. Perry: “Today we still have over 20 thousand real world nuclear weapons. Enough to blow up everybody on the planet several times over.
Those weapons pose the immediate problem of a danger of terrorism, the immediate problem of the possibility of nuclear war.
“The antagonism between Russia and the United States has reached a point now where I believe we are on the brink of a new nuclear arms race. It breaks my heart.
“Today, the danger of a nuclear catastrophe is actually higher than it was during the cold war. Let me say that again…”
”
Fmr. U.S. Sec. of Defense Dr. Wm. J. Perry – photo: EON
An original Silicon Valley entrepeneur, he advanced spy technology, was former Defense Secretary, but now is a leading Nuclear Abolitionist –
What does Bill Perry know that we don’t…
…and NEED TO?
Little did mild-mannered, hi-tech electronics entrepreneur Bill Perry know when he accepted a call from Washington, DC in 1962 that he would be involved in the most potentially catastrophic nuclear stand-off period in history.
That is, up until to this even higher risk present moment.
Though now eighty-six, Perry is a man with fire in his belly, and a drive to warn the world about what he knows as he travels the remaining ‘miles before he sleeps.’
He has been a defense establishment insider for most of his life., yet when most people would be relaxing into their ‘sunset years,’ Former Defense Secretary Bill Perry has teamed up with other senior statesmen of similar stature, Sam Nunn, George Schultz, and Henry Kissinger to mount a public nuclear consciousness-raising campaign aimed especially at the generation that will have to deal with the legacy of the Atomic Age in which each played major roles. Perry also laments the current amnesia about the nuclear threat by the general public – and therefore the lack of action.
“…Our chief peril is that the poised nuclear doom, much of it hidden beneath the seas and in remote badlands, is too far out of the global public consciousness.” (My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, William J. Perry)
In this succinct talk at a bookstore in Northern California, as part of his tireless current book tour, he lays out the key points his ‘journey on the nuclear brink,’ and shares what he knows must be done for our society to back away from the present nuclear brink.
In this succinct talk at a bookstore in Northern California, as part of his tireless current book tour, he lays out the key points his ‘journey on the nuclear brink,’ and shares what he knows must be done for our society to back away from the present nuclear brink.
“We are appalled that none of the candidates running for the highest office in the land has yet put forward any plans or strategy to end current threats of nuclear annihilation, none has challenged the planned expenditure of $1 trillion to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and none has made a point of the U.S. being in breach of its nuclear disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the presidential debates it has been a non-issue, which scandalizes the candidates for not raising the issue in their many public speeches and the media for not challenging them for failing to do so. As a society, we are out of touch with the most frightening, yet after decades still dangerously mishandled, challenge to the future of humanity.”
“Publicly available military documents confirm that nuclear war is still on the drawing board of the Pentagon.
Compared to the 1950s, however, today’s nuclear weapons are far more advanced. The delivery system is more precise. In addition to China and Russia, Iran, Syria and North Korea are targets for a first strike pre-emptive nuclear attack.
Let us be under no illusions, the Pentagon’s plan to blow up the planet using advanced nuclear weapons is still on the books.”
“There are currently 460 or so operating nukes, some chugging along far past their expiration dates, coughing up 10 percent of global energy demands. Teller’s green disciples want to see nuclear power’s total share swell to 50 percent, which would mean the construction of roughly 2100 new atomic water-boilers from Mogadishu to Kathmandu. What are the odds of all of those cranking up without a hitch?
Meanwhile, back at Fukushima, unnoticed by the global press corps, the first blood cancers (Myelogenous leukemia) linked to radiation exposure are being detected in children and cleanup workers. And off the coast of Oregon and California every Bluefin tuna caught in the last year has tested positive for radioactive Cesium 137 from the Fukushima meltdown. The era of eco-radiation has arrived. Don’t worry. It only has a half-life of 30.7 years.”
“Few gave noted the fact that cutting the power lines to de-energize Crimea nearly led to fatal consequences at the South Ukrainian nuclear power plant, which is located in the Mykolaiv region, – an accident on a Chernobyl scale. A miracle saved us all: workers at the station succeeded in a few hours to restore the electricity to the security system. [Nuclear power plants produce electricity, but they need a constant supply of it to avoid meltdown, as in Fukushima, for instance — tr.]”
“…He sees the decline of interest in the nuclear issue as a matter of high urgency.
“This is the scary thing for me,” he says. “The people for whom this is still a threat, the people who are most anti-nuclear, the people who are most afraid about this, are the ones who know most about it.”
And yet, the pool of knowledge possessed by that elite group of weapons designers and scientists is fast drying up. “It’s very disturbing that the number of people who have seen a nuclear weapon detonate is dwindling. Half the American population was not yet born or were young children when the Soviet Union disappeared. The most anti-nuclear people in the US today are 75, 80 years old.”
Without their expertise to keep us alert, Schlosser fears, the world will be allowed to slide into a form of collective madness founded on denial, a death wish that sees nuclear weapons as no longer a problem. Though both the US and Soviet Union have reduced their stockpiles dramatically, the US today still has 4,650 nuclear weapons, Russia about 3,500, China and France about 400 each and the UK 150. Should just one of those warheads go off, through an accident, or through systems infiltration by a hacker, the consequences would be unthinkable.”
‘Punditry’ or Promise?
California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom says he has been pondering the issues relating to extending PG&E’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power station operation for some time. In a December 18, 2015 meeting of the State Lands Commission – which he chairs – he voiced his conclusions. This is a verbatim excerpt of what he had to say.
This excerpt is re-posted by EON from the Commission’s video archive as a public service.
In the following excerpt of its Dec. 2015 meeting, the CA Lands Commission, chaired by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, hears a staff report and public comments on extending Diablo’s operation.
Re-posted by EON from the Commission’s video archive as a public service.
Maggie and Arnie Gundersen – respectively Founding President and Chief Nuclear Engineer of Fairewinds Energy Education – are former nuclear energy industry insiders who have become consultants and educators about the risks posed by that industry. They provide expert witness services and promote safe energy.
In this conversation with EON’s Mary Beth Brangan and Jim Heddle they talk about those risks, the impact of whistleblowing on their lives, their experience in helping to shutdown San Onofre, and their advice to the people and organizations pushing for the shutdown of Diablo Canyon, California’s ‘Last Nuke Standing.’
They encourage nuclear abolitionists not to demonize those who are mistakenly promoting nuclear energy as a solution to climate change.
This is a segment from a forthcoming EON series based on the Gundersen’s recent speaking tour in California, which included events at Sonoma State and California Polytechnic as well as talks in Pt. Reyes Station, Berkeley and San Luis Obispo (hosted by Mothers for Peace). The program at Sonoma State featured presentations by Arnie and author Majia Nadesan and a conversation between them.
