ORGANIZATIONAL SIGN-ON STATEMENT WILL BE RELEASED WEDNESDAY TOO

MAKE SURE YOUR GROUP IS ON

Dear Friends,

According to numerous reports, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) have decided to go ahead and release their climate bill on Wednesday, May 12, without the backing of Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and despite the ongoing calamity of the BP Gulf oil spill.

We don’t expect the bill to be markedly different from what we had previously reported: it will be a taxpayer-funded bonanza for the nuclear power industry, will still support offshore oil drilling (though perhaps a bit less stridently than before), will still support “clean coal,” will still remove EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and will still seek vastly insufficient carbon reductions.

We intend to go ahead and release a grassroots statement blasting the bill and its dirty energy provisions on Wednesday as well. It will be important to get into the same news cycle as the bill’s release. Because it is obviously no longer being released on the Chernobyl anniversary, we have reworked the statement. It is below, along with the current list of signers.

Organizations: Please check the list and make sure your group has signed on. If you haven’t yet signed on, please consider doing so. To sign on: send your name, organization, city and state to nirsnet@nirs.org.

If you have signed on, please check to make sure you are properly listed, and let us know of any changes.

Individuals: We know you want to have a say too! But we can’t send out 100-page press releases with everyone’s names on them! So we are preparing a new Senate letter and letter-to-the-editor campaign, and we’ll get that out to you on Wednesday or Thursday.

We hope you’ll keep supporting our efforts with your activism and your financial help. You are what makes this work possible. If you can make a tax-deductible donation to our outreach fund, please do so here.

Thanks for all you do,

Michael Mariotte
Executive Director
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
nirsnet@nirs.org
www.nirs.org

Karsten Pruess, the hydro-geologist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory who carried out this studied, claims that “carbon dioxide could theoretically boost the amount of energy produced by hydrothermal plants by 50% or more….” and that “the technique could be used to dispose of the carbon dioxide produced by conventional power plants, which contributes to global warming.”

In order to take control of the geothermal power, heat must be extracted from below the surface of the Earth. This new method being studied by Pruess can extract this heat more efficiently than the current method, which involves water being pumped through the hot rocks and subsequently being extracted again.

Pruess’ hypothesis prior to utilizing the Soultz hydrothermal plant located in northwest France was that his method would be more resourceful than the plant’s method of pumping water. Though he was not completely confident in this hypothesis prior to commencing the study, he learned that it is beneficial to take risks and attempt new solutions. On top of the fact that driving carbon dioxide through the hot rocks produces more energy by up to 50 percent, it also necessitates less energy to be used in undertaking the process. This is due to the fact that the hot gas in the exit hole of the rocks is less impenetrable than the cooler gas at the entry, subsequently meaning reduced pumping would need to be done because of this density. Overall, this novel idea appears to be a win-win situation regarding the proposal of a new form of renewable energy.

Let us also look to the second aspect of absorbing the dangerous greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide is. According to Pruess’ study, it seems to be inevitable that some amount of the gas would seep into the rock, storing the carbon dioxide. Although this seems like it would be an extreme positive, Robert Pine of the Camborne School of Mines in the United Kingdom thinks there could be some adverse affects from this.

His take on it is this: “While carbon dioxide is unlikely to escape from such traps, rock fractures, which are common in regions used for hydrothermal operations, could allow gas to leak out. Using gas fields might be better, but because they aren’t very hot you would have to go very deep to get to the heat.”

So, although he still appears to, in general, advocate the idea that Pruess has proprosed, in his opinion there are precautions that should be taken to ensure the most advantageous results from the new method. For more information please visit Green Energy and Alternative Energy Source: Renewable Energy

Fortunately, the radioactive contamination levels fell well below legal limits. The power plant is the one largest nuclear facility’s in the world and just one of fifty-five nuclear reactors in Japan. The incident, in light of the recent swarm of headlines regarding alternative energy use and the possible re-emergence of nuclear power as a primary alternative energy source, leaves many to wonder, is nuclear power safe?

Nuclear energy has both good and bad points. It creates a huge amount of energy without using valuable fossil fuels, but it also produces radioactive materials that can be extremely harmful to the environment. Consequently, nuclear safety includes actions taken to prevent nuclear and radiation accidents or to limit their consequences.

Workers at nuclear plants, and the larger environment, run a risk due to this radioactive material. Nuclear power plants must be run very carefully to ensure that there are no mistakes, which is why nuclear power plant operators promote a safety culture. The term “safety culture” is a term introduced by the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group in a report published on the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) defines safety culture as “an assembly of characteristics and attitudes in organizations and individuals, which establishes that, as an overriding priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance.” Safety culture is about improving safety attitudes in people, but it is also about good safety management established by organizations with a holistic, whole community, whole of life approach. A good safety culture implies a constant assessment of the safety significance of events, such as earthquakes or other natural disasters.

Additionally, nuclear power plants possess both active and passive safety systems. Active safety systems are systems activated by a human operator, an automatic computer driven system, or even a mechanical system to respond to dangerous events in an appropriate manner. Passive safety systems rely on the laws of nature to ensure a reactor responds in an appropriate manner during potentially dangerous events. The laws of nature include for instance, incorporating the law of physics in engineered components of nuclear power plants whereby a nuclear reaction would slow versus accelerate during potentially dangerous situations or events.

Nuclear power plants also possess structural safety systems. Surrounding a nuclear reactor are certain containment structures, such as the fuel ceramic, metal fuel cladding tubes and the reactor vessel and coolant system. Finally, nuclear reactors are housed in containment buildings. Containment buildings, which are made of steel or concrete, enclose nuclear reactors to contain the escape of radiation.

Ultimately, human exposure to radiation, the primary contamination of concern at nuclear power plants, is more likely to come from exposure natural background radiation and from some medical procedures. In fact, studies exist finding no evidence of increased risk of exposure to radiation or occurrences of cancer in individuals living near nuclear facilities. For instance, in 1990 a study by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health, which surveyed over 900,000 cancer deaths in counties near nuclear facilities, found no increased incidence of cancer mortality in people living near 62 different nuclear facilities in the United States.

Regardless of the safety systems in place, which promote a culture of safety in nuclear power plant operations, no industrial activity is risk-free. Occurrences take place, which are completely outside our control, as evidenced by the earthquake, which impacted the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power. Any malfunction, accident or natural disaster at or near a nuclear power plant presents potentially devastating, long-term impacts to the surrounding community and environment.

By: Denise Palmer

Sustainable Living Articles @ http://www.articlegarden.com
This report is published by Energy Business Reports, an energy industry think tank and leading source for energy industry information and research products. To read more about this topic, see ‘Global Nuclear Power Outlook and Opportunities 2007‘