The doomed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan reminds me of my last time in a nuclear power plant where a plant spokesman in southwestern Michigan said a meltdown could never happen, even in an earthquake. What happened after the dog and pony show Palisades Power Plant spokesman Mark Savage gave me last year confirmed my fears that nuclear power plant operators can't be trusted.
I was writing for The Herald-Palladium, a small daily newspaper in St. Joseph, Mich. about how efforts by the nuclear power industry to build a new generation of plants might affect the two power plants in the paper's circulation area. A week after the tour, I called an anti-nuclear activist who mentioned Palisades had an unplanned shutdown due to water leaking from a faulty control rod.
The shutdown occurred about an hour after my tour, but Savage never mentioned it to me despite numerous questions I had asked him about the history of leaks of radioactive tritium - a form of hydrogen and nuclear byproduct - and other problems at the plant. Palisades is owned by Entergy, a corporation with a troubling track record of running nuclear plants including the Vermont Yankee plant shutdown last year due to radioactive water leaks http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/11/vermont_yankee_nuclear_plant_s.html
As I told my editors after the incident, if Savage couldn't be trusted to notify me about a relatively minor problem at the plant on the day I was touring it, how could we trust him to notify us about something serious?
With the newsrooms shrinking as the newspaper industry goes extinct there aren't a lot of reporters to do investigative reporting especially at smaller papers like the H-P. That leaves journalists and the public at the mercy of the industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which, like most federal regulatory agencies, is more a lapdog than a watchdog.
The Union of Concerned Scientists documented 47 incidents between 1979 and 2008 where the NRC failed to address safety problems that forced shutdowns http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/04/how-we-almost-blew-ohio#
Before he became president and a proponent of nuclear power, Sen. Barack Obama noted that the NRC is funded by nuclear industry fees and called it "moribund" and "captive of the industries it regulates." http://www.thenation.com/article/zombie-nuke-plants
The comments were prompted by tritium leaks from an Illinois plant owned by Exelon, whom Obama's presidential campaign later took donations from. President Obama has proposed $36 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans to build up to 20 new nuclear plants. Like my former congressman in southwest Michigan, Rep. Fred Upton, Obama sees no conflict of interest in accepting money from an industry he supports despite their troubling track record.
Upton, whose district includes Palisades, supports recycling nuclear fuel to help keep old plants like Palisades running. The top contributor to Upton's re-election campaign in the last election cycle was Energy Solutions, a Utah-based nuclear recycling company which donated $38,000 through its political action committee.
What goes on in Michigan with nuclear power happens all around the country. I grew up and spent most of my early reporting career in Connecticut, home of the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Connecticut near Long Island Sound, a plant with a history of problems. I remember in 1997 touring the three-reactor plant with then-Gov. John Rowland who emerged from the tour saying safety concerns had been exaggerated. Shortly thereafter, the NRC temporarily closed the plant after finding management ignored the safety concerns raised by workers http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9400E5DF1239F937A15756C0A96E958260&pagewanted=all
In the event of a meltdown of all three reactors, an NRC-commissioned study estimated some 54,000 radiation exposure deaths within a year and 89,000 eventual cancer deaths. Even the conservative Rowland, who would later go to jail for accepting gifts unrelated to Millstone, admitted Millstone officials lied to him. In a 2007 complaint, anti-nuclear activists alleged radiation emissions from Millstone had caused high rates of cancer among area children http://www.mothballmillstone.org/news2007d.html
I now live in northwestern Ohio about an hour away from the Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station located outside Toledo. In 2002, the plant came within a third of an inch of melting down due to a "pineapple-sized" hole to the reactor caused by acid corrosion. Two employees and a contractor were accused of falsifying safety reports, but there are accusations, that plant owner First Energy scapegoated one of the indicted employees to coverup their own profit-motivated transgressions http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/04/how-we-almost-blew-ohio#
With catostrophic climate change on the horizon due to fossil fuels like coal and oil, it's natural for people to look to nuclear power as an alternative, but what's happening in Japan shows it's an accident waiting to happen. Industry backers will always insist that there are safeguards in place for worst case scenarios while cutting corners to make more money. In the wake of Japan's earthquake and tsunami and subsequent partial meltdown at at least one of the four troubled plants, American nuclear power supporters are circling the wagons http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/science/earth/14politics.html?hp
They offer false choices that dodge the need for American sacrifice. We need to drastically conserve energy - the US has about 2 percent of the world oil reserves, but uses a quarter of all oil - and focus on solar and wind energy and natural gas when it can be drilled safely. We should be investing in mass transit and high speed rail and electric cars, not driving sport utility vehicles and complaning about high gas prices.
Existing nuclear plants should be phased out when their licenses expire. New nuclear plants cost up to $12 billion to build.
The financial cost of building a new generation of plants is colossal. So is the danger.
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