Nuclear is Our Future Pro-nuclear activist group

The NRC has proposed implementing one of the few POGO recommendations I agree with: reducing hours for security guards at nuclear power plants. I’d like to take this opportunity to draw a distinction between watchdogs and attack groups. We don’t like to engage either, since neither tend to know what they’re doing, and the NRC’s unwillingness to admit anyone to discussions who isn’t a member of the good ol’ boy network doesn’t help, but I submit that there is a difference that we need to be aware of.

We’re used to being under attack; there hasn’t been a moment in the last 40 years when we weren’t. We are used to ignorant arguments coming from groups that are trying to shut down the industry, and accordingly have gotten used to taking any ignorant argument as a threat to shut down the industry. This, I believe, is a mistake.

Greenpeace and NIRS are attack groups. They have campaigns, use words like “shut” and “stop,” and have a stated aim of trying to destroy nuclear technology. They cannot be reasoned with; they must be exposed as fools in public, their sources of volunteers and money cut off, and the loons in charge marginalized. We are familiar with them, their message, their strategy, and their tactics.

POGO, on the other hand, suffers from exactly the same problem as the industry and NRC: nuclear exceptionalism. They are a watchdog group; they believe that the NRC and government in general are not doing the best possible job and are trying to expose problems so they can be fixed. We disagree with them a lot, but they’re not out to get us. They aren’t the problem. Don’t attack them in the manner that Greenpeace and NIRS attack the industry.

Joe Six-Pack thinks nuclear power plants pollute, are unsafe, and produce piles of leaking, deadly waste. They want a good reason to think that nuclear power plants don’t do any of those things, and we can provide it–if we act graciously and professionally, and not wimpy or suburban, and destroy these urban myths with real information. As I’ve said before, people are not dumb–they just have other things to worry about. Tell me an auto mechanic can’t understand how a nuclear power plant works.
The key is, they can’t figure it out on their own. We have to do what every other technology proponent does, and provide information and involvement. Whatever you want to say about how it should be, the public is the boss.

Filed under Activism, Nuclear Exceptionalism, Politics and Regulation, Security and Terrorism, Their Actions

Posted on June 3, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“Right from the beginning of the nuclear power industry, we have been assured that the technology is safe.”

-mng.org.uk

And it was, and still is. It’s safer than fossil fuels, and (rather importantly) works.

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Energy, Safety

Posted on June 3, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

Anti-nuclear activists have started circulating an email alert (rather, an alert in the footer of every email they send) asking people to get a (they suggest) WordPress or MySpace blog and start blogging as a way to stop nuclear power. I see some good signs here.

First, a WordPress blog in its externally-hosted form is a technical challenge for people who aren’t familiar with servers, and in its free form is not powerful enough to be effective in an actual campaign. You can’t even change the HTML code. MySpace, however, is a joke. There’s no point trying to use it; once you get past being a joke of a movement, you have to disassemble everything you did and start over on a real platform.
We didn’t make that mistake, at least not that badly. Blogger, for all its faults, is extensible. And most importantly, we made our mistakes a while ago and are starting to recover while they dig themselves a hole. They don’t know that it’s easier to have a tech-savvy organization set up a community that activists can join than to try to make everything work together after six or seven incompatible systems are entrenched. It seems also that anti-nuclear pages are either sophisticated ASP jobs or hacks, with nothing in between; an anti-nuclear activist who is trying to do a good job faces an almost square learning curve with almost no help from their colleagues. They are forced to cut corners and further decrease compatibility (and thus interoperability–which is the whole point).

Second, they honestly think that NEI pays everyone off, and that we’re all NEI employees. Wrong. They simply, honestly, and truly do not understand that there is a difference between the industry and the supporters of the technology. That leads them to think we aren’t distributed and can be beaten easily by five or six dedicated people.

Third, they concentrate on RSS. Go chase RSS, guys. Nobody uses it. It’s useful only as an aggregation tool for people with nothing else to do and when it is converted to an email alert system.

Fourth, they acknowledge that the anti-nuclear movement doesn’t do blogging. The first three dedicated, sustained pro-nuclear blogs (NEI, Atomic Insights, and NIOF) started in a short period in 2005. Others came along later; a second wave came along in 2006 (Freedom for Fission, We Support Lee, Energy from Thorium, and ARDT), and a third wave came along in late 2006 to early 2007 (Pebble Bed Reactor, Idaho Samizdat, Left Atomics, Nuclear Australia, NNadir). I like the fact that that number is going up with each wave (and diversifying), and NIOF is working on making it easier for people to get started–and get started in an organization.
I don’t see the anti-nuclear activists, who are new to this and learn tech more slowly, getting there any faster than we did. Accordingly, I (conservatively) conclude that the anti-nuclear activists are two years behind us.
We have a window, and we have to do something with it. This little smell of blood shouldn’t lead us to believe that they’re dead, but should inspire us to work even harder to kick their butts and make sure they don’t get up again. We must do this by removing their base of support; using the internet’s core competencies (as the UNIX-HATERS Handbook says of computers, “nitpickers with elephantine memories”) as a tool (not a strategy) to accelerate the process of organizing college campuses. It is clear that to do that, we need a Nuclear Advocates’ Declaration of Principles (or something else similar to the Port Huron Declaration; if nothing else, to put our opinions in writing to immunize us from allegations that we’re being bought off), a web-based community platform, and an internal handbook that we can keep out of anti-nuclear activists’ hands until they have their own equivalent (i.e., something we can keep close to our chest for two or three years). NIOF is actively working on the second part, after which we’ll obviously do the third part, but pro-nuclear activists will need to call a conference to do the first part.

In short: they’re a threat, but a foreseen threat. We know what timeline, roughly, they will be operating on. Our application of game theory to proliferation–and their disdain for doing so–helps us. We know exactly what to do to prevent this threat from materializing. We can do it, and I know we will. We must. Too much is at stake, environmentally and on a public health level, for us to not do anything about it, or to fail to do what we know we can do and operate at the high level we know we can operate at.

Get up and do something!

Filed under Activism, Their Actions

Posted on June 2, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“ASLB rejects new contentions…but not on their merits”

-New England Coalition

…on the fact that they were being used as a deliberate delaying tactic.

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Their Actions

Posted on June 1, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

Rep. Nita Lowey, that eminent friend of nuclear power (joined by woo-woo John Hall as well as Eliot Engel, Maurice Hinchey, and Christopher Shays), is sponsoring a bill intended to make it even more unnecessarily difficult to build a nuclear power plant–or relicense one.

-Require that the NRC determine that plants are safe. In other words, add another piece of paper onto a process that already works.
-Require that the NRC certify that each nuclear power plant doesn’t have security vulnerabilities during the licensing process. In other words, the effects of a terrorist attack are the victims’ fault.
-Add another level of bureaucracy to the evacuation plans requirement, and expand the EPZ to 50 miles. More stakeholders can veto the plan under this proposal than possible today–any state within 50 miles or any federal agency involved in emergency management–increasing the likelihood of Shoreham-type politics.
-Require that the NRC do the same reviews for a renewal that they do for a licensing, most of which are completely pointless, since the design doesn’t change. In reality, all a renewal application should have to prove safety-wise is that a plant’s designed-in safety effects won’t be affected by aging.
-Require the NRC to determine in any relicensing that the population density around the plant hasn’t changed to the point where it is defined as “urban siting,” which is bad for some reason. In other words, shut down Indian Point.

Fortunately, the bill doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past President Bush even if it did pass. But we’re going to have to watch out for this in a couple years, when either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be eager to prove that they’re tough on these “problems.” Indian Point is going to have a constant fight on its hands come 2009.

Oh, and four Democrats and one Republican do not a bipartisan coalition make. Maybe they put the “coal” in “coalition” (or the “mental” in “environmentalist”), but not much more.

Filed under Emergency Response, Perception, Physics, Politics and Regulation, Safety, Security and Terrorism, Their Actions

Posted on June 1, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“Nuclear or Geothermal power plants? Neither.”

-’amazngdrx‘

Geothermal energy comes from the heat given off when radiation from natural radioactive materials inside the Earth is absorbed by nearby rock or other materials. So it is actually a kind of nuclear power.

It is more commonly grouped with wind and solar under the banner of “renewable energy,” but this quote goes to show that “renewable” actually means “unfeasible.” When they realize that geothermal energy might in fact work, it becomes scum, the enemy of the environment. Energy allows us to do things, so if the objective is to starve polluting processes so that they can’t operate (a perfectly reasonable and understandable tactic), any functional energy source must be opposed, existing ones must be made as expensive as possible, and the depletion of reserves must be sped up–with a ban on exploration for new supplies–until there is no alternative but to revert to the solar-powered 1600-vintage “happy peasant lifestyle.” A lifestyle, I might add, which would have killed me at birth.
Thus, I ain’t too happy about proposals like this. I can put two and two together, and I like my energy. To quote one of the store designs (itself a quote):

Filed under Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Energy, Sustainability, Their Actions

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

A completely bogus study from Sweden purporting to demonstrate that people are more likely to get cancer if exposed to pre-industrial levels of radiation than if they were exposed to atomic bomb detonations once again raises a question about anti-nuclear groups’ unwavering support of the politically-motivated Linear-No-Threshold radiation impact hypothesis (LNT):

Why on Earth do they support it?

The LNT is, at its core, an assumption. A graph is constructed, with radiation exposure on the horizontal axis and cancer deaths on the vertical axis. The Japanese atomic bombing survivors’ exposure and cancer data is then plotted, and a line is drawn from there to zero radiation and zero cancer.
Seriously.
No low-dose data is included–not from pre-industrial cancer rates, which involved basically the same radiation exposure as today yet were practically nonexistent, and not from the definitive study on the matter, which tracked all the radiation ever received by maintenance crews in Navy nuclear shipyards–and found a mortality rate over 20% lower than their coworkers in non-nuclear shipyards.

But if anti-nuclear groups want a scientific investigation of the health effects of radiation, as they so often claim to do, why do they support an assumption?

Pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear, and in-between organizations all should recognize the fallacy of relying on assumptions, and insist on a well-funded NAS investigation of the health effects of ionizing radiation, with the objective of identifying whether or not there is a threshold, and if there is one, upper and lower bounds.
I call on anti-nuclear groups to show that they have confidence in their claims by submitting them for rigorous peer review.

Filed under Fun With Statistics, Health, Radiation, Research, Their Actions

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

A reminder and update to the recent post about an anti-nuclear petition to start a politically-motivated investigation of the NRC: they’re using an online petition. Legislators ignore online petitions, because a bot could easily be programmed to sign it a million times with random names (e.g., Geraldo Lubczynski) and no verification. They pay attention to letters from their constituents, and to a certain extent, written petitions that have been the subject of media campaigns. They pay a lot of attention to petitions to get a referendum on the ballot, in states where this is possible.

Plus, think about it: how is it going to get delivered? Isn’t it a lot easier to provide people with an email form and writing tips?

The only conceivable use for an online petition is to “test the waters” about what ideas can find support on the internet. There is little use for such an exercise; any idea can find support on the internet, and the blogosphere in peer-review mode (much as Ruth Sponsler and I did a while back w.r.t campus organizing) is much faster at evaluating soundbites. Blogs combine quick response with thoroughness; webrings and link lists, while they basically create echo chambers, remove much of the requirement for physical meetings to discuss strategy. The disadvantage is that they’re public, but their limited readership provides the internet equivalent of a focus group. Online petitions, on the other hand, only provide a yes/no option–and you never hear from the “no” people.

Don’t use online petitions; use a letter-writing campaign, or a ballot item, with the internet as an organizing tool (i.e., as a substitute for the phone tree). These facts have been known since about 2000, but the anti-nuclear activists are showing how new they are to net.activism by using online petitions. Let them shoot themselves in the foot.

Filed under Activism, Their Actions

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

There has been a call from several anti-nuclear groups recently to investigate the NRC for heresy by thought, heresy by word, and heresy by deed “endangering” the “people of the United States,” subverting “the democratic process,” planning “at least 50 more nuclear plants,” complacency in the installation of “substandard and defective parts,” “limiting public participation” and “lowering standards” “to reduce construction costs,” failure to require evacuation plans [which they do require -ed.], discriminating against the elderly, allowing the production of nuclear waste, “failing to regulate,” “interfering” with whistleblowers, and endorsing the scandalous findings of that heretic Galileo.

Hey, if they can “investigate” anyone who disagrees with them as though they were criminals, why don’t we start our own petition? Here are some charges I can think of off the top of my head:
1. Abrogating the responsibility of the government to defend its citizens from military attack by forcing nuclear power plant operators to hire small armies to defend their facilities;
2. Forcing nuclear power plant operators to file evacuation plans in response to postulated accidents that cannot happen;
3. Levying disproportionate fees;
4. Failing to regulate radioactive discharges from fossil fuel facilities;
5. Encouraging kludging and other bad engineering practices;
6. Recovering unnecessary costs from licensees and ratepayers;
7. Contributing to global warming by making the licensing process unnecessarily difficult;
8. Failing to consider reactor designs other than the light-water reactor;
9. Encouraging SLAPP lawsuits by anti-nuclear groups;
10. Preventing the beneficial use of byproduct material;
11. Failing to establish meaningful guidelines for the review of a reactor design;
12. Failing to accomodate integral fuel cycle facilities;
13. Requiring unnecessary components that reduce maintainability and introduce additional accident precursors;
14. Establishing technical specifications that emphasize beating a failure probability over sound engineering;
15. Discouraging the construction of test and research reactors through excessive fees and requirements that apply only to operational reactors;
16. Interfering with the doctor-patient relationship;
17. Failing to assert its statutory authority over the environmental impact of nuclear power;
18. Replacing sound management with rules and people-proofing;
19. Punishing licensees for paperwork violations;
20. Requiring multiple reviews of identical safety considerations;
21. Failing to establish a federal standard for byproduct material disposition;
22. Failing to use cost-benefit analysis for public health issues.

Any others?

Filed under Politics and Regulation, Their Actions

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

According to this email alert, they’re looking into a database to keep track of each reactor trip. That doesn’t sound like it would be too hard to counter as a pro-nuclear group; a blog would work even better as a way to analyze it.

Filed under Activism, Their Actions

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »