14 January 22
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A corrupt California Public Utilities Commission has sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom a death warrant for the state’s rooftop solar panel industry.
Like Germany, the Golden State is transforming into a mecca for emission-free renewable energy, batteries and LED/efficiency. In one of humankind’s most stunning technological revolutions, the cost of renewables continues to plummet while their output skyrockets.
Solar panels are transforming the public utility industry into a decentralized, democratized system where individual businesses and homeowners can own their own power supply.
To giant corporations like Pacific Gas … Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas … Electric, that spells doom. They’re in the business of selling grid-based power generated at big, centralized power stations.
So with the CPUC as their servant, they’ve sent to Newsom’s desk a hit list of taxes, fees and other “reforms” on how panel owners sell electricity back to the grid. It’s “a proposal to kill rooftop solar overnight,” says the executive director of the state’s solar association, Bernadette Del Chiaro. “It’s a disaster.”
Only public pressure can save California’s huge renewable industry. Write/email/call Gov. Newsom at: ( https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov40mail/ ).
Newsom has also been asked to independently inspect the two decayed Diablo Canyon nukes at San Luis Obispo. But they are already seriously embrittled, making a major accident all too likely too soon.
PG…E operates Diablo. In 2010 it killed eight people when its faulty gas pipes blew up a suburban neighborhood in San Bruno. PG…E’s decrepit power lines killed nearly a hundred more people by setting off fires that burned down much of northern California. Yet this is who’s now running two very old atomic reactors surrounded by earthquake faults (the San Andreas is just 45 miles away) with rotting innards and no private insurance.
A petition (www.solartopia.org) signed by more than 2600 Californians was delivered to Newsom nearly three years ago. It asked him merely to conduct an independent investigation into how badly the Diablo units have deteriorated. But he’s done nothing.
Meanwhile, Biden’s Build Back Better plan includes $35 billion in bailouts for new nukes. His Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Grantholm, wants to undermine a broad-based agreement between labor, environmental, state and local groups to shut the two Diablo units by 2025.
Yet everywhere the nuke industry is collapsing.
In France, cracked pipes have shut four of the country’s 55 reactors. The compromised French power supply faces serious winter shortages, especially if more cracks close down more reactors.
(If it ever gets inspected, similar cracks are likely to turn up at Diablo, which is of similar design).
France’s major atomic project at Flamanville is a catastrophic failure. Like Olkiluoto in Finland, and other projects in England, it’s years behind schedule and billions of Euros over budget.
In Georgia, America’s last two new nukes are off the cliff. Scammed with an interest-free $8.3 billion federal loan from Barak Obama, and $3.7 more from Donald Trump, the twin Vogtle nukes are years behind schedule. Newly discovered safety, construction and design flaws could kill them outright.
Vogtle’s price tag has soared from $14 billion to more than $30 billion, with no ceiling in sight. If they ever open, the reactors can never compete with renewables. Two more nukes at V.C. Summer in neighboring South Carolina, have been cancelled at a loss of more than $10 billion. At least one ranking executive has gone to prison.
But some nuke cultists still push sodium-cooled “small modular reactors.” In 1959 a precursor design spewed huge quantities of radiation at Santa Susanna, north of Los Angeles. Childhood and other cancers are rampant downwind.
Throughout the planet, today’s reactors emit carbon, radiation and huge quantities of heat. Of the 93 still licensed in the US, all but one are more than thirty years old. Some exceed forty. None are privately insured against a major catastrophe. All suffer from serious defects in aging, maintenance, waste storage and an elderly work force rushing to retire.
But the world’s fourth-largest economy is going green. On December 31, 2021, Germany shut three of its remaining six reactors (of an original 17). The last three will die at the end of the year, rendering Europe’s dominant power totally nuke-free.
With a huge push for wind, solar, batteries and LED efficiency, Germany might hit its aggressive green targets ahead of schedule.
Unfortunately, it continues to sell coal-generated electricity to France, whose failing nukes have fed demand for more carbon emissions.
But as Germany’s energiewiende races toward Solartopia, even that may disappear….especially if France kicks its nuke addiction and opts for cleaner, more reliable renewables.
As it has for decades, a desperate fossil/nuke industry is trying to paint itself green. It denies the horrendous human death tolls at Three Mile Island and Fukushima. It lies about being carbon-free (it isn’t) while also ignoring its huge emissions of heat, radiation and toxic chemicals. It skips the huge death toll among birds hitting its cooling towers and the billions of marine creatures that die at its outtake pipes (no windmill or solar panel ever killed a fish).
As in California, King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes, Gas) has a world-wide assault on renewables. But they’re all that can save us from extinction on this planet. So you MUST tell Gov. Newsom to dump these latest attempts to tax the sun.
Can we shut our remaining insanely dangerous reactors before the next one blows up?
THAT will depend on whether YOU and the green energy movement can preserve California’s rooftop renewables while duplicating Germany’s enormous success in transitioning to Solartopia.
Harvey Wasserman’s America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of Us History can be had via www.solartopia.org. The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft, co-written with Bob Fitrakis, is at www.freepress.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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