Frack Sand Book about Wisconsin

Book Release and Signing, October 24, 2018 — 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Fall Creek Public Library, 122 East Lincoln Avenue, Fall Creek, WI, 54742

Professor Tom Pearson will discuss how anthropological research was used in writing his book about the impact of frac sand mining on sense of place, community, and local democracy in our area.

THOMAS W. PEARSON is associate professor of anthropology and assistant director of the Honors College at UW–Stout. He is the author of When the Hills Are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community, published by the University of Minnesota Press. His writing has also appeared in several academic journals, including American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Human Organization. He lives in Menomonie, Wisconsin.

This event is co-sponsored by the Fall Creek Public Library

Our book sales committee will have copies of “When the Hills Are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community” available for purchase at this event. Please join us for an autographing session following the presentation.

More info on this talk and Heather Swan’s talk on honeybees at the CF library are at:
cvbookfest.org

Thanks for your help! Eileen Immerman, CCC-WIS.COM

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See also from: Wisconsin Public Radio

“Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community”

Fracking causes many human impacts

George Ahern’s Op-Ed of August 29 has been the source of many guffaws here in Appalachia, where it is passed around among people far from Naples, Florida. It is written as though there was no negative side on the balance sheet of fracking.

The industry uses technology developed at the Morgantown Energy Center (West Virginia) for the DOE and first tried by George Mitchell with government financial assistance. It is so financially insecure both Bloomberg and the New York Times carried articles about difficulty getting funding for new projects. One of those articles says, “Some of fracking’s biggest skeptics are on Wall Street. They argue that the industry’s financial foundation is unstable: Frackers haven’t proven that they can make money.”

Fracking companies are going broke on a regular basis. Another quote from the same article, “The 60 biggest exploration and production firms are not generating enough cash from their operations to cover their operating and capital expenses. In aggregate, from mid-2012 to mid-2017, they had negative free cash flow of $9 billion per quarter. This article was published in the same month as Dr. Ahern’s. Only five of the top 20 fracking companies made more money than they spent in the first quarter of 2018!

Some of the reasons are quite simple. Fracking expense is tremendous and the wells decline rapidly. Conventional wells produce for decades, fracked wells don’t pay to pump beyond 6 or 7 years, and production has gone down by half in a couple of years. All the production in the first year makes a selling point to investors, and the rest, conveniently, isn’t mentioned. Several times as much water is used as oil produced in oil wells, and several times as much water returns to the surface. Five thousand tanker truckloads of water must be taken from a source and then much of it pumped back underground. This causes earthquakes.

Local Chamber of Commerce people benefit from the investment, and they love it. Rural people hate it when it arrives, and anyone concerned with it’s effect on the biosphere see mostly harm. Energy Retun on Energy Invested (EROEI) is quite poor.

When you look at the anti-fracking resistance you see many small groups working individually, composed of several interests. The first is composed of landowners who consider themselves abused by laws that allow extraction industry to “run over” them. A second consists of people who suffer illness from the chemicals used in fracking and brought up from the deep with “return flow’ from the fracked wells. Still others are environmentalists, afraid of the huge amount of soil disturbance caused by well pads, access roads and the endless network of pipelines and pump stations required to transmit the product. Dr. Ahern’s notion that it is unified is a product of the petroleum industry’s notion that to be effective it must be organized the way they are. Almost all anti-fracking workers are unpaid volunteers, supplying their own funding for travel and research.

Horror stories abound in Appalachia, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma. Frequently surface owners do not own the oil and gas under their property. This is the result of law that allowed surface to be “severed” from minerals, a longstanding practice going back to the early days of oil and gas when lawyers were educated and landowners weren’t. This results in surface owners receiving arbitrary “settlements,” largely dictated by the company. Environmental damage is paid to no one, since the community owns the environment.

Part of the political appeal of fracking is the decline of petroleum reserves in the United States. We exported early and although blessed with reserves, they are gone. After all, the U. S. has only two percent of the dry land of the earth. The remaining conventional reserves lie in Russia and Iran (which “free world” companies want to confine) and the Middle East, with potentially shifting loyalty.

Finally, the piece Ahern wrote ignores the two devastating products of fracking: carbon dioxide and petroleum based plastics. One is ruining the atmosphere and the other the surface of the dry land earth and the sea. The blurb describing Ahern does not give the area of his Ph. D. expertise; perhaps it is not in science. If in Chemistry or Physics, the idea of radiation from the sun exciting carbon dioxide molecules, making sensible heat, what is measured with a thermometer, would not be strange. We all know microwaves make water molecules vibrate faster in a microwave oven. These heating and littering effects simply can’t be ignored by anyone with children or interested in continuing civilization.

An easy calculation shows 7708 tons of carbon dioxide have been added to the atmosphere on every square mile of the earth’s surface since coal was first used on any scale to produce heat and energy; and that we are now adding 203 tons more to each square mile every year. Some of this heat is transferred to the ocean, making it warmer, some goes to melting ice at high altitude and some to melting ice at the poles. This raises the ocean level.

Ahern couldn’t have done better in singing the praise of an industry that is exhausting it’s reserve of capitol and credibility on influencing legislation and enforcement and attracting reluctant investors. The ultimate irony of the article is that it was published in a coastal city in Florida. Rising sea level and intrusion of saltwater will get to it among the first.

Sincerely, S. Thomas Bond, Ph. D.

>>> Dr. Bond’s Ph. D. is in Inorganic Chemistry. Along with teaching he has maintained a farm in central Appalachia. He is a frequent contributor to newspapers, and the author of a book on life in Appalachia.

See also:

* — 1. “Commentary: The era of resistance to fracking is ending”, George Ahearn, Naples Daily News / August 29, 2018

2. “The Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground”

3. “Fracking: Do the Economics Justify the Risks?”

Methane is increasing in the atmosphere

Letter to the Editor by Tom Bond, WVNews, June 16, 2018

West Virginia leaders have an unmatched talent for delicious, self-serving fantasy. Take the picture with the article “Atlantic Coast Pipeline construction begins with ground breaking in Lewis County.” Obviously unfamiliar hands on golden shovels, with a State Trooper arms akimbo in the background in case reality should pop up.

Born in Wheeling in the middle of the Civil War, West Virginia was conceived to deliver the coal of western Virginia to the Union through the new railroads. After emancipation, coal led directly to a new and more complicated kind of slavery. Company houses, company stores, scrip money, work from boyhood to death under horrible conditions devoid of safety rules. It lead to a war in southern West Virginia with a battle line miles long.

The money and the ideas came from out of state, and the capital gained went out of state to build industry elsewhere. The local benefit was marginal at best and it left behind broken communities, hills still collapsing today, bleeding red water. Where coalmining continues mountains are truncated, and huge areas of surface are essentially left useless, no longer able to produce the magnificent forest of the past.

Now extraction comes in a new form, fracking. The final result of fracking would be a regular pattern of well platforms, access roads and pipelines over much of the state, so from high altitude it will look like a pox on the earth. It would preclude future agriculture and forestry on those pox affected areas.

We desperately need jobs in West Virginia, so they claim jobs. But drilling is a mature industry requiring a small amount of highly skilled labor and huge investment. Several companies are advancing on automating drilling, so that only one man and robots can do the work. Once the well is drilled it only needs a small amount of labor to maintain, and the well lasts 6 to 8 years. Once the pipelines and compressors are in place only a few jobs are provided by them to take the gas to market, too.

Its present permutation of drilling, called fracking, involves harmful chemicals which are widely believed to be dangerous to people living in the area. Hundreds of scientific, peer reviewed research papers confirm it too.. It is true some don’t, about 20%, just enough to make the situation confusing. People and local doctors know, however.

Surface property is made less useful, and consequentially less valuable, which goes unrecognized by drillers, tax collectors and much of the public. What you work a lifetime to get is lost without compensation.

And there is the “great white elephant” in the room that can’t be gotten around. Carbon dioxide causes the temperature of the earth to rise, and so does methane lost into the atmosphere, even more. It is just as deadly as nuclear warfare, just slower. We don’t need to expand burning hydrocarbons, the investment should go to renewables. The blithe claim gas is a “transition” fuel is belied by the buildup of pipelines like the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. It will have to be paid for by customers regardless of when a transition occurs, resulting in an very high rate of return, guaranteed by law. Great investment for big banks.

Citizens should callout the golden fantasy pushed by some commercial eager beavers. West Virginia needs good education to attract modern industry and a governmental plan to provide infrastructure. Then we could become more than a resource colony stripped of the goodies too cheap to be respected by other states.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

See also:
Pennsylvania, for first time, sets methane requirements on natural gas wells | StateImpact Pennsylvania, June 7, 2018

Amity & Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

Essay by Eliza Griswold, New York Times, June 9, 2018

(Ms. Griswold spent the past seven years reporting in southwestern Pennsylvania.)

Jason Clark has lived near Amity, Pa., in the southwestern part of the state, since he was born. He likes to call urban Americans “hypocrites.” At 38, he’s the president of the Pork Association in Washington County, which sits at the edge of Appalachia. City dwellers are consumers, as he sees it; they gobble up resources like meat and coal and natural gas without knowing where they come from or thinking much about the toll that rural Americans pay to supply them.

There’s a term for that toll. Economists call it the resource curse, or the paradox of plenty. Since the 1990s, political scientists and development experts have used the resource curse to explain why countries richest in fossil fuels tend to remain poor. The problem, they contend, lies in the toxic impact of large influxes of cash: Easy money displaces more productive economic activity and fosters weak governments.

Typically, scholars apply the term to poorer continents, yet it affects America also, and nowhere more so than Appalachia. Oil was discovered in western Pennsylvania in the 1850s. And for more than a century, coal companies have clear-cut hollows to burrow into the earth below.

Corporations influenced local politicians and owned local businesses. They set the price of bread and the number of hours in a workday. For a time, these companies also supplied jobs and, by extension, built communities as churches and schools grew up around mines. Yet education wasn’t really a focus. For laborers, the best-paid positions were underground. They required high levels of specialized skill best learned on the job.

Over the past several decades, as market forces and dwindling supplies have pushed coal companies into bankruptcy, they’ve abandoned towns, leaving behind the ravages of slag heaps and thousands of miles of streams and rivers polluted by acid mine drainage. Drive along the border between Pennsylvania and West Virginia and you’ll see waterways that are the bright orange of hunters’ vests. Neither the state nor towns can afford to pay the cleanup costs.

Fracking, however, promised to be different. When the natural gas boom arrived in the region more than a decade ago, it came with assurances that natural gas would burn cleaner than coal, releasing only half the amount of carbon into the atmosphere. Its proponents also argued that after a time, its environmental footprint would be so small that it would disappear into the rural landscape. For Appalachia’s residents, who’d experienced generations of mining and drilling on their farms and were well versed in the language of mineral rights, fracking brought with it the possibility of finally profiting off their land by signing lucrative leases to the oil and gas beneath their feet.

In the seven years I’ve spent reporting in southwestern Pennsylvania, I’ve watched the oil and gas industry build influence in Washington County by buying up farm livestock at the 4-H competition at the county fair and placing favorable articles in local papers — paid content that featured “shaleionaires,” a handful of farmers who’ve profited mightily off drilling.

Such corporate tactics can sow discord among neighbors who find themselves winners and losers in a lottery driven by energy markets. With an influx of cash from signing mineral leases, some larger landowners have gotten rich, while neighbors with less land pay the price for oil and gas extraction. These hidden costs range from the expense of car repairs that result from roads ruined by truck traffic, to the more troubling health consequences of living next door to leaking pools of industrial waste — including dying animals and sick children.

Struck by these and other forms of environmental injustice, many rural Americans have found they have nowhere to turn for protection. In Pennsylvania, government agencies and legal protections can do little to help. State environmental investigators, who are underpaid and inadequately trained, often abandon the public sector for more lucrative jobs in oil and gas. Federal agents, hamstrung by budget cuts and now under siege in the Trump administration’s campaign against environmental regulation, don’t have the mandate to hold drillers accountable for shoddy practices.

In Pennsylvania, a band of citizen activists has fought back. Among them are retired coal miners and steelworkers whose activism is rooted in the long history of labor unions in the state. Historically Democrats, most are also socially conservative hunters and fishers. Many were Trump voters who adhere to neither party and resist easy political classification. They view themselves not as environmentalists — a word that many see as carrying a dubious “liberal” agenda — but as conservationists, who believe in the wise use of resources for the benefit of humankind.

Since 2011, I’ve attended community meetings with these activists. At one such gathering, I met Stacey Haney, a single mother and nurse, and an avid hunter whose father, like many of the men in attendance, was a Vietnam combat veteran and an out-of-work steelworker. Ms. Haney, like others, was skeptical of corporate interests but far more suspicious of the federal government and of outsiders coming to Appalachia to wag fingers at poor people for signing mineral leases that helped them hold on to their farms.

Ms. Haney was proud to sign a lease on her small plot of land. She hoped it would earn her enough money to build her dream barn, but the act also had patriotic implications. She believed that as a daughter of a veteran, she had a duty to help keep American soldiers at home, instead of in the Middle East fighting foreign entanglements linked to oil. The promise of American energy independence would keep Americans safe and support an industrial resurgence in the rust belt. For all of these reasons, Ms. Haney was a staunch supporter of fracking.

Then an oil-and-gas operation began atop a hill about a quarter of a mile from her home. The industrial site included a vast open waste pond that leaked and sent noxious gases into the air. After her farm animals and her children developed mysterious illnesses, Ms. Haney grew fearful about potential exposure and abandoned the farm, which had once belonged to her great-grandfather. Ms. Haney became an outspoken activist. She sued the corporation that she believed had sickened her children; then she took on the state.

In 2012, along with a team of lawyers who represented small towns, Ms. Haney challenged a revision to Pennsylvania’s oil and gas law. This law would remove the rights of small towns to determine where drillers could operate. The towns battled it, arguing they had a duty to protect their citizens. To bolster their claim, they relied on an obscure amendment to the Bill of Rights in the Pennsylvania Constitution, the Environmental Rights Amendment, which guaranteed all citizens the right “to clean air and pure water.” The argument for the amendment was based directly on Pennsylvania’s history with coal companies leaving citizens with poisoned air and toxic water. This, the amendment underscored, involved a basic violation of individual rights.

Although on its surface the Environmental Rights Amendment sounded like a “liberal” cause, its basis was essentially conservative: the belief that citizens and communities had the right to govern themselves and could not be steamrollered by large corporations or federal agencies. In a 4-2 decision, the conservative bench of the state Supreme Court found in favor of Ms. Haney’s side. The small towns won.

“It’s not a historical accident that the Pennsylvania Constitution now places citizens’ environmental rights on par with their political rights,” Chief Justice Ronald Castille, a conservative Republican and Vietnam combat veteran, wrote in his landmark decision. Pennsylvania’s long history of resource extraction has given its citizens a sophisticated understanding of what energy really costs.

An abundance of coal, oil and natural gas has been, at best, a mixed blessing for rural Americans. This has helped to turn them against not only the federal government for failing to protect them but also their fellow Americans, whose appetite for consuming energy never seems to slacken.

>>> Eliza Griswold is the author, most recently, of “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” from which this essay is adapted.

Leaks, spills, fires, explosions happen every day, OMG!

Essay by Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

Fracking is surely the most widely contentious industrial process today. It beats out use of pesticides, and brings much the same complaints as mountaintop removal to a much wider area. It involves natural capital, the God given things we humans have to use for our support and betterment, our common property.

Natural capital was here before we humans came along, and will be needed after you and I are gone, indeed as long as there are humans on earth, indeed as long as there is life of any kind. Failure to recognize it as an asset is a serious mistake, because this can be squandered.

The natural world is a wonderfully complex system. Whether you see it as worked out over 4.54 billion years, or the gift of an all-powerful God, examination shows wonderful properties. Dead life is recycled so that there are no piles of trash, a perfect recycling system, even the rocks are recycled in time. Humans are recent and have become in our day unaware of our increasingly urban way of connections to this marvelous system, and how tenuous our life is and how brief our time here actually is. (Old age forces you think about this, though.) Humanity survives by a succession of generations. Each must learn from the last.

We humans are increasingly out-of-whack because our technology alters our immediate environment for our survival and comfort. Our needs are immediate and our thinking first arrives at solutions suited for immediate use, rather than fitting well into the natural system. Thus we have garbage, resource shortages, and, largely unrecognized destruction of the vast system in which we survive. It has recently become known to science, our best system for knowing, that, “60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.” And we have caused the loss of 50% of the plant life.

So where does fracking come in?

Fracking will denude much of the area where it is practiced. Viewed from high altitude we will be able to see the pockmarks of fracking pads, and the veins of connecting roads and pipelines. Restoration of grass to pads and roadways will never be as productive as before within the lifetime even of the youngest now alive. Forests requires 70 years to grow to harvest if replanted on the pipelines, and it won’t be. Poisoned waters may clear up in centuries, and it may not. Sick people in the form of lost labor and lost mental work are human capital lost by fracking.

All this is natural capital and there is negligible price for altering it, no consideration for its loss. Owners of this capital and the public must bare a loss, so it is no inhibition on the fracker or factor in the price of natural gas to restrain it’s use!

It is widely understood that the decrease in the value of property, making people sick, adding to the burden of the taxpayer and poisoning water that could be used later or down stream is immoral. How does that enter the decision to frack? Not at all! It is ignored by the companies, by the financiers, and by government.

Legislators have the motivation for moral withdrawal provided by the companies. It is known that there are more than 20 registered lobbyists for every member of Congress. Most are deployed to block anything that would tax, regulate or otherwise threaten a deep-pocketed client. There is a similar situation in state legislatures, no doubt.

Enforcement is not adequate even for existing agencies. They are underfunded, understaffed, and under motivated. For example, the U. S. has one pipeline inspector for every 5000 miles of pipeline, about twice the length of the country.

There are 2.7 million miles of pipeline snaked across the U.S. Some of the pipes carry hazardous chemicals, others carry crude oil, and still others carry highly pressurized natural gas. And when it comes to safety, all of them are under the care of 528 government inspectors.

Moral withdrawal helps make money for a few, and robs many others, and plays havoc with natural capital.

Multiple Safety Issues with Nuclear Plants

Why This Nuclear Engineer Says Every Nuke Plant in the US Should Be Shut Down Yesterday

From an Article by Karl Grossman, Common Dreams, January 13, 2017

The good—the very good—energy news is that the Indian Point nuclear power plants 26 miles north of New York City will be closed in the next few years under an agreement reached between New York State and the plants’ owner, Entergy.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has long been calling for the plants to be shut down because, as the New York Times related in its story on the pact, they pose “too great a risk to New York City.” Environmental and safe-energy organizations have been highly active for decades in working for the shutdown of the plants. Under the agreement, one Indian Point plant will shut down by April 2020, the second by April 2021. 

“If the general public would see these secret ‘red’ reports, its view on nuclear power would turn strongly negative.” They would be among the many nuclear power plants in the U.S. which their owners have in recent years decided to close or have announced will be shut down in a few years.

This comes in the face of nuclear power plant accidents­—most recently and prominently the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan—­and competitive power being less expensive including renewable and safe solar and wind energy.

Last year, the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant in Nebraska closed following the shutdowns of Kewanee in Wisconsin, Vermont Yankee in Vermont, Crystal River 3 in Florida and both San Onofre 2 and 3 in California. Nuclear plant operators say they will close Palisades in Michigan next year; Oyster Creek in New Jersey and Pilgrim in Massachusetts in 2019; and the closure of California’s Diablo Canyon 1 in 2024 will be followed by Diablo Canyon 3 in 2025.

This will bring the number of nuclear plants down to a few more than 90­ — far cry from President Richard Nixon’s scheme to have 1,000 nuclear plants in the U.S. by the year 2000.

But the bad—the very bad—energy news is that there are still many promoters in industry and government still pushing nuclear power. Most importantly, the transition team of incoming President Donald Trump has been “asking for ways to keep nuclear power alive,” as Bloomberg reported last month.

As I was reading last week the first reports on the Indian Point agreement, I received a phone call from an engineer who has been in the nuclear industry for more than 30 years­ with his view of the situation.

The engineer, employed at nuclear plants and for a major nuclear plant manufacturer, wanted to relate that even with the Indian Point news—“and I’d keep my fingers crossed that there is no disaster involving those aged Indian Point plants in those next three or four years”­—nuclear power remains a “ticking time bomb.” Concerned about retaliation, he asked his name not be published. 

Here is some of the information he relayed – a story of experiences of an engineer in the nuclear power industry for more than three decades and his warnings and expectations.

The Secretive INPO Report System

Several months after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in March 1979, the nuclear industry set up the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) based in Atlanta, Georgia. The idea was to have a nuclear industry group that “would share information” on problems and incidents at nuclear power plants, he said.

If there is a problem at one nuclear power plant, an INPO report will communicate the incident other nuclear plant operators. Thus the various plant operators could “cross-reference” happenings at other plants and determine if they might apply to them.

The reports are “coded by color,” explained the engineer. Those which are “green” involve an incident or condition that might or might not indicate a wider problem. A “yellow” report is on an occurrence “that could cause significant problems down the road.” A “red” report is the most serious and represents “a problem that could have led to a core meltdown”­ and could be present widely among nuclear plants and for which action needs to be taken immediately.

The engineer said he has read more than 100 “Code Red” reports. What they reflect, he said, is that “we’ve been very, very lucky so far.” If the general public would see these secret “red” reports, its view on nuclear power would turn strongly negative, said the engineer.

But this is prevented by INPO, “created and solely funded by the nuclear industry,” thus its reports “are not covered by the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and are regarded as highly secretive.” The reports should be required to be made public, said the engineer. “It’s high time the country wakes up to the dangers we undergo with nuclear power plants.”

The NRC Inspection Farce

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is supposed to be the federal agency that is the watchdog over nuclear power plants and it frequently boasts of how it has “two resident inspectors” at each nuclear power plant in the nation, he noted.

However, explained the engineer, “the NRC inspectors are not allowed to go into the plant on their own. They have to be escorted. There can be no surprise inspections. Indeed, the only inspections that can be made are those that come after the NRC inspectors “get permission from upper management at the plant.”

The inspectors “have to contact upper management and say they want to inspect an area. The word is then passed down from management that inspectors are coming­ so ‘clean up’ whatever is the situation is.”

“The inspectors hands are tied,” said the engineer.

The 60- and Now 80-Year Operating Delusion

When nuclear power plants were first designed decades ago, explained the engineer, the extent of their mechanical life was established at 40 years. The engineer is highly familiar with these calculations having worked for a leading manufacturer of nuclear plants, General Electric. 

The components in nuclear plants, particularly their steel parts, “have an inherent working shelf life,” said the engineer.

In determining the 40-year total operating time, the engineer said that calculated were elements that included the wear and tear of refueling cycles, emergency shutdowns and the “nuclear embrittlement from radioactivity that impacts on the nuclear reactor vessel itself including the head bolts and other related piping, and what the entire system can handle. Further, the reactor vessel is the one component in a nuclear plant that can never be replaced because it becomes so hot with radioactivity. If a reactor vessel cracks, there is no way of repairing it and any certainty of containment of radioactivity is not guaranteed.”

Thus the U.S. government limited the operating licenses it issued for all nuclear power plants to 40 years. However, in recent times the NRC has “rubber-stamped license extensions” of an additional 20 years now to more than 85 of the nuclear plants in the country­ permitting them to run for 60 years. Moreover, a push is now on, led by nuclear plant owners Exelon and Dominion, to have the NRC grant license extensions of 20 additional years ­to let nuclear plants run for 80 years.

Exelon, the owner of the largest number of nuclear plants in the U.S., last year announced it would ask the NRC to extend the operating licenses of its two Peach Bottom plants in Pennsylvania to 80 years. Dominion declared earlier that it would seek NRC approval to run its two Surry nuclear power plants in Virginia for 80 years.

“That a nuclear plant can run for 60 years or 80 years is wishful thinking,” said the engineer. “The industry has thrown out the window all the data developed about the lifetime of a nuclear plant. It would ignore the standards to benefit their wallets, for greed, with total disregard for the country’s safety.”

The engineer went on that since “Day One” of nuclear power, because of the danger of the technology, “they’ve been playing Russian roulette­, putting one bullet in the chamber and hoping that it would not fire. By going to 60 years and now possibly to 80 years,  “they’re putting all the bullets in every chamber­ and taking out only one and pulling the trigger.”

Further, what the NRC has also been doing is not only letting nuclear plants operate longer but “uprating” them­ allowing them to run “hotter and harder” to generate more electricity and ostensibly more profit. “Catastrophe is being invited,” said the engineer.     

The Carbon-Free Myth                    

A big argument of nuclear promoters in a period of global warming and climate change is that “reactors aren’t putting greenhouse gases out into the atmosphere,” noted the engineer.

But this “completely ignores” the “nuclear chain”­ the cycle of the nuclear power process that begins with the mining of uranium and continues with milling, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel “and all of this is carbon intensive.” There are the greenhouse gasses discharged during the construction of the steel and formation of the concrete used in nuclear plants, transportation that is required, and in the construction of the plants themselves.

“It comes back to a net gain of zero,” said the engineer.  Meanwhile, “we have so many ways of generating electric power that are far more truly carbon-free.”

The Bottom Line

“The bottom line,” said the engineer, “is that radioactivity is the deadliest material which exists on the face of this planet ­and we have no way of controlling it once it is out. With radioactivity, you can’t see it, smell it, touch it or hear it­ and you can’t clean it up. There is nothing with which we can suck up radiation.”

Once in the atmosphere­ having been emitted from a nuclear plant through routine operation or in an accident ­“that radiation is out there killing living tissue whether it be plant, animal or human life and causing illness and death.”

What about the claim by the nuclear industry and promoters of nuclear power within the federal government of a “new generation” of nuclear power plants that would be safer? The only difference, said the engineer, is that it might be a “different kind of gun­but it will have the same bullets: radioactivity that kills.”

The engineer said “I’d like to see every nuclear plant shut down­ yesterday.”

In announcing the agreement on the closing of Indian Point, Governor Cuomo described it as a “ticking time bomb.” There are more of them. Nuclear power overall remains, as the experienced engineer from the nuclear industry said, a “ticking time bomb.”

And every nuclear power plant needs to be shut down.

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net

Remembering the Passenger Pigeon

Why don’t we grieve for extinct species?

From an Article by Jeremy Hance, The Guardian, November 19, 2016

Photo: Martha flies again. Martha was the world’s last passenger pigeon, who perished on September 1, 1914. Once the most populous bird on the planet, passenger pigeons vanished remarkably quickly due to overhunting and habitat destruction. In 2014, mourners carried this model up Mount Caburn and burned it in a pyre.

In early 2010, artist, activist and mother, Persephone Pearl, headed to the Bristol Museum. Like many concerned about the fate of the planet, she was in despair over the failed climate talks in Copenhagen that winter. She sat on a bench and looked at a stuffed animal behind glass: a thylacine. Before then, she’d never heard of the marsupial carnivore that went extinct in 1936.

“Here was this beautiful mysterious lost creature locked in a glass case,” she said. “It struck me suddenly as unbearably undignified. And I had this sudden vision of smashing the glass, lifting the body out, carrying the thylacine out into the fields, stroking its body, speaking to it, washing it with my tears, and burying it by a river so that it could return to the earth.”

Pearl felt grief, deep grief, over the loss of a creature she’d never once seen in life, a species that had been shot to extinction because European settlers had deemed it vermin. Yet, how do we grieve for extinct species when there are no set rituals, no extinction funerals, no catharsis for the pain caused by a loss that in many ways is simply beyond human comprehension? We have been obliterating species for over ten thousand years – beginning with the megafauna of the Pleistocene like woolly rhinos, short-faced bears and giant sloths – yet we have no way of mourning them.

Still, Pearl didn’t push the grief under or ignore it. Instead, she sought to share it. In 2011 Pearl, who is the co-director of the arts group, ONCA, and the theatre group Feral in Brighton, helped organise the first ever Remembrance Day for Lost Species. Held every November 30th, it’s since become a day for activists, artists and mourners to find creative ways to share their grief for extinct species – and reinvigorate their love for the natural world.

“We hope the Remembrance events will function as funerals for humans do,” Rachel Porter, a co-founder of Remembrance Day for Lost Species and a movement therapist, said. “Such rituals are ancient, embedded within us. We are just placing this common ritual into an unfamiliar context.”

But there are no rules to the Remembrance Day for Lost Species and anyone can start a public event or hold a private ceremony. This year, they are going on all over the world, including a dinner for the dodo in London, a poetry reading in Berlin, and a remembrance ritual for the thylacine outside of Brisbane, Australia.

Graphic designer and art therapist Julia Peddie, who is hosting the thylacine ritual in Australia this year, said she remembers as a child first learning about how humans wiped out the dodo – and how the knowledge crushed her. “I can only imagine how children feel now, witnessing such enormous losses, and wonder if they are desensitising in order to cope,” she said. “Remembrance Day for Lost Species provides an opportunity for children and adults to connect with their grief, and in doing so, reclaim a part of themselves.”

 “Actual grief is hardly practiced today,” Megan Hollingsworth, a poet and founder of the collaborative art project ex·tinc·tion wit·ness, said. “If it were, children would neither be murdered in war nor would they go hungry and homeless in the streets of the world’s ‘wealthiest’ nations. Water would be protected. The desires of ‘grown’ men and women would not ever trump the needs of any single child, let alone whole communities.”

Hollingsworth, also one of the founders of the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, will be holding a bell tolling ceremony in Montana on the 30^th of November.

Photo: A processional for the great auk during the Remembrance Day for Lost Species in 2011. The great auk went extinct in 1844 after the last two known animals were killed violently by men seeking their eggs. The species was pushed to extinction by killing for its feathers, eggs and even to use as fishing bait.

“Telling the stories of recently extinct species is a way of capturing people’s imaginations to this end,” said Pearl. “It’s not science or statistics, it’s history, it’s real life – and in an age of cultural amnesia, storytelling inspired by historical events is a way to learn lessons from the past.”

But many probably fear that allowing themselves to feel the grief – really feel it – will result in a personal collapse. Hollingsworth said that an environmental studies professor once told her: “‘I can’t think of this as grief. That would be endless.’”

But this is “where the misconception lies,” according to Hollingsworth. Grieving doesn’t bring endless suffering, but healing and health.

“What happens when I don’t grieve someone’s death? What does it mean not to feel or express sorrow when someone passes unnecessarily due to my negligence? Just the thought of this is chilling to me as the sociopath is brought to mind,” she said.

Grieving in the Anthropocene

Legend says the world’s last thylacine died cold and alone. The story is that it was mistakenly locked out of its nighttime quarters at the zoo in Hobart, Tasmania during an unusually cold night in 1936. The animal, which was never even identified as a male or female, perished from exposure. That was 80 years ago this year.

While the last thylacine may not have actually died from the cold, it certainly died in a kind of loneliness that is almost impossible for humans – seven billion and rising – to comprehend. It was, after all, an endling. The last of its kind.

And yet do we barely remember it, let alone weep for it.

Photo: A child visits the ‘grave’ of Bombus franklini, a bee that went extinct in 2006, during the Funeral for Lost Species.

Julia Peddie said the 80th Anniversary of the extinction of the thylacine “went fairly unnoticed in the mainstream media” even in its native Australia. Despite little media around the anniversary, Australia still has a lot of “nostalgia” for the thylacine, said Peddie, to the extent that some people believe it still inhabits the wild lands of Tasmania.

Perhaps, this is a kind of denial in action, an inability to accept the extinction of what once was; a denial that may continue to allow Australians – and people around the world – to ignore the losses going on right in front of them.

Australia is an epicentre of extinction. It has the highest mammal loss of any country on Earth. Since European arrival, the country has lost at least 30 species of mammal. And another was lost just this year: the Bramble Cay melomys, the world’s first mammal known to have gone extinct due to climate change.

“The stories of lost species remind us that things do end, they do die, that we are causing irrevocable and deeply distressing changes – but that the ending’s not yet written for the stories of rhinoceros, of hedgehogs, of phytoplankton,” said Pearl.

So, really, why don’t we grieve for the passenger pigeon, the golden toad, or the Yangtze River dolphin? Or how about Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog which just vanished from the Earth in September? Why don’t we rend our garments for the woolly mammoth, or tear our hair for the dodo or smear our windows with ash for the great moas that once roamed New Zealand? It can’t hurt. It could only heal.

“We need to imagine and invent new rituals for the Anthropocene,” said Pearl. “What would a memorial for the Caspian tiger or the elephant bird look like? A memorial for the Great Barrier Reef? For 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2?”

The age of the Anthropocene is an age of grief, put simply. Not showing, sharing or indeed feeling that grief will make it all the more unbearable. But a collective keening may be key to moving forward and creating a new society that fully respects and cherishes the millions of life forms that call this planet home.

Photo: A memorial to the passenger pigeon on a beach in Wales by Emily Laurens in 2014.