Dear EcoNews,
I would like to thank EcoNews Journalist, Elena Bilheimer, for two articles she wrote in the March, 2023 issue of the EcoNews: “Exploring Energy: Nuclear” and “Exploring Different Environmental Ideologies.”
Both are well-researched and clearly written. It was also nice to see she used Cal Poly Graduate Student, Alec Brown, as one of her sources. Alec and his graduate student colleague, Lorelei Walker, created the North Coast Resident Energy Survey with the NEC in 2022.
Ms. Billheimer enumerated some of the large costs of nuclear energy including uranium mining, storage of radioactive waste materials for thousands of years, etc. I would like to add a couple of other real costs we see today: costs of accidental radioactive exposure to the environment, and the costs of the real threat nuclear plants pose if terrorists steal radioactive materials or rods from plants.
To the first concern, we know all too well how dangerous nuclear power plants are to communities. Not only was the Eureka plant closed due to its location near an active earthquake fault, but also because whistleblower Rob Rowen, nuclear control technician and the person responsible for maintaining the plant’s monitoring system, found irregularities in the plant operation and registered those concerns. According to Rowen, records and his 2015 book, My Humboldt Diary:A True Story of Betrayal of the Public Trust , only three years after beginning its operations in 1963, Humboldt Bay Nuclear recorded invisible radioactive vapor that had spouted out the plant’s stacks and was carried by winds over the adjacent community. Devices deployed in southern Eureka to measure radiation in the atmosphere found that South Bay Elementary School, located approximately a quarter mile downwind from the plant, consistently showed the worst contamination.
What would the costs be if a plant were actually targeted by a foreign or domestic terrorist? After 9/11, that threat became very real. All repositories of nuclear material had to ratchet up barriers and monitoring systems to address potential terrorist threats. We do not know what the cost of that was but surely in the millions, if not billions, of dollars in addition to the ongoing cost of increased security personnel. As recently as the early days of the Russian aggression on Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, became a clear target and the plant’s electrical system was temporarily shut down, leaving it to heat up as water cooling was minimized at times. Imagine if that happened in Northern California either with the radioactive rods still in place at the decommissioned plant or if a new plant came online. How much of the area including private property would be uninhabitable not to mention the ecological impacts to the ecosystems? What would the cost be in lost jobs, ruined resources and perhaps lost lives?
I also wanted to add a local note related to the NEC to Ms. Bilheimer’s article, “Exploring Different Environmental Ideologies.” Though the 1960s’ era genesis of the movement defined loosely as Deep Ecology is generally attributed to the writings of Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring), Paul Ehrlich, David Brower (Friends of the Earth) and Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, perhaps one of the best academic papers on the topic added articles to broaden the understanding of the philosophy. Perhaps one of the best academic papers on the topic was by former Cal Poly Humboldt sociology professor and one of the founding members of the NEC, Bill Devall. THE DEEP ECOLOGY MOVEMENT, was published in the The Natural Resources Journal in 1980 and a follow-up book, Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered, with fellow author George Sessions in 1985. Devall, a practicing Zen Buddhist, looked at global as well as local philosophies that recognize a deeper relationship between people and the natural world. Devall’s earthly body was welcomed back into the earth he loved in 2008. Again, nice job, Ms. Bilheimer.
– Dan Sealy, April 5, 2023