A very very modest victory for local Anti-nuclear activist
May 20th, 2009
|
| Share |
The “Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone” is basically a one-woman operation who has been working to do everything that she can to get attention in the name of shutting down the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant in Waterford CT. Nancy Burton lost her credibility a long time ago but sitll will throw any kind of legal challenge at Millstone just to be annoying. If the law says that a member of the public can raise an objection, submit a petition or dispute something, she does. If the law doesn’t say that a member of the public can do these things, she does anyway.
A recent “victory” in the courts has her all giddy again.
A Connecticut environmental activist on Wednesday scored a significant legal victory in her fight over how the Millstone nuclear power complex manages its wastewater.
The state Supreme Court unanimously decided to allow Nancy Burton to challenge the state process that led to a preliminary decision to allow Millstone to renew its wastewater discharge permit. The state Department of Environmental Protection released a draft decision in August 2006 to renew the permit.
Article ControlsEmailemail
imagereprint
imagenewsletter
imagecomments
imageshare
imagedel.icio.us
imageDigg It!
imageyahoo
imageFacebook
imagerss
Yahoo! BuzzBurton claims Millstone’s water intake and discharge system has destroyed billions of fish and other marine life in Long Island Sound and alleges the permit renewal process that began in 1997 has been tainted by bias, state favoritism toward Millstone and a disregard for environmental laws.
The five justices overturned a lower court judge’s ruling that Burton had no standing under state law to challenge the permit process.
“We conclude that the plaintiff’s complaint adequately sets forth facts to support an inference that unreasonable pollution, impairment or destruction of a natural resource will probably result from Millstone’s operation,” Justice Richard N. Palmer wrote in the court’s decision.
The high court sent the case back to Superior Court, where a different judge will hold a hearing on Burton’s allegations about the permit process. Justices said the lower court judge would be allowed to decide how to fix any problems with the process – if any are found.
“Today’s decision is a full vindication of the rights of all citizens to go to court to protect the environment,” Burton said Wednesday.
To be clear: This does not mean that she has actually won anything in any way or that the court has ruled anything about the facts of her alegations. Burton had submitted a complaint against the Millstone Nuclear plant a while back. The court that received the complaint dismissed it outright. In other words, they found the case so frivelous or empty that they didn’t even bother hearing the arguments. Instead, they tossed it out, thus saving everyone time and money. Burton appealed (which she tends to do a lot of) and eventually got a court to reverse the decision to toss the complaint. So now the court needs to at least review the case and hold a hearing before they can deposit this in the trash where it belongs…
(er… sorry.. in the recycle bin, I mean)
There is something especially ironic about Burton’s statement “Today’s decision is a full vindication of the rights of all citizens to go to court to protect the environment,”because she actually does not have the right to go to court in any capacity beyond “citizen.” She can still file suits as Citizen Burton, but she can’t act as council or in any capacity that the average person can. She used to be able to, but she was disbarred.
All this means is that the case will have to be heard, Dominion will have to pay to have a lawyer go and spend a couple of days in court and Burton will get another opertunity to make a mockery of the legal system and a fool of herself.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Just LAME, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
May 20th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
If we could put a stop to the anti-nuclear lawyers and Sierra Club/Greenpeace style lawsuits that have been using extortion techniques to prevent the building of nuclear power plants, it would go a long way to reducing the cost of clean power. The problem seems to be that there is no recourse for victims of this sort of nuisance lawsuit, thus there is no downside for the perpetrators if they loose. They are free to go back and continue this sort of legal harassment at their leisure.
I think it is time for pronuclear supporters to start to take action to counter this sort of thing. For a start we need to start filing Amicus Curiae briefs with the court in all of these cases from outside the industry. The reason is that the antinuclear movement has had no real opposition other than from the targets themselves and they need to know that they don’t have the field to themselves.
Second pronuclear sympathizers need a higher profile period. Media loves a conflict, and they will be just as happy to report on two groups with different views as they will be with the usual Davis vs Goliath treatment that they usually give this issue as evidenced by their treatment of the issue that is the subject of this post. This will make for a great opportunity to get our message out to a wider audience, and show up the opposition for the idiots that they are.
The best we can do right now is draw the antinuclear forces into open public debate. It would be devastating for them because as it stands they have nothing in the way of a solid platform anymore. They have been riding on Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island for years now, and are very vulnerable to an attack now because all of the dire predictions that they made back then have turned out to be vast exaggerations. Not only that, the Movement has lost most of their more credible supporters. Some have come over to our side with much fanfare, however those of us that follow such things closely have seen many many more just keeping their mouths shut and not being drawn into battle anymore.
Another thing – the antinuclear movement is getting old. They can no longer draw on waves of Boomers to fill their ranks anymore, and the young generation seems more open to or message – when we can get it to them. Right now they are great supporters of ‘renewables’ because they don’t know any better, but having not lived through the Cold War the terms ‘Nuclear’ and ‘Atomic’ doesn’t automatically make them crap their pants, as it does some of us that lived through the ‘Duck-and-Cover’ drills and the wailing of the CD sirens. They are a lot more open minded to the prospect of nuclear power and we need to reach out to them.
Ether way people like Nancy Burton should not be given a free ride anywhere.
Quote Comment
May 20th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
DV82XL said:
Well nuclear power and nuclear energy are related in the same way that wind turbines and beating someone over the head with a baseball bat are.
How can we relate other energy this way? Can we call biomass burners “incindary power” and wind power… hmmm. I was thinking “Stabbing power” but the wind turbine doesn’t really stab the air so much as slice it.. how about “slasher power” or something. I don’t know what to call solar power though, nothing in one-word that makes it sound sinister.
Quote Comment
May 21st, 2009 at 1:18 am
Chem Geek Gregor said:
It is important to recognize that the anti-nuclear movement was already ascendant before the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, Three Mile Island merely galvanized an already-active movement. The anti-nuclear movement’s achievement was not to stop nuclear power, but to take it off the table as an option after 1979.
They achieved this by creating a global zeitgeist — holding as an article of faith that nuclear power is a severe danger in all sorts of ways. Their arguments revolved around three main propositions: that nuclear plants are dangerous because they can blow up or melt down; that nuclear waste is extremely and persistently dangerous; and that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are intrinsically linked. It is only recently, as these arguments have lost ground, have they changed their tune to criticizing the economics of nuclear energy.
What we need is some bullet-points that are simple like the ones above to damn ‘renewables.’ They need to be intuitive, simple to state and few in numbers, and because we are the good guys, they need to be the truth. Any suggestions?
Quote Comment
May 21st, 2009 at 3:04 am
DV82XL said:
That seems to be a bit of circular logic. It is because of what these groups have done that it is so expensive. I saw a website a while back which had some examples of cost. The cost estimates for a reactor megawatt built from scratch in the UK are about eight times as high as they are in Romania, which has set a record for the cheapest construction of modern reactor using a design they imported from Canada and had built there in less than two years. Romania says they will break this record. It is a safe reactor and not shoddy or anything because it is a clone of a design from Canada that meets all international standards for safety.
Quote Comment
May 21st, 2009 at 3:56 am
RBR1978 said:
Naturally, who said they couldn’t be the cause and use it for a reason? After all we are talking about groups that until recently routinely claimed that a nuclear power plant could explode like an atomic bomb, and would carry placards illustrated with the silhouette of the plant they were protesting with a mushroom-cloud over it.
Your example is a case in point of the effect they can have on the cost. The same design of CANDU that Romania bought took twice as long to refurbish with massive cost overruns IN CANADA! mostly due to endless interference by ‘concerned’ members of the public, and a politically motivated regulator that was largely created as a sop to antinuclear elements active in the country at the time. You might recall it required Parliament removing the head of that agency a few years ago to maintain the world supply of certain radioisotopes after its refusal to permit the restart if the NRU reactor. These same idiots are also behind the failure of the two MAPLE reactors meant to replace the NRU going into service.
Quote Comment
May 21st, 2009 at 4:00 am
DV82XL said:
I thought that nuclear power was off the table because it was too expensive at a time of double-digit interest rates and cheap oil and gas.
DV82XL said:
“Wind Power is a Gas Salesman’s Scam” ?
I think a lot people are emotionally attached to the idea of renewable energy, and therefore if one wishes to attack the renewable energy industry, the best point to attack is the gas-fired plants (very much non-renewable, and unlike nuclear not even sustainable in the medium term) that wind turbines and solar panels use as backup. Also, an attack must be made on renewable energy mandates – any suggestions?
In European countries, playing up the Gazprom bogeyman could also be highly useful.
Quote Comment
May 21st, 2009 at 4:39 am
George Carty said:
Throughout the early 1970s, there was considerable technical discussion about the safety of nuclear power throughout the world. This was mostly driven by Ban-the-Bomb groups that wanted nuclear power stopped in the belief that it was the source of PU for weapons. While this is not so, the secrecy surrounding all things related to nuclear weapons did nothing to allay these fears, and played straight into the hands of the growing antinuclear (power) groups that were starting to form.
Local court cases against new construction were common. The building of a reactor in Maryland was delayed after a court victory over the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971. Construction on subsequent projects slowed as a result. Mass popular opposition to the “new, clean nuclear power stations” worldwide, however, seems to have begun in Germany. Shortly after work started in Hartlepool, a new plant was proposed for the tiny southwest German village of Wyhl. Opposition grew and, by the time work began in 1975, a mass movement was ready. Thirty thousand protesters gathered, seized control of the site, and occupied it. The plant was never built.
The German protesters did not rest on their laurels after this victory. In 1977, 20,000 people protested the use of salt mines at Gorleben for nuclear-waste storage. Growing bolder, they turned to open violence. At Brokdorf in 1981, 100,000 demonstrators surrounded the site of a proposed nuclear plant, confronting 10,000 police. According to the New York Times, “groups of hundreds of demonstrators armed with gasoline bombs, sticks, stones and high-powered slingshots” attacked the police, injuring 21 of them.
So there was considerable antinuclear activity at the time, but notably only in those counties with a large indigenous coal industry, like the States, Germany and Great Britain elsewhere the movement never was able to generate the sort of numbers on the ground. I’ll leave it to you to judge if this was coincidental.
However Three Mile Island was a godsend to this bunch because it forced (in the U.S.) a moratorium on new builds, and that was easer and cheaper to maintain then fighting each project on the ground as it came up.
Quote Comment
May 21st, 2009 at 12:07 pm
RBR1978 said:
DV8 beat me to the punch, but the Romania reactor is a CANDU reactor which is a prime example of how a reactor can be built without any major issues and be done right. It is the prototype for how this should be done. It is a CANDU-6 which is a 740 megawatt (electric) reactor with extremely high uptime and it is perfectly safe and meets all the quality standards of any GIII reactor or better.
It should be noted that these reactors are sometimes said to have been delayed from construction in 1986, but that’s not really true because the reason the project was haulted was the fall of communism in the east and the more recent one was barely even started. They basically had to start all over when the project resumed under the new government.
On time and under budget! (how often do you hear that in a nuclear project in the west?)
Romania is very happy with their investment and is likely to be buying more. THe economics are excellent. They have got it to the point where the capital cost is getting to under 1000 USD/Kw, which is a kind of holy grail for countries like the US and Canada where it can be more like 4000-6000.
The Romanian’s may not keep their title for having the most effecient construction of a CANDU, because China is very ambitious about their construction and they already have built them on time and under budget. They already built two and usually as they put more at the same plant the price goes down because they can share some components like the spent fuel handling. They may very well manage to get the cost down under the 1000 dollars to kilowatt mark.
This is great but also a little sad given the fact that we can’t manage to pull that off here. One would think that it would be cheaper and easier to build a reactor in Canada, on home turf, no language barriers or shipping of components and logistics, plenty of experienced operators, infrastructure in place. Comparatively speaking you’d assume it would be easier, right? No. It’s not. Technical matters are not the problem. They’ve wanted to put two or more in to power tar sand refinement and it has been floating for years and years and still is up in the air as a proposal. That’s how it works here. The Chinese must have learned something from manufacturing all those Nike sneakers. “JUST DO IT!”
Quote Comment
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:27 am
DV82XL said:
Do you think there’s anything to the argument that “Détente took the wind out of the sails of the anti-nuclear-weapons movement. Its leaders didn’t want to get proper jobs so they pimped themselves out to the fossil fuel industries by rebranding themselves as anti-nuclear-power protestors” ?
DV82XL said:
Is that Hartlepool in England? I live only ten miles from there!
DV82XL said:
What you’re talking about is before my time (I was born in 1980). I asked my parents though whether they were aware of anyone in my local area (which used to be dominated by coal mining) who had protested against nuclear power on a “Nuclear power is an excuse to shut the pits” platform – but apparently not.
(“Pit” is the local vernacular for coal mine…)
Of course the pits were shut by Thatcher’s government (which had a major grudge against coal miners), but unfortunately the coal-fired power stations were replaced largely with gas burners, not nuclear reactors.
Bloody privatization and double-digit interest rates!
In connection with the massive German anti-nuclear mobilizations, were coal miners a significant proportion of the rioters? Whereas it is conceivable that in the United States today, coal companies are a significant force lobbying against nuclear energy, the anti-nuclear-power protesters in 1970s Britain and Germany could not be mercenaries of the coal industry, as in both those countries coal mining was state owned and subsidized (in Germany, massively so), so the people with most to lose from a shift to nuclear would have been the coal miners themselves.
Oh, and do you think that more general hostility to nuclear power on the Left is at least partially to do with the fact that left-wing organizations were reluctant to “betray” the coal miners who had been the spearhead of the labour movement for much of its history? (A bit hyprocritical now, when many leftist groups are beating the AGW drum
)
Quote Comment
May 23rd, 2009 at 10:59 am
George Carty said:
Again is it a coincidence that the movement against nuclear power picked up during and after Strategic Arms Limitation Talks? (SALT I and SALT II) Because certainly the anti-nuclear-weapons movement dropped off the radar then
George Carty said:
Yes, the Hartlepool Power Station. It still is operating
George Carty said:
I have been looking for evidence of a direct connection between coal, unions or owners, for a while from that period. Unfortunately there is little material to work with from that time. Recently, the coal industry has been more open about its stand against nuclear energy – as evidenced by several leading articles on these very pages – so again it’s circumstantial, but a good fit.
George Carty said:
Perhaps. An interesting theory.
Quote Comment
May 24th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
The British coal strike in 1983-84 was not really about Maggie Thatcher’s dislike of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) but more due to the slow death of deep-mined coal as a major industry in the UK. Basically all the easy-to-get good-quality cheap coal had been extracted over the previous 150-200 years. It fuelled, literally, the Industrial Revolution. What coal is left now is low quality and in deep, faulted seams making it barely profitable to dig up and bring to the surface. There are a few good economical pits left, but not many.
The strike was in protest at the planned closure of a lot of marginal and end-of-life pits. The leader of the NUM, Arthur Scargill was an ambitious idiot who fell into every trap Maggie laid for him and he predictably lost. The strike cost the industry a number of pits with some life still in them — usually when the NUM went on strike they allowed maintenance teams to go underground to keep the pumps running and the roadways maintained. “King” Arthur thought he could win the strike in short order and maintenance teams were not allowed into many pits. After a year on strike some of these pits were economically unsalvageable with flooding, collapsed roadways and in-situ mining equipment destroyed.
Most carbon thermal power stations in the UK still burn coal. Many of the newer stations were built near the coast or on estuaries where cheap coal is delivered to the storage yards via bulk carriers bought on the world markets, from places like Eastern Europe and South Africa. As an added benefit it’s very difficult for a union to picket a shipping port’s operations, unlike a landlocked power station. The other advantage is that riverine or seawater can be used for cooling the exhaust steam from the generators.
Quote Comment
May 24th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Arthur Scargill – is this the clown that said: “I challenge George Monbiot to test out which is the most dangerous fuel – coal or nuclear power. I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.” in The Guardian last year? I he has also said: “By mining and refining coal, we can provide all the electricity, oil, gas and petrochemicals that people need, without causing harm to the environment”
Yes I can just imagine what the outcome would be if someone with such a flimsy intellect crossed swords with the Iron Lady. Bet he was checking between his legs to see if everything was still there after she finished with him.
Quote Comment
May 25th, 2009 at 2:03 am
DV82XL said:
I’m currently sitting in a room “full of radiation” all kinds of radiation actually. There’s carbon-14 and potassium-40 decaying in my body, there are cosmic rays coming through here and various other natural radioisotopes, meanwhile my cell phone and computer are creating electromagnetic fields, the monitor and lights are producing visible light and everything in the room is radiating energy in the termal infrared and high microwave/terahertz range.
If I wanted to be somewhere devoid of radiation I’d have to find a cave surrounded by a very large amount of purified lead or other dense material. I’d also have to cool it with liquid helium. This would kill me, of course.
I’ll give you a better test: stand just downwind of one of the two kinds of plants.
Quote Comment
May 25th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Been there, done that. Which is the source of my all to powerful loathing of coal fired power plants. I grew up seeing one at its worst and I know just how bad they are.
Quote Comment
May 25th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
The whole argument for “clean coal” that we’re somehow going to cap a coal fired plant and burn thousands of tons of coal and then take the massive volume of hot corrosive and dirty flu gas and seperate it out and sequester it and grab and compress all the CO2 to stick in the ground makes me wonder about something. When the coal advocates go out to speak about that, do they have to practice ahead of time in the mirror to keep a straight face?
Quote Comment
May 25th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Gordon said:
That’s why I was asking in another thread about the approval process. From what I can see in about every jurisdiction the authorities responsible for the licensing of dirt-burners don’t hold the licensee to the same standards as nuclear plants are held to by their regulators. Thus I can see a ‘clean coal’ plant being granted a permit, and when it doesn’t preform exactly as promised, ‘accommodations’ will be made, whereas a reactor would be immediately shut. In fact there are examples of both these things having happened in the past.
The other thing coal gets is a free ride on releasing radioactive waste. Typically a coal-fired power plant emits about 3.3 times the amount of radioactive waste into the environment that a nuclear plant produces for a similar amount of power produced. This is due to the fact that coal contains radioactive material, mostly uranium and thorium, at about 4 parts per million. Now this does not seem like a lot until the quantity of coal a 1000 megawatt plant will burn in a day, around 11,000 tons, is considered. This works out to be roughly 40 kilos of radioactive material (88 pounds) each day. About 10% of this will be released to the atmosphere and the rest will end up in the ash pile and subject to weathering. ‘Clean coal’ or not, there is no requirement for this material to be sequestered, as is the case with spent fuel from a nuclear reactor despite the fact that along with the uranium and thorium there are concentrations of more dangerous radioisotopes of elements like potassium and phosphorous in the ash.
It is not a level playing field at all, and that needs to be pounded into to the public’s mind at every opportunity, because I am sure there is a Nancy Burton or two out there with too much time on their hands to make themselves a pest to a coal plant in their region.
Quote Comment
May 25th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
DV82XL said:
In the US, getting approval for a coal power plant is not comperable to a nuclear plant. In general, there is no “license” in the sense that the there is with a nuclear plant with the NRC. THe NRC has nothing to do with coal and that’s that. There is no formal submission process or anything.
What you need is basically the following:
1. A building permit/zoning permit/infrastructure permits (local or state. you’d need this with anything you build, regardless. You need the permits to bring in rails and such).
2. You may need utility permits or approval to be a mass market electricity generator (if you’re not already). This again goes for anything – or at least any utility plant. It’s possible you could have trouble here if the local utility commission gets enough protests due to property value and such.
3. Emission approval – this is the only part that is in any way related to the approval for the coal exhaust. This is through the EPA. Basically you have to show that the plant meets emissions standards by the EPA. They’re not all that tight, so if you have some very rudimentary scrubbers and fly ash traps, you should be good.
Of course, there are other local and state issues. Many times, a coal plant is difficult to build because locals will start calling politicians to get strings pulled to stop it, but it’s not as bad as nuclear. Generally, they’re not that difficult to build. Like I said there is no real “coal burner” license.
One of the big things though is that in most places there are some major grandfather issues that can effectively make things regulation-free. If a utility owns property that it has had since before regulations exist they might be able to claim it has always been utility property and therefore can’t be expected to conform to new rules. Any facility that has been burning coal for any period of time generally gets a pass and that can even mean adding more units to it.
I would say that the regulations relating to a coal plant are generally the incidental ones that come up just due to the needs of the plant: Railroad permits, dock permits, permits to build a structure over 300 feet tall, permits for thermal discharge. That kind of thing. There isn’t a single major regulatory hurdle that is attached to coal.
Quote Comment
May 25th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
The EPA does not have the power to kill a coal plant like the NRC can with a nuke plant. Coal plants can be fined or the EPA can order them to shut down and they can file court appeals and continue to operate in the mean time. There are enviornmental issues depending on the jurisdiction, but it’s not like a nuclear plant. I’d say it’s a burden issue: the coal plant does not need to prove anything, but it could be shut down if it is proven to be an enviornmental hazard.
@ DV82XL: If you want to hold coal power plants to the same standards as nuclear plants and the same kind of regulation, then there will be a lot of people sitting in the dark. Especially any coal plants that have been in continuous operation since before 1977. If you applied the same containment requirements as a nuclear plant, they would all shut down overnight and probably never open again.
Quote Comment
May 25th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Russ said:
I am well aware of that and it isn’t my contention that we should, (or could, rather) just that I see a situation developing where we will have the wool pulled over our eyes by ‘Clean Coal’ where it will amount to nothing be hollow promises without a regulatory mechanism in place to enforce them. This to me is the issue.
Frankly, from what I have seen none of the clean coal ideas I have seen put forward are practical, and I doubt many of them will ever be commercialized without making the cost of coal powered generation totally uncompetitive. My suspicion is what we will seeing is some marginal improvements, and pilot-plants to give the illusion the industry is doing something. This nuclear energy could never get away with.
What I would like to see is all the various national regulators from nations with a nuclear a power sector, take a less adversarial approach to the industry they are responsible for, and like the aviation regulators, see themselves as facilitators. I have worked with American, Canadian, European, and Japanese air transport bureaucracies in my day, and they always struck me as having a real sense of balance in the conduct of their duties. I have seen nothing of that in the stories I hear from the nuclear side.
Quote Comment
May 25th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Amazingly, the guy this is about has not stopped in to comment, despite usually being very eager to comment.
Quote Comment
May 25th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Crap! I had two tabs opened and I commented on the wrong post!
Quote Comment