Spring snow is not unusual around here, but tonight’s will probably carry radiation. It’s been dry since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Tests taken by the Vermont Health Department have shown radioactive iodine, presumably from Fukushima is showing up in the state. There’s no safe level of radiation, but what we’re getting in Vermont is no cause for panic.

Now that precipitation is on the way, however, it might be a good time to take a holiday from milk. Not easy to contemplate in a diary state, where small farmers have enough to contend with, but milk drinking was the primary route for radioactive material into people’s bodies after Chernobyl in 1986. Radiation was detected in Washington State milk earlier this week.

Again, it’s not life-threatening, but precaution, a concept that escapes federal agencies – whether the issue is genetically-modified food, toxic pollutants, nuclear devices or climate change – is a good thing. “An abundance of caution.” The phrase looks so old fashioned.

Monday past was the 32nd anniversary of the partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island; last Thursday was the 22nd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill. The first anniversary of the BP blowout is three weeks from tomorrow and the 25 anniversary of Chernobyl is four days after that. (It’s a busy time for me at work right now.)

A week ago, we learned General Electric, which designed the reactors at Fukushima (and 23 just like them in the US), pays no taxes, despite profits in the billions of dollars, while shipping jobs overseas.

As I mentioned then, America’s nuclear regulators knew in 1972 that the design of the GE reactor’s cooling system was flawed, but kept their mouths shut for fear it would lead to the end of nuclear energy. Four of the six troubled reactors at Fukushima Daiichi are the flawed GE design and were built AFTER the regulator’s memo was written.

Precaution, as I said, is notably absent from our government’s thoughts, even when lives are on the line. OK, so you’re a regulator who wants to cook the books on behalf of the industry you’re supposed to regulate. Could GE quietly be told to stop selling flawed reactors? Could the purchasers of said flawed reactors be quietly told to beef up the power supply for the cooling systems?

Will anyone ever be called to account for this? Doubt it. If you think your government is honest and acting in your best interest, act accordingly. If you think your government is dishonest and not acting in your best interest, act accordingly.

Those people in the tea party are not entirely off base. They’re right to be angry (and scared). I think they’re angry at some of the right people (and some of the wrong people). I think their prescriptions for change are misguided, deliberately misguided by the people on whom they rely for information.

Seismologists say as a result of the March 11 earthquake, the world is spinning faster, by 1.8 microseconds per day. It feels like we’re spinning faster than that.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

That’s not true, there’s plenty of mischief still available to the Terrible Twins and as we saw with the wiretapping bill last month, there are more than enough foolish Democrats willing to abet Bush/Cheney shenanigans.

When Congress reconvenes in a few weeks, it will take up consideration of an energy bill and the Cheney cronies will be pushing for the construction of a new generation of nuclear reactors. Expect to hear that we need – desperately need – more nuclear power as a solution to global warming. All the politicians who’ve been doing the bidding of big oil (“Oh no, we can’t tax ExxonMobil’s billions in windfall profits.”) and big auto (“Oh no, we can’t raise fuel-efficiency standards.”) will now stand in the wells of their respective bodies and tell us that unless we allow another wave of nuclear experimentation wash across the nation, your grandma will die of heat stroke.

To the eternal embarrassment of most of my fellow Vermonters, we have a nuclear power plant in the Green Mountain State. Vermont Yankee was built 35 years ago and should be nearing the end of its life. Its license is set to expire in 2012, but the plant’s owner Entergy Nuclear, has applied for a 20-year extension. It may well get the extension, seeing as last year the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allowed the plant to increase its power output by 20 percent more than it was designed to produce.

Tuesday, still in the midst of high summer electricity demand, Vermont Yankee had to cut its output by half when its cooling towers began to fail under the pressure of the extra water that’s been forced through them since the power boost.

Okay, okay – Vermont Yankee is an old reactor. The nuclear industry says its new generation of reactors will be “inherently safe.” Maybe – maybe not. The problem with a promise like that is we cannot determine its truth unless we allow the construction of the new reactors and they operate safely for 50 years – or have meltdowns.

Since we can’t predict the future, we have to use the past as a guide. We know when nuclear-generated electricity was first developed, we were told we could have it for nothing, as it would be “too cheap to meter.” It was not, is not and never will be. In fact, when the first nukes were built no insurance company on Earth would write a policy to cover one. To fill the gap, the federal government in 1957 agreed to cover losses from a nuclear mishap for the first ten years until everyone saw how safe nuclear plants were. By 1967, still no insurance company would write a nuke policy, so the federal insurance scheme was extended for another 10 years. After that, the extensions were for 12, 15 and 20 years. Congress keeps making the extensions longer as its way of facing the fact that “the invisible hand of the free market” won’t come within a thousand miles of one of these idiotic machines.

While the US has had nukes for a half-century, we have never agree on a place to put the nuclear waste, which will be hazardous to living things for hundreds of thousands of years. We’ve spent $10 billion on a “repository” at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but it’s not clear that it will ever open. Meanwhile, five decades of nuclear waste sits in “temporary” storage on-site at power plants, accidents or terrorist targets waiting to happen.

In recent nuclear news, a French consortium earlier this month won a half-billion euro contract to build a new sarcophagus over the melted reactor at Chernobyl, scene of the world’s worst nuclear accident. Radiation is leaking out of the site again.

Last month, an earthquake in Japan shut down the world’s largest nuclear power complex which, unknown to authorities (!!!) was built on a major fault line. The earthquake caused a fire at the reactor, tipped over barrels of contaminated material and spilled hundreds of gallons of radioactive water into the ocean.

In France and Alabama reactors have been shut down this summer – again during peak demand – because their water discharges were overheating local rivers. How is that a solution to global warming?

The list of nuclear energy’s deficiencies is almost too long and farcical to be believed and is available to all with the slightest of Googles. A new generation of these disasters should be the easiest of pitfalls for Congress to avoid, but recent history unfortunately suggests that may not be the case.

© Mark Floegel, 2007