Clean Nuclear a "big lie", says Alec Baldwin

I've always thought people who count nuclear as "green energy" are idiots who wouldn't know a red paint theory if it fell on them. Just because you can't see, hear, smell or taste (usually) radioactive poisons doesn't make them less deadly. Ralph Nader once opined (red paint theory) that if a town or city woke up one day and overnight everything had been painted red by a non-toxic colouring that fell from the sky, people would spend millions to billions to clean it up, even though it represented no threat to human health.

Conversely, as most modern pollution is invisible to human sense and there is no red paint / burning fire / smelly smoke to run from, people are unaware of the toxins in their food, water and air, and thus paralyzed when it comes time to take action. It is time for Toronto to start announcing radiation levels in Toronto and GTA tap water, as these levels rise and fall based on radioactive tritium releases from Pickering and Darlington nuclear power plants just east of the city.

I had figured that the Fukushima disaster would wake up a few more humans, and seeing a Hollywood icon like Alec Baldwin take up the baton is encouraging. Here's an excerpt from Baldwin's Huffington Post article on why nuclear energy is NOT green.


The Big Lie of "Clean" Nuclear

by Alec Bladwin, Actor

Fascinating and heartbreaking how the Japanese civilian population, once again, has been called upon to teach us a harsh lesson about nuclear energy.

In the past few decades, more details have emerged about the development and deployment of the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan during World War II. Best-selling books report about how some government officials and scientists involved with the project urged Leslie Groves and the military to drop the bomb over the ocean, just off the coast of Japan, as perhaps this measure would scare the enemy into surrendering.

Groves and other military leaders asserted that there were only three finished weapons and that if the "demonstration blast" did not produce the desired effect, the US would have squandered a rare (at that time) and expensive opportunity. Also, some believed that the dropping of the two bombs served some grim purpose as a medical experiment. What would the bomb actually do to a city, its infrastructure and its population?

Who would argue that the results of those two bombs have kept that option at bay since 1945?

In the wake of the recent Japanese nuclear disaster, Kenzaburo Oe writes in The New Yorker about Hiroshima:

What did Japan learn from the tragedy of Hiroshima? One of the great figures of contemporary Japanese thought, Shuichi Kato, who died in 2008, speaking of atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, recalled a line from "The Pillow Book," written a thousand years ago by a woman, Sei Shonagon, in which the author evokes "something that seems very far away but is, in fact, very close." Nuclear disaster seems a distant hypothesis, improbable; the prospect of it is, however, always with us. The Japanese should not be thinking of nuclear energy in terms of industrial productivity; they should not draw from the tragedy of Hiroshima a "recipe" for growth. Like earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural calamities, the experience of Hiroshima should be etched into human memory: it was even more dramatic a catastrophe than those natural disasters precisely because it was man-made. To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima's victims.

I had written two pieces deconstructing the bizarre claims of the nuclear power industry. The incessant lie that nuclear is clean power, forever discounting the filthy and contaminating processes that mine, refine and enrich fissionable material for utility reactors. Although we must never set aside other factors such as vulnerability to terrorism and the lingering and unsolved issue of waste disposal, the Big Lie regarding "clean nuke" hype seems to trouble me most. You can't get many Americans to view a wind farm as a sign of our investment in a clean, safe energy future, but they seem to roll over and let the nuke industry do as they please, even in the wake of Fukushima.

If I told you that the chances that you would get AIDS from one act of unprotected sex with an infected partner were one in a million, would you do it? (Actually, according to a report by researchers Norman Hearst and Stephen Hulley in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the odds of a heterosexual becoming infected with AIDS after one episode of penile-vaginal intercourse with someone in a non-high-risk group without a condom are one in 5 million.) The answer is no. Because, if you took that bet and lost, you'd get AIDS.

Nukes are a similar bet. And there is no "protection" you can put on to save you. Fukushima shows us that utility companies reap all of the benefits, while we assume all of the risks.


Full online article on nuclear energy by Alec Baldwin, Huffington Post

Green Stock Watch: High energy prices are wind in cleantech sails

The double-edged events in Libya have caused a spike in global oil prices that will slow growth at home and abroad, however renewed high energy prices also invigorate renewable clean power companies.

The more you look into it, the more you will realize that oil is the most replaceable of all commodities, via natural gas, methanol, ethanol, new biogas / biofuel technologies and even solar, wind, geothermal, conservation and energy storage, directly and via equivalent energy displacement.

This is good news for green power stocks, however any with weak coffers should move quickly to raise cash now, for peace is just as likely to break out as war, if not more so. Money may soon be more expensive, so CFOs and CEOs, start working overtime to have sufficient money raised in the next two to three months, to last two to three years if possible.

A few years back I called the 2008 top in oil prices, predicted it coming and announced its arrival after oil crossed the $140 mark. We're getting into frothy territory again, and a new prediction is likely coming very soon. Not sure how high this one's gonna go, but we're climbing the peak now:

5 year chart Brent Crude oil price


Events and human psychology will determine this coming top, yet it already looks probable that support after the next oil price downturn will be around $56, up from $42 during the most recent bottom. THIS is a third higher, so when oil is next near a bottom and everyone is barking "disinflation", just compare the current bottom to the bottom in the previous cycle, and make your calculations from there.

If the oil price goes through 140 and makes a new high above 160, then 56 would be likely support for the next recession. If the oil price falters around or below the 140 mark, we have the dreaded double top and the downside may be even more severe, possibly to 24 at the nadir.

The bulls will tell you that $140 will become the new support level, converting former resistance, but don't believe them. At that price the global economy would crash, which is good for neither sellers nor buyers. Traders will take the market down about four or five times faster than they take it up, so don't be shy about starting to take long oil profits soon.

It also seems rather early to short, with Libya onstage, Iran in the wings, Bahrain and Yemen on side stages. As the ancient Chinese proverb says, "May you live in interesting times!"


Perhaps 2011 is another Sell in May and Stay Away year, or maybe things are moving even faster. Stay tuned.


Middle East democracy uprisings related links:

Middle East Revolutions 2.0; Egypt and Tunisia Timelines Dec 2010 to Feb 2011

Heroes and Martyrs of 2011 Tunisia and Egypt Revolutions

Canada urges Libya to show restraint with democracy protesters