Big Nuke's Radioactive Hoax in Impoverished Ohio

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/wasserman06192009.html


Signs of Desperation?


Job-starved southern Ohioans are being promised a shiny new nuclear plant. But the announcement has come with a cruel reminder, and the scent of a desperate hoax.

Using the gargantuan corpse of the shuttered Portsmouth-Piketon uranium enrichment plant as his backdrop, U.S. Senator George Voinovich (R-OH) punctuated his enthusiastic endorsement the new nuke by proclaiming that, with his support, the US government has paid thousands of Ohio workers hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the health damage they suffered from being irradiated while working there.

What was he thinking?

Just north of the Ohio River, Portsmouth-Piketon was a mainstay of the nuclear power/weapons complex dating back to 1954 (it shut in 2001). Generations of workers and their progeny suffered a devastating plague of radiation-related diseases from the facility's radioactive fallout, inside and around the plant boundaries. It took decades of brutal, grinding grassroots campaigning to win even a modicum of compensation.

Now the heaviest of nuclear hitters want to use this same site for a 1600-megawatt French-designed plant that would anchor a "Clean Energy Park." In a region devastated by the enrichment plant's shutdown, and by the decimation of the American industrial economy, it would be a flagship for the "nuclear power renaissance."

It is a cruel hoax.

-snip-

Nor has the insurance industry come forward to provide liability coverage in case of a major accident. New design criteria may require containment domes designed to resist a jet crash. But the cost requirements to do that may add to the already prohibitive financial burden.

-snip-

Among other problems might be: where will the water come from to cool this plant? Reactors in France, Alabama and elsewhere have been forced shut because waste water has caused overheating of streams---up to 90 degrees Farenheit and higher.

-long snip-

Southern Ohioans are good people who deserve jobs and a real economic future. No matter how much Big Nuke spends on them, rushed high-profile corporate announcements touting a doomed technology can only add to their grief.
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[Lerkfish]

1. This location is already irradiated.

this plan will only make it worse.

[ensho]

2. true

nt

[liberal N proud]

3. Telling the locals it will bring 400 - 700 permanent jobs

From the Chillicothe Gazette:

Calling it the "beginning of the beginning," Duke Energy chairman, president and CEO James Rogers Thursday officially kicked off the effort to bring 400 to 700 new permanent jobs to Piketon within roughly the next decade.

Also claiming 1600 - 1800 construction jobs:

In addition to the permanent jobs would come the prospect of 1,600 to 1,800 construction jobs and about that same number of construction support positions, more than $500 million per year in local, state and federal tax revenues and other benefits, additional work for Ohio manufacturing companies making parts for the new facility and the ripple effect benefits to the local tax base that impacts, among other things, area school districts.

http://www.chillicothegazette.com/article/20090619/NEWS01/906190308/1002/Southern-Ohio-Clean-Energy-Park-Alliance-announced

[Lerkfish]

4. the area is so impoverished they would probably agree to a plant where children were skinned alive

and made into lampshades.


the locals, at the previous plants incarnation, took jobs there even though they knew they were rolling the radioactive dice, because the area is geographically isolated with no other industry.

[ensho]

5. ah those nazi human skin lampshades and breast/nipple change purses

who can ever forget that. those change purses were seared into my brain as a kid during WWII

and desperate people will take dangerous jobs.

[SidDithers]

6. If you needed to generate 1600 MW in Ohio...

how would you do it?

Sid

[spinbaby]

7. They mine coal in Ohio n/t

[Lerkfish]

8. Piketon is not that far from the Ohio River

a pretty robust natural resource of kinetic energy, if properly tapped.

[SidDithers]

9. Hydroelectric is a great solution...

if, as you said, it an be properly tapped. The province of Quebec generates over 90% of it's electricity from hydroelectric sources, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 33,000 MW.

Sid