Grassroots movement forces shuttering of two Chicago coal plants

By Jeff Biggers

In a move that should electrify the clean energy movement across the country, the tireless champions with the Chicago Clean Power Coalition have announced that Midwest Generation, a subsidiary of multinational giant Edison International, will soon shut down the Windy City’s two Model-T-era coal-fired plants.

The historic victory, after a decade-long battle, marks a shift in the clean energy battle for the country: If Chicago, once hailed as the “world’s largest market of coal,” can go coal free, the rest of the nation must surely be close behind them.

Thanks to one of the most determined, diverse and successful clean energy campaigns in the nation–including a breakthrough campaign to pass a Clean Power ordinance–the retirement of the decrepit and deadly Fisk and Crawford coal-fired plants will end the century-long reign of the most toxic polluters in the heartland.

Birthplace of Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the world, an editorial in the Chicago Tribune asked in 1892: “Doubtless the end of the coal, at least as an article of a mighty commerce, will arrive within a period brief in comparison with the ages of human existence… How long can the earth sustain life?” The editorial lambasted Americans for our lack of vision and sense of energy conservation, and our need to “invent appliances to exhaust with ever greater rapidity the hoard of coal.”

The Chicago Clean Power Coalition will hold a press conference in Dvorak Park on Thursday to formally announce the agreements signed by Midwest Generation, the Clean Power Coalition, and the City of Chicago.

“Today’s victory demonstrates that people shouldn’t have to tolerate toxic polluters in their backyard,” said Rosalie Mancera of Pilsen Alliance. “By working with our neighbors and elected officials, Chicagoans have finally won the right to breathe clean air.”

“For over ten years our communities have been fighting for the right to breathe clean air, clean land and clean water. Today we are ending over 100 years of pollution for profits and showing the power of community,” said Kimberly Wasserman of LVEJO. “Hopefully, this is the first of many victories in Illinois, as citizens and politicians come together to hold corporate polluters accountable and usher in a clean energy future.”

“Fisk and Crawford have been polluting Chicago neighborhoods for over 100 years,” said Jerry Mead-Lucero of PERRO. “Our work is not over when the plants close. Midwest Generation and the City of Chicago must continue working to ensure these sites are properly cleaned up and returned to safe, productive use for our communities.”

As a unique city-wide effort, the Chicago Clean Power Coalition includes: Chicago Youth Climate Coalition, Eco-Justice Collaborative. Environmental Law and Policy Center, Environment Illinois, Greenpeace, Faith in Place, Illinois Student Environmental Coalition, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Nuclear Energy Information Service, Pilsen Alliance, Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization, Protestants for the Common Good, Rainforest Action Network Chicago, Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago, Doctor’s Council SEIU, Sierra Club, and the Southeast Environmental Task Force.

“This is a major victory for the people of Chicago!” said Pam Richart, Eco Justice Collaborative. “With the closure of the Fisk & Crawford coal plants, our city takes a bold step away from dirty energy and the harm it brings to human health, while at the same time opening the way for a clean energy future. We look forward to working with community groups and the City to ensure that these sites are cleaned up and restored for safe, productive uses.”

“Chicago families have spoken: We have the right to breathe clean air, and we aren’t willing to tolerate old, dirty coal plants in Chicago neighborhoods that harm our health and foul our air,” says Faith Bugel, Senior Attorney with the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC). “This victory means cleaner air, cleaner water, cleaner energy, and a safer environment for us all.”

“This is a victory for the people of Chicago, who have demonstrated that grassroots activism is more powerful than the special interests of corporate polluters. We hope other communities across the country will find new inspiration to stand up for their right to clean air and a safe climate, ” added Kelly Mitchell, Greenpeace Coal Campaigner.

From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/29-7

Nuclear plants in United States experienced fifteen “near-misses” in 2011

By Environment News Service

The Union of Concerned Scientists has documented 15 “near-misses” at 13 U.S. nuclear plants during 2011 and evaluates the response of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to each event in a report released today.

The second in an annual series of reports, “The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety 2011 Report: Living on Borrowed Time” details 15 special inspections launched by the federal agency in response to problems with safety equipment, security shortcomings, and other troubling events at nuclear power plants.

The overview is provided by David Lochbaum, the director of UCS’s Nuclear Safety Project. He worked at U.S. nuclear plants for 17 years and was a boiling water reactor technology instructor for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“While none of the safety problems in 2011 caused harm to plant employees or the public, their frequency – more than one per month – is high for a mature industry,” Lochbaum writes.

In the 40 years that the Union of Concerned Scientists has evaluated safety at U.S. nuclear power plants, “We have repeatedly found that NRC enforcement of safety regulations is not timely, consistent or effective,” the report states.

The UCS says its findings match those of the agency’s internal assessments, as well as of independent agents such as the NRC’s Office of Inspector General and the federal Government Accountability Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress.

Many of these 15 “near misses” occurred because reactor owners either tolerated known safety problems or took inadequate measures to correct them, Lochbaum finds.

For example, the owner of the Oconee nuclear plant in South Carolina installed a backup reactor core cooling system in 1983. However, in 2011 – more than a quarter-century later – workers discovered a problem with the system that would have rendered it useless in an accident.

Another significant safety-related event in 2011 occurred at the Braidwood and Byron nuclear plants in Illinois. Workers at those plants had instituted a practice in 1993 of deliberately draining water from the piping to a vital safety system. They did so to reduce corrosion caused by the drawing of untreated lake water into the system. However, writes Lochbaum, “their solution would have prevented this vital safety system from functioning properly during an accident.”

In addition to “near misses” at these three nuclear plants, 12 others are documented in the report.

  • At Callaway in Jefferson City, Missouri, operated by Union Electric Co., routine testing of an emergency pump intended to prove that it was capable of performing its safety functions during an accident actually degraded the pump. The pump’s manufacturer recommended against running the pump at low speeds, but this recommendation was ignored during the tests.
  • At Cooper in Nebraska City, Nebraska, operated by the Nebraska Public Power District, workers replacing detectors used to monitor the reactor core during low-power conditions were exposed to high levels of radiation when they deviated from the prescribed procedure.
  • At Millstone Unit 2 in Waterford, Connecticut, operated by Dominion, despite a dry run of an infrequently performed test on the control room simulator and other precautionary measures, errors during the actual test produced an unexpected and uncontrolled increase in the reactor’s power level.
  • At North Anna in Richmond, Virginia, operated by Dominion, an earthquake of greater magnitude than the plant was designed to withstand caused both reactors to automatically shut down from full power.
  • At Palisades in South Haven, Michigan, operated by Entergy, when a pump used to provide cooling water to emergency equipment failed in September 2009 because of stress corrosion cracking of recently installed parts, workers replaced the parts with identical parts. The replacement parts failed again in 2011, disabling one of three pumps.
  • Also at Palisades, workers troubleshooting faulty indicator lights showing the position of the emergency airlock door inadvertently shut off power to roughly half the instruments and controls in the main control room. The loss of control power triggered the automatic shutdown of the reactor and complicated operators’ response.
  • At Perry in Cleveland, Ohio, operated by FirstEnergy, problems during the replacement of a detector used to monitor the reactor core during low-power conditions exposed workers to potentially high levels of radiation.
  • At Pilgrim in Plymouth, Massachusetts, operated by Entergy, security problems prompted the NRC to conduct a special inspection. Details of the problems, their causes, and their fixes are not publicly available.
  • Also at Pilgrim, when restarting the reactor after a refueling outage, workers overreacted to indications that the water inside the reactor was heating up too rapidly, and lost control of the reactor. The plant’s safety systems automatically kicked in to shut down the reactor.
  • At Turkey Point Unit 3 in Miami, Florida, operated by Florida Power and Light Co., a valve failure stopped the flow of cooling water to equipment, including the reactor coolant pump motors and the cooling system for the spent fuel pool.
  • At Wolf Creek in Burlington, Kansas, operated by the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Co., workers overlooked numerous signs that gas had leaked into the piping of safety systems, impairing the performance of pumps and flow-control valves.

The report also cites instances when onsite NRC inspectors made “outstanding catches of safety problems” at the Fort Calhoun, Hatch, and LaSalle nuclear plants before these impairments led to events that required special inspections, or to major accidents.

Read more from Environment News Service:

WikiLeaks release shows Stratfor surveilled activists for DHS, Dow Chemical, and Coca-Cola

By Allison Kilkenny / In These Times

Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings last night posted a story on an internal DHS report entitled “SPECIAL COVERAGE: Occupy Wall Street,” dated October of last year. The five-page report, part of five million newly leaked documents obtained by Wikileaks, sums up the history of the movement and assesses its “impact” on the financial services and government facilities.

In an interview on Citizen Radio, Hastings talked about the monitoring by DHS and also the leaked emails from Stratfor, a leading private intelligence firm Hastings describes as the “shadow CIA.”

The process of combing through the huge amount of leaked documents has only just begun, but Hastings considers the revelation that the government was keeping tabs on OWS to be the biggest news so far to come out of the latest dump.

The monitoring, or spying (depending on how generous one is feeling), process included DHS scouring OWS-related Twitter feeds.

“[DHS] was following all of the social networking activity that was going on among Occupy Wall Street,” says Hastings. “Now, I’m sure this is going to be spun tomorrow as this continues to grow that, oh, it’s just benign, DHS just used open source material to do this, and that’s true, but the question is: why is a large government bureaucracy who’s mandated to protect the homeland…monitoring very closely a peaceful political protest movement? They’re not monitoring the Democratic National Committee, they’re not monitoring Young Republican meetings. They’re monitoring Occupy Wall Street.”

The report emphasizes the need to “control protesters,” terminology Hastings finds troubling, along with DHS’s assertion that OWS will likely become more violent. Hastings calls that prediction “quite a leap,” as there is no evidence so far that the overwhelmingly peaceful movement is prone to become violent.

“[The report] names all the sort of groups [DHS is] worried about, one being Anonymous, this hacktivist group, but it also names the other people in Occupy Wall Street: labor unions, student groups,” Hastings says.

One might expect to read some hand-wringing over public safety concerns in a government document, and yet the DHS document appears to be more concerned with protecting the mechanisms of the financial sector than in ensuring the safety of citizens who are exercising their First Amendment rights.

“They talk about threats to ‘critical infrastructure’ and this fear that these protests are going to…make commerce difficult and people are going to start losing money. There is a kind of bottom line in analysis to what they’re talking about. There isn’t an emphasis on public safety in a way one would expect from a department that’s supposed to protect the homeland. It’s this sort of sense that they’re protecting somebody’s homeland, and they’re the folks who generally make all the money.”

This same business-over-people bias is present in the second major leak involving the Stratfor emails. “When you go look at the back-and-forth, it’s all about, well, we have to protect lower Manhattan so the bankers can get to work on time.”

Hastings talks about two troubling tracks: In the DHS case, the U.S. government monitoring activist groups, and in the Stratfor case, large corporations paying a private intelligence firm to monitor other activist groups.

Dow Chemicals had Stratfor analyze the activities of Bhopal activists such as the Yes Men, who famously pranked the company by impersonating a Dow Chemical executive and publicly apologizing on the BBC for the Bhopal disaster that killed 8,000 people.

The list of Stratfor’s corporate clients is an impressive one, including Dow Chemicals and Coca-Cola. Clients are willing to pay the firm $40,000 for a subscription to Stratfor’s services (and additional huge sums of money for more services,) because the company bills itself as a private CIA, privy to high-level intelligence access.

“You have the DOW Chemicals situation, you have Coca-Cola hiring Stratfor to go after animal rights activists, to sort of keep tabs on them, and then also the question is: why would Stratfor have this Department of Homeland Security document, right? And the answer to that is Stratfor’s clients, or clearly Stratfor saw a business opportunity in keeping track, and figuring out how to handle protesters. In fact, in the email record…they’re talking about different tactics in lower Manhattan about, well, the streets are narrow down there, so if they push the protesters this way, or that way, that’s a better way to catch them. They’re drilling down into the best ways to kind of protect the financial services who are some of their clients.”

On Jan. 26, 2001, Fred Burton, the vice president of Stratfor, fired off an excited email to his colleagues: “Text Not for Pub. We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.”

The question was: who did Burton mean by “we”?

“It’s like the Big Lebowski, right? The royal We,” says Hastings.

What Burton meant by “we” was the U.S. government.

“We know that the Department of Justice had been investigating Assange, and playing this game of oftentimes not explicitly saying what they were doing, but sort of threatening they would be doing this espionage investigation. We know that they’ve interviewed people in a grand jury, and then a few weeks ago with the Bradley Manning pre-trial that they were actually trying to make this espionage case against Assange,” says Hastings. “Burton claims that there in fact a secret U.S. indictment against Assange related, essentially, to espionage. That’s pretty big news.”

Hastings is braced for all of the typically condescending and dismissive remarks to come rolling in from the beltway in the wake of these latest leaks. In fact, the derision has already begun. One editor at The Atlantic called Wikileaks “a joke,” and dismissed the Stratfor emails out of hand.

Hastings expects others to say there’s no difference between a private intelligence firm and a newspaper or news bureau.

“I think that’s totally wrong. Journalists have sources and informants, but also our mission is to share that information with the public so the citizenry can make more informed decisions. Stratfor’s mission is to gather information so it can sell it to the highest bidder so corporations can essentially make more profit and get a competitive edge on their opponents,” he says.

That kind of knee-jerk dismissiveness strikes of bad journalism, according to Hastings. While no cheerleader for Wikileaks – during the interview, Hastings admitted there’s a lot of stuff one can criticize Wikileaks about, particularly the practice of releasing large amounts of data that hasn’t been reviewed very carefully – he still finds the overall work done by the group extremely newsworthy.

“What news organization has had a bigger impact than Wikileaks? Iraq war logs, Afghan war logs, the Cablegate. These are important stories. This is news. DHS was monitoring Occupy Wall Street. That’s a story, and it’s a significant story. We’re talking about Occupy Wall Street: one of the biggest grassroots, political movements that we’ve seen in a generation and the government’s response to that.”

One of the most worrying aspects to the Stratfor story is the privatizing of yet another typically goverment-only function. Like Blackwater, here is another shadowy private agency doing the work usually done by the U.S. government, a recipe, as we’ve learned time and time again, for unaccountability and disaster.

Also, Stratfor is ripe for the revolving door effect.

“It’s a chance for people who worked in government in these various intelligence agencies to, once they leave, to have lucrative positions where they’re able to — in the same way some politicians become lobbyists to ply off their old contacts — to have these great, well-paying positions where they can use their former intelligence contacts and sell their services in the corporate world,” says Hastings.

To naysayers claiming there’s nothing wrong with former government officials capitalizing on their particular skill sets, Hastings responds, “Once you start spying on activists, and peaceful protesters, then I would say that’s very troubling.”

From TruthOut: http://www.truth-out.org/wikileaks-exposes-dhs-spying-occupy-movement/1330533841

Indian government stripping forest protection in order to fast-track industrial projects

By Jeremy Hance, Mongabay

In a bid to fast-track industrial projects, India’s Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is opening up 25 percent of forests that were previously listed as “no-go” areas, reports the Hindustan Times. The designation will allow between 30 and 50 new industrial projects to go ahead rapidly, including road construction and coal mining.

Reportedly the changes came after industry representatives met with the Prime Minister’s Office, headed by Manmohan Singh, to complain that projects were being held up by environmental regulations, in some cases taking six years for approval. The industrial group was led by Ratan Tata, head of Tata Group, a massive conglomerate that works in steel, chemicals, solar power, energy transmission vehicles, and food products like tea and coffee among other industries. In response, the PMO not only removed protection for forest lands, but also promised approval for projects would be done in 60 days and forests would be cleared within 180 days.

“Based on the limited information we have, this is a very alarming development,” tropical ecologist William Laurance with James Cook University, who has recently spent time in India, told mongabay.com. “Infrastructure expansion—such as new roads, hydroelectric dams and mines—can have huge environmental impacts. They cause direct forest degradation and can also open up a Pandora’s Box of further problems—such as illegal land colonization and land speculation.”

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), around 19 percent of India is covered in natural forests, excluding monoculture plantations. Many of the remaining forests are degraded and fragmented. Since 2009 India has lost 36,700 hectares according to a recent assessment. The state of Andhra Pradesh saw the largest loss in forest, which government officials blamed on logging by the communist-Maoist group, the Naxals.

India has recently pledged to expand forest cover to around 33 percent of the country, however the Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, recently said such a target was “unrealistic.”

“India has already lost over 80 percent of its native forests and further forest loss and degradation are still advancing rapidly,” Laurace says. “The fast-tracking of big infrastructure projects can easily become a rubber stamp for bad development practices. Such ill-advised projects can have far greater environmental and human costs than the economic benefits they provide.”

India’s remaining forests are home to a wide variety of species, including Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris), Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), golden langurs (Trachypithecus geei), and the dhole (Cuon alpinus), each of which is listed as Endangered by the IUCN Red List. India is one of 17 countries in the world that is considered “megadiverse” for its spectacular wealth of biodiversity.