I’ve seen this once before.

LA Free Press October 27, 1968

Back in the ‘Sixties, when we all believed that the news was actually “fair and balanced” and that the New York Times WAS all the news that was fit to print. And then, having ingested various psychedelic substances, the old Left realized that all the real news was just bunkum. And the great underground newspapers began, exploding from the Village Voice to the Boston Phoenix, the Los Angeles Free Press and the Berkeley Barb. We even had, in my hometown, The Santa Fe Sun, which was sold by hippies on Canyon Road, as a way of supplementing their brown rice.

Because, as became apparent, the “Establishment” news only printed press releases about how great cigarettes were and how wonderful and just the War in Vietnam was, and how noble the President (Johnson AND Nixon) who wouldn’t spy on Americans and believed in the First Amendment and people’s right to assemble. Nixon rode the Middle American horror at the scruffy, hairy Vietnam protests into the White House and we all know how THAT turned out.

Except, Woodward and Bernstein were not solely responsible for keeping the story in the public eye. The Establishment press tried to eighty-six the Watergate burglary, and dutifully scoffed at each and every new allegation that came to light. But the Underground press didn’t. They told the stories that the peckinsniffs of the Establishment deemed unfit to print and, in the end, the writers and spirit of the underground press were absorbed INTO the Establishment media and the underground papers winked out, one by one until a single large corporation owns nearly all of the “free” papers that the underground papers morphed into.

When I got to LA in 1976, you could still buy a Freep at newstands all over town. Within a year or so, it mysteriously vanished, never to reappear. (I later met the principals in that, and it’s a story worth telling, but not today.)

As, one by one, no longer with a monopoly on real news, the underground papers morphed into the “advertiser driven” free papers of today. (Again, my first job in publishing was in one of the first papers to adopt that model, working for Phonograph Record Magazine in the Max Factor Building just across the street from Sid Graumann’s Chinese Theater.

They’d gotten the major FM stations (FM was just undergoing its explosion) in the main markets to “sponsor” the monthly music magazine, which was then distributed for free in record stores and elsewhere in their markets. (Prior to that, you almost always PAID for literature worth reading, religious tracts excepted.)

And, since each FM station got four interior pages of advertising THEY could sell to either defray costs or make a profit, I was hired to come in in the middle of the night, and work long, bizarre shifts, pasting up the thirty-two separate four-sheet (two board) ad pages every month.

And that became the model for the free papers. The advertising paid for the papers, win-win. But, over time, the free papers have become as bland and characterless as the modern daily newspapers have. And we take our nooz from teevee.

The old establishment “megamedia” still define the narrative — of course, for years, lazy talk show hosts and teevee news took their cues from the New York Times, nationally, and when we HAD local radio talk shows (before the Limbaugh putsch), they invariably took their cues from the local newspaper.

But, whatever the reason, the old “Gatekeepers” have done us wrong, and everybody knows it, right and left. When they deem a scandal unworthy of note, it vanishes down the memory hole, with the most famous exception having been — ancient history already — Trent Lott’s comments about how the country would have been better off with Strom having won the presidency (in 1948, when he ran on the Segregationist ticket), and the MSM refused to take it up. A pointless slip of the tongue, it was adjudged, and it was the refusal of the old Usenet and the still-aborning blogosphere to drop it that forced it into front page news, with Lott stepping down as Republican Majority leader in the Senate.

And now, as the crucifixion of John Edwards, once the Vice Presidential nominee in 2004, proceeds for no useful policy reason but politics as spectacle by the inevitably prudish bourgeouis Establishment press (although, when you really get to know them, you would be shocked at how “moral” they actually are, vis a vis how moral they posture.)

Let me tell you a true story from Los Angeles in the 1980s. T’was in another wifetime:

My then-wife worked at a certain Three Letter Acronym network, preparing electrical equipment for a major upgrade the network was doing. And, in that same building, right in good old Hollywood — just about a mile or so from that wonderful police station that was so corrupt they decided that rather than try to reform it, they would just shut it down and send everybody to trial — the local  affiliate news was broadcast.

In cranky old police state of Los Angeles, the evening news was particulary vehement any time that there was a prostitution or pornography or sex scandal, and they went apoplectic on DRUGSES, resulting in high ratings.

The Male Anchor was one of an endless line of LA Anchors who never quite cracked the Big Leagues at network but who were well-known locally and did the usual appearances at charities and sporting events. He was particularly accomplished in spewing righteous indignation and sputtering outrage — albeit not with the Heston-as-Moses grandiloquence of George Putnam, the model for a generation of LA Angry Moral Men and Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Said Male anchor was having a nooner in his girlfriend’s spacious and darkened windowed car, in front of the Three Letter Acronym building when a citizen made a miscue in Hollywood traffic and hit said girlfriend’s car. Since it was right outside, the news camera guys yanked out their cameras and took footage, which happened to include a very embarrassed Male Moral Angerman.

Said footage vanished in some irrevokable manner, but there was quite the hue and cry silently through the building, and to cap it off, they showed and reported the car accident, safely scrubbed of the damning footage that would have identified the flagrantes just post delicto, a scene that the Male Moral Angerman’s wife would have surely gone ballistic over.

Thus are our arbiters of news gatekeepers of our morality, without having ever practiced it themselves.

Which means, sadly, in the present day that we have to take our news from the “underground press” of the blogosphere. The media will be carpet-bombed with bait & switch “arguments” ginned up every day by the old Rovian footprint: control each and every day’s news cycle, and keep the “discussion” focused on your issues – look how well the distraction of the “Obama eats dogs” meme is doing:

Politically, the most interesting phenomenon last night was the dog jokes. The President himself made three jokes about eating dogs. This represents a victory for new media and especially for Jim Treacher, since liberal news sources like the New York Times and Jon Stewart had studiously tried to pretend that the dog controversy didn’t exist. Obama and Kimmel evidently recognized that Twitter made such pretense impossible. (The New York Times, however, is still holding out.)

That last is from John Hinderaker, latest Board Member of the CATO Institute, installed fiat of the Brothers Koch.  He also reportedly does lobbying work for his firm, which has the Brothers Koch as clients.

Isn’t that special?

It’s at the top of the page, presumably saying precisely what the Brothers Koch would like said. After all, they’re notorious for becoming piqued when someone in their “foundational” employ doesn’t toe the line … as the current CATO dustup is but an examplar.

My point being only that every form of media is overrun with media quislings, doing the bidding of their corporate masters.

If the presumptive GOP Nominee for President of the United States commits a felony under state law, on camera, isn’t that news? Somewhere?

Well, certainly not in the “Establishment” and “Bought and Paid For Blogs” media. Here’s an example of how media is bent to the will of the overlords by grabbing institutional credibility (presumably to say precisely what needs saying from a certain point of view):

… So what happens when partisans like the Koch brothers get their hands on an institution that exhibits flashes of independence? In Cato’s case, we can expect that independence to evaporate. They have already tried to pack the board with people like self-proclaimed neoconservative John Hinderaker, who once wrote, “It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.”

Does anyone think guys like that are going to preserve any hint of independence at Cato?

That was Robert Greenwald on FireDogLake. Greenwald is a very astute documentary film maker whose prior projects have done a lot to open talk about subjects Verboten in the Establishment press. Like the Koch Brothers, or the institutionalized bias and intent of Fox News in “Outfoxed.”

Just one more little example and we’ll be on our way:

… For the past 30 years, the Murdoch empire has sought to undermine and destabilise elected governments, and independent regulators, in pursuit of a political agenda that, while hiding behind a smokescreen of free market orthodoxy, is in the end nothing less than a sophisticated attempt to optimise the power and influence of News Corporation and its populist, rightwing agenda.

That’s to say low (or better still, no) corporate taxes, minimal state regulation and the creation of an aura of “exceptionalism” sufficient to convince and recruit many of the most senior politicians in the western world to either turn a blind eye or actively help the company to achieve its commercial objectives.

The strategy is well-honed and, as Murdoch himself once admitted, brutally simple. “You tell the bloody politicians what they want to hear and once the deal is done don’t worry about it,” ran one quote in Thomas Kiernan’s biography, Citizen Murdoch. “They’re not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Otherwise, they’re made to look bad and they can’t abide that. So they just stick their heads up their asses and wait for the blow to pass.” [The Guardian (UK)]

Oh.

So, welcome to the underground press, which, while it may get out of control and crazy, like the old underground newspapers, is still your best shot at finding out what’s really going on behind that “Pageant” of the daily newsdaze and its Barbie® doll newsreaders of slowly increasing cleavage shown.

Just remember, Wikileaks isn’t anything new:

1969 Freep story that outed undercover officers all over the place

For better or worse, it’s what we’ve got left, since radio, television and print media all belong to The Man (or Men or Brothers or What-Have-You.)

Or you could take a look at this, which documents what I’m talking about:

Come Saturday Morning: What Fifty-Plus Years of a Business-Bigot Alliance Gets Us — The Modern GOP
By: Phoenix Woman Saturday March 31, 2012 6:45 am

… How did this all happen? How did it come to be that what once was the Party of Lincoln is now the Party of David Duke and Strom Thurmond? [...]

Courage.

=============

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

THE DEVIL [mortified] Señor Don Juan: you are uncivil to my friends.

DON JUAN. Pooh! why should I be civil to them or to you? In this Palace of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you. Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know….

~ George Bernard Shaw – Man & Superman, Act III, “Don Juan in Hell” (1903)

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the douchebag I am about to be uncivil to:

Peter Roff is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report. A former senior political writer for United Press International, he is currently a senior fellow at the Institute for Liberty and at Let Freedom Ring, a non-partisan public policy organization. His writing has also appeared on Fox News’ Fox Forum.

Another mental midget of the Right, incapable of serious thought, a walking, squinchy compendium of talking points, bumper stickers and a wasted education, he is the poster boy for all of the right-wing idiocy and hypocrisy that has followed in the wake of the death of Andrew Breitbart.

Time for some fisking, because, really, this is what the entire response of the rabid reich-wing has stood for: imbecility masquerading as martyrdom. Emphasis on “dumb.” To wit(less):

Andrew Breitbart a Pioneer Journalist Who Stood Up to Liberal Media

U.S News and World Report (shame be eternally upon them)
March 1, 2012

The old saying about the weather—everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it—used to also apply to the problem of liberal bias in the establishment media. Lots of conservatives complain about it, many of them even seem to enjoy doing so, but few actually do anything about it.

“Liberal bias in the establishment media” is such a hackneyed piece of garbage that only a brainwashed buffoon would have the effrontery to believe that it actually even MEANT something, but this buffrontery would be unworthy of a baboon. “Establishment”? Like Righties are the “hippies” fighting against “The Man”?

Puhleeze! For all but four of the last 32 years, the GOP has controlled either the White House or one house (minimum) of Congress. Making them the “outsiders”?

The continuing error of the “outsiders” is that what they mistake for “liberalism” is cowed incompetence, which, if one were to reasonably mistake for ANYTHING, it would surely be the non-evidentiary cloud-cuckooland fantasies of the “conservatives.” (And note that to them “liberalism” isn’t an actual ideology, it is merely negative space. If it doesn’t fall on its knees and worship at the false altar of Reagan — which has nothing to do with the actual terms of Ronnie — then it must be “liberal,” which is intoned with a venom formerly reserved for the N-word.)

Get a grip, monkey-boy. If ANY-one is the “establishment” it’s Peter Roff. Got that? Good. We continue (and I am reprinting the entire execrable essay, so that we may treasure every scream of horror as children and women cry “Dear GOD, what is that THING?”):

Andrew Breitbart, who left us early Thursday morning unexpectedly and far too soon, was different. Rather than simply complain, he established something approximating an electronic and social media empire on the Internet that, it needs to be said, changed journalism in America.

No: he didn’t change journalism in America. That’s hyperbolic nonsense. Period. Try again.

It’s not just that Breitbart did it well. He did it with an energy and passion and determination that made him the equal of the left, which even in his death continues to express its hate for him with a passion. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—himself no stranger to controversy—tweeted, “Andrew Breitbart never shied from controversy. He was one of conservatism’s most forceful spokesmen and will be greatly missed.”

Really? His barbarism in “taking out” Anthony Weiner — not through his arguments, but, rather, through the most scrofulous form of electronic peepery — is a) clearly NOT “journalism,” nor b) was his “forceful” arrogation of the podium at Weiner’s resignation announcement anything OTHER than a barbaric display of utter abrogration of civility that no civilized human ought do other than condemn.

He pulled this crap again and again, and no “civilized” person had the good sense to cold-cock the brute. Happily, Ghod took care of that oversight. And quoting Rummy as any sort of “moral” arbiter would seem utterly laughable in light of his decision to abrogate 230 years of American policy and tradition to engage in torture.

Through his various websites and media appearances, Breitbart broke stories. Without him, for example, former Rep. Anthony Weiner might still today be in Congress and on the way to being mayor of New York City. He was ruthless in his pursuit of truth, a rare quality among the left-leaning establishment press, which more often carries the agenda of bigger government forward rather than questioning it.

Anthony Weiner’s only sin was that he stood up to bullies LIKE Breitbart, who had to find some sleazy way to destroy him outside the boundaries of civil discourse or debate, and succeeded, hoping to (along with morons like Mr. Roth) destroy his marriage as well. Merely removing Weiner from the public stage was not enough, and that’s not a “forceful spokesman.” No: that’s being an assassin and a thug — as in “Thugee.”

This is so verdantly scrofulous and corrupt that it seems a minor feat to have packed so much blatant, errant psychotic nonsense into a single paragraph.

Scrofulous is precisely the term for it, too: “scrofulous - morally contaminated; “denounce the scrofulous wealth of the times”- J.D.Hart immoral; deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong.

“He was ruthless in his pursuit of truth, a rare quality among the left-leaning establishment press” is a grammatical outage (not “outrage”). To hold “ruthlessness” in pursuit of “truth” as a POSITIVE is, in context, a justification for torture, spying and extortion. All of which Breitbart demonstrably engaged in. Again, the means justifying the ends.

This conservative dimbulb seems to believe that the ends justify the means, which entailed falsification and tactics that would make the scumbags at the National Enquirer blanch. Only a mindless hypocrite would embrace this sad, sordid legacy and THEN decry any perceived incivility to the dead  Breitbart as awful and horrible — as the entire Reich-Wing blogosmear has delighted in, from before the moment that rigor mortis actually set in.

They come not to bury Breitbart but to fight the preconceived notion that anyone watching his barbaric, childish bullying tactics, his deceptively-edited tapes, his wanton destruction of lives and careers, and his utter hatred for the “left” — that he engaged in with the feral glee of a hydrophobic dog — and for days now, they have publicly masturbated to their fantasy that all should be properly civil to the dead brute. In the MOST uncivil of terms.

“Breitbart broke stories” is precisely correct, albeit not in the manner that our felching necrophile “journalist” conservative seems to believe.

“which more often carries the agenda of bigger government forward rather than questioning it” is a slur stereotype that is mindlessly accepted by the mindless, but is idiotic to anyone capable of rational thought who does not masturbate to the speeches in Atlas Shrugged.

The trope that “Establishment Liberal Journalists” carry the water for “Big Government” (implicitly because their “liberalism” makes them either willing or unwilling dupes) is sheerest bad science fiction. Like foaming-at-the-mouth TV “prophets” they find justifications for their apocalyptic mentality in every news item, somehow linking it back to the babbling nonsense of a book that no one has ever been able to make heads or tails of. (I speak of Atlas Shrugged and not The Revelation of St. John, since there IS some meaning that can be derived from the latter.)

And now, the pièce de résistance from the pièce de shite writer:

There are others who knew him better, worked with him more closely, and are in a better position to comment on him as a person. His accomplishments as a journalist pioneer, however, are evident for everyone to see. He paved the way for a new generation of conservative writers and pundits, taught many of us how to use social media as an effective communications tool, and, in the end, made a difference. Few of us can probably think of a better epitaph.

They’re evident, all right. But the evidence is that Andrew Breitbart resurrected the ruthless blood-lust of the Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon raider and adopted it to new technology. No student of history, or of ethics or of morality can embrace his modus operandi without abandoning any lessons derived FROM those studies.

If he paved a way then the road he paved was wide and the “good intentions” espoused are those espoused by the first character quoted at the beginning of this essay.

I attempted to be respectful at the demise of Breitbart, but the license it has given his admirers for rapine pillage in the arenas of public discourse abrogate any attempt at respect for the dead. Since ANY dissing of dead Andy would be ramped up and megaphoned from the rafters as the conservative monkeys gleefully threw their feces, the actual display was not surprising, except in the universality and fervency of that flinging.

Which is Andrew Breitbart’s true epitaph. Legitimate journalists everywhere were chary about announcing his death — because Breitbart’s HOAXES were so ubiquitous that no one wanted to be caught in yet another one.  That is the first epitaph.

The second is from morons like this idiot, who have twisted truth, nobility, moral purpose and the very foundations of American democracy into the Roman gladiatorial arena in which the only important spectacle is the death and dismemberment of the contestants, without regard to who they are as PERSONS — only that they are the negatively-defined “liberals” just as Jerry Falwell once defined anyone who didn’t accept HIS reading of the Bible as “secular humanists,” a term coined by that demon-spawn while on his way to worm-food.

Now, Andrew Breitbart is food for the worms, and I doubt seriously that the worms will survive his toxicity any more than the targets of his psychotic hatred did.

The necrophiles at Breitbart’s “media empire” are now reprinting essays on his toxic hatred of the President of the United States, and, thus, civility is no longer in order, as it ceased to be in order after a thousand essays like Mr. Roth’s.

I will not comment on the latest one in THIS essay, save to say that Mr. Breitbart has proven, posthumously, that he was every bit as lousy a drama critic as he was a lousy human being. I leave it to the worms to comment on how tasteful he might be, although I doubt it will be any less so than his reprinted essay, whose opening refrain of purest equine fecal matter I reproduce here:

THE VETTING, PART I: BARACK’S LOVE SONG TO ALINSKY

by Andrew Breitbart

Prior to his passing, Andrew Breitbart said that the mission of the Breitbart empire was to exemplify the free and fearless press that our Constitution protects–but which, increasingly, the mainstream media denies us…

Utter garbage. (Or, as I have noted before: Occam’s Dull Razor tells us:  Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained just as well by stupidity. See “At the Mountains of Madness,” which applies here, as well).

Let us conclude, instead, with Mr. G.B. Shaw, who has written a better epitaph for Mr. Breitbart than could I or Mr. Peter Roth:

Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. [ibid.]

For in the end, Breitbart was not a swaggering bully, nor some great innovator. No: in the end he was and remains a coward.

He should enjoy his new domicile in Hell very much, I believe.

Courage.

================

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.

For a few hours on the afternoon of Nov. 1, the people of southern California were scared by initial reports of an alert at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. An “alert” is the second of four warning levels.

Workers first detected an ammonia leak in a water purification system about 3 p.m. Ammonia, when mixed into air, is toxic. The 30 gallons of ammonia were caught in a holding tank and posed no health risk, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC).  

During the 1970s and 1980s, at the peak of the nuclear reactor construction, organized groups of protestors mounted dozens of anti-nuke campaigns. They were called Chicken Littles, the establishment media generally ignored their concerns, and the nuclear industry trotted out numerous scientists and engineers from their payrolls to declare nuclear energy to be safe, clean, and inexpensive energy that could reduce America’s dependence upon foreign oil.

Workers at nuclear plants are highly trained, probably far more than workers in any other industry; operating systems are closely regulated and monitored. However, problems caused by human negligence, manufacturing defects, and natural disasters have plagued the nuclear power industry for its six decades.

It isn’t alerts like what happened at San Onofre that are the problem; it’s the level 3 (site area emergencies) and level 4 (general site emergencies) disasters. There have been 99 major disasters, 56 of them in the U.S., since 1952, according to a study conducted by Benjamin K. Sovacool Director of the Energy Justice Program at Institute for Energy and Environment  One-third of all Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant.

At Windscale in northwest England, fire destroyed the core, releasing significant amounts of Iodine-131. At Rocky Flats near Denver, radioactive plutonium and tritium leaked into the environment several times over a two decade period. At Church Rock, New Mexico, more than 90 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Rio Puerco, directly affecting the Navajo nation.

In the grounds of central and northeastern Pennsylvania, in addition to the release of radioactive Cesium-137 and Iodine-121, an excessive level of Strontium-90 was released during the Three Mile Island (TMI) meltdown in 1979, the same year as the Church Rock disaster. To keep waste tanks from overflowing with radioactive waste, the plant’s operator dumped several thousand gallons of radioactive waste into the Susquehanna River. An independent study by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina revealed the incidence of lung cancer and leukemia downwind of the TMI meltdown within six years of the meltdown was two to ten times that of the rest of the region.

At the Chernobyl meltdown in April 1986, about 50 workers and firefighters died lingering and horrible deaths from radiation poisoning. Because of wind patterns, about 27,000 persons in the northern hemisphere are expected to die of cancer, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. An area of about 18 miles is uninhabitable. The nuclear reactor core is now protected by a crumbling sarcophagus; a replacement is not complete. Even then, the new shield is expected to crumble within a century. The current director at Chernobyl says it could be 20,000 years until the area again becomes habitable.

In March, an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale and the ensuing 50-foot high tsunami wave led to a meltdown of three of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency reported that 31 radioactive isotopes were released. In contrast, 16 radioactive isotopes were released from the A-bomb that hit Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945.  The agency also reported that radioactive cesium released was almost 170 times the amount of the A-bomb, and that the release of radioactive Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 was about two to three times the level of the A-bomb. The release into the air, water, and ground included about 60,000 tons of contaminated water. The half lives of Sr-90 and Cs-137 are about 30 years each. Full effects may not be known for at least two generations. Twenty-three nuclear reactors in the U.S. have the same design—and same design flaws—as the Daiichi reactor.

About five months after the Daiichi disaster, the North Anna plant in northeastern Virginia declared an alert, following a 5.8 magnitude earthquake that was felt throughout the mid-Atlantic and lower New England states. The earthquake caused building cracks and spent fuel cells in canisters to shift. The North Anna plant was designed to withstand an earthquake of only 5.9–6.2 on the Richter scale. More than 1.9 million persons live within a 50-mile radius of North Anna, according to 2010 census data.

Although nuclear plant security is designed to protect against significant and extended forms of terrorism, the NRC believes as many as one-fourth of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants may need upgrades to withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters, according to an Associated Press investigation. About 20 percent of the world’s 442 nuclear plants are built in earthquake zones, according to data compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The NRC has determined that the leading U.S. plants in the Eastern Coast in danger of being compromised by an earthquake are in the extended metropolitan areas of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chattanooga. Tenn. The highest risk, however, may be California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon plants, both built near major fault lines. Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, was even built by workers who misinterpreted the blueprints.  

Every nuclear spill affects not just those in the immediate evacuation zone but people throughout the world, as prevailing winds can carry air-borne radiation thousands of miles from the source, and the world’s water systems can put radioactive materials into the drinking supply and agriculture systems of most nations. At every nuclear disaster, the governments eventually declare the immediate area safe. But, animals take far longer than humans to return to the area. If they could figure out that radioactivity released into the water, air, and ground are health hazards, certainly humans could also figure it out.  

Following the disaster at Daiichi, Germany announced it was closing its 17 nuclear power plants and would expand development of solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources. About the same time, Siemens abandoned financing and building nuclear power plants, leaving only American-based Westinghouse and General Electric, which own or have constructed about four-fifths of the world’s nuclear plants, and the French-based Areva.

The life of the first nuclear plants was about 30–40 years; the newer plants have a 40–60 year life. After that time, they become so radioactive that the risk of radiation poison outweighs the benefits of continuing the operation. So, the operators seal the plant and abandon it, carefully explaining to the public the myriad safety procedures in place and the federal regulations. The cooling and decommissioning takes 50–100 years until the plant is safe enough for individuals to walk through it without protection. More critical, there still is no safe technology of how to handle spent control rods.

The United States has no plans to abandon nuclear energy. The Obama administration has proposed financial assistance to build the first nuclear plant in three decades, and a $36 billion loan guarantee for the nuclear industry. However, the Congressional Budget Office believes there can be as much as 50 percent default.  Each plant already receives $1–1.3 billion in tax rebates and subsidies. However, in the past three years, plans to build nuclear generators have been abandoned in nine states, mostly because of what the major financiers believe to be a less than desired return on investment and higher than expected construction and maintenance costs.

A Department of Energy analysis revealed the budget for 75 of the first plants was about $45 billion, but cost overruns ran that to $145 billion. The last nuclear power plant completed was the Watts Bar plant in eastern Tennessee. Construction began in 1973 and was completed in 1996. Part of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, the Watts Bar plant cost about $8 billion to produce 1,170 mw of energy from its only reactor. Work on a second reactor was suspended in 1988 because of a lack of need for additional electricity. However, construction was resumed in 2007, with completion expected in 2013. Cost to complete the reactor, which was about 80 percent complete when work was suspended, is estimated to cost an additional $2.5 billion.

The cost to build new power plants is well over $10 billion each, with a proposed cost of about $14 billion to expand the Vogtle plant near Augusta, Ga. The first two units had cost about $9 billion.

Added to the cost of every plant is decommissioning costs, averaging about $300 million to over $1 billion, depending upon the amount of energy the plant is designed to produce. The nuclear industry proudly points to studies that show the cost to produce energy from nuclear reactors is still less expensive than the costs from coal, gas, and oil. The industry also rightly points out that nukes produce about one-fifth all energy, with no emissions, such as those from the fossil fuels.

For more than six decades, this nation essentially sold its soul for what it thought was cheap energy that may not be so cheap, and clean energy that is not so clean.

It is necessary to ask the critical question. Even if there were no human, design, and manufacturing errors; even if there could be assurance there would be no accidental leaks and spills of radioactivity; even if there became a way to safely and efficiently dispose of long-term radioactive waste; even if all of this was possible, can the nation, struggling in a recession while giving subsidies to the nuclear industry, afford to build more nuclear generating plants at the expense of solar, wind, and geothermal energy?

 [Walter Brasch’s latest book is Before the First Snow, a fact-based novel that looks at the nuclear industry during its critical building boom in the 1970s and 1980s.]