The price of independence
Professional political campaigns at the US Senatorial level must protect themselves from the many “helpful” constituents who want to waste their precious time with their under formulated notions of how to win their race. For a quasi-independent political group like our Flip Project it is quite hard to convince the official campaign to give us any time. The lovely out-of-state volunteer campaign coordinator is happy to put all people on their door to door canvass. But if we want to do something other than that, their hands are tied. For us, the price of our independence is we need to out perform door to door canvasses.
This year, with a very short campaign duration (thank you Georgia’s new “election integrity”/ voter suppression laws), we have chosen to promote free rides to the polls as what we think our volunteers can deliver that will be the most effective way to get out votes. We are producing assets, like the Spanish language poster below, with a QR code that lands or our splash page, which gives out information on free rides (with ride services or friendly volunteers), polling locations and election protection practices.
We are scrambling to get these assets translated into almost every language, except Vietnamese which broke for Trump in the most recent presidential election. We support everyone’s right to vote, and especially we want to promote voting among non-English speaking citizens, and we promote the languages we are especially excited about. At this point, we only have enough enough money to do poster and other physical promotional materials in English and Spanish. The other languages likely to see translated assets for this election are Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, Bangladeshi and possibly Pakistani, these will be promoted over social media by our air team. In the 2020 Georgia runoff, we did translations of election materials into 13 languages.
2020 Presidential results national results by ethnic group.
Turns out there are a bunch of studies showing the correlation between access to a car and voting. The above graph shows the somewhat shocking thing which happens in the US, and even though we might not like the behavior, we can not deny the behavior. People who don’t own cars are on the order of 30% less likely to vote than people who do have a car in their household. [What i found interesting in this, is that the absentee ballot use is basically unchanged, where i had thought people without access to cars would significantly increase their use of absentee ballots – but they don’t and instead they often simply do not vote.]
Our high tech partner in free ride share is plus1.vote and their findings shocked us a bit. They found that social media campaigns for their services were far less effective than their other techniques. One of their techniques is to use geographic and demographic data to locate prospective free ride candidates and then push the free ride directly into their Uber wallet. Then they don’t even have to mess with a promo code, they can simply push a button and they will get a free ride to the correct polling station for their pick up.
Looking for high Democrat voting with low auto ownership
We are also digging into the data to find the best places to promote free rides. There is very granular census data we have gotten for free, which combined with political data gives us the ability to look at locations in metro Atlanta which have high Democratic voter preferences and also low car ownership – the sweet spots for free ride to the polls services.
Flip Project Ground Team L to R – Paxus, Jacqueline, Vicky, Spiderman (aka Mark)
We had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner of the project staff in Georgia now (several more folks are coming up). In a beautiful coincidence, the Indian restaurant we went to dinner at overlooked the Hosia Williams Mural (seen in the background of the above picture). In 2020, we help revitalize this mural, we had a GOTV artwork competition near here and several of the current staff met for the first time in this location. For this all out-of-town group of activists, this spot feels like coming home.
There is still time to support this campaign and a significant need. I am also humbled and thankful for the many friends and family who have donated and insured that we can keep this project going. This is a very close race and perhaps our effort will be the piece that pushes us to a win, as we helped in 2020 Georgia senate runoff.
Meet the Communities – An evolutionally stable design
[Update May 2023 – the dates for QuinkFair have been updated in this post]
There are some evolutionary marvels out there. Designs so stable that they make the dinosaurs look like the new kids on the block. I am speaking specifically of dragonflies, jellyfish and cow sharks.
Say you have an event where you have brought together 200 participants and perhaps 100 of them are hunting for a new community (the others are from communities or are just community-curious). Let’s say there are 40 communities represented. How do you get the key information to the right hunters so they can make good choices?
I don’t know exactly who developed the Meet the Communities format that the Twin Oaks Communities Conference has used for decades, but it is an evolutionarily stable format, because it works so well.
You could say it is basically formatted around the controversial propagandist axiom “there is no such thing as a long story”. You line up all your communities and say “you have 1 minute to present yourself and then people who like you will come for more personal and longer talks after all the communities present themselves”. Yes, the communities movement basically invented speed dating.
After these introductions community presenters spread out to picnic tables and put up their signs and hunters who were intrigued at the short presentation come and have a longer, more personal and more focused conversation.
There are some organizational pieces you have to include to make it work. You need someone who is watching the clock and when people hit their 1 minute mark gently moves them off the stage. Ira did this for many years. [Which resulted in Pat Therrian intentionally running over her time so Ira would have to grab her, which Pat quite liked.] And you have to explain to the sustainability network guy how, while his project is important, he can not get up and present himself as a place based residential community.
Another proof of evolutionary stability is imitation. The West Coast Communities Conference (when it was happening before the pandemic) also used this format as does the QuinkFair event happening July 20 thru 24, 2023 at the Twin Oaks Conference Site. These are the communities who have been invited to present themselves during MtC which will be the morning of July 21st.
| Acorn | Mineral |
| Abrams Creek/CFNC | Storm Mountain WV |
| Baltimore Free Farm | Baltimore |
| Cambia | Louisa |
Community of Peace | Louisa |
| Cosmic Honey | San Francisco Bay a |
| Cuckoo Compound | Cuckoo VA |
| Cville Ecovillage | Cville VA |
| Federation of Egalitarian Communities | US |
| Foundation for Intentional Community | North America |
| Glow House | DC |
| Hawks Crest | Richmond |
| Living Energy Farm (LEF) | Louisa |
| Little Flower | Louisa |
| Magnolia (LEF affiliate) | Louisa |
| Open Circle | Etlan VA |
| Twin Oaks | Louisa |
Oct 19 – A Community of Communities
Interview with organizer Macaco from the Ecovillage Education Institute.
Funologist: What is happening at the Charlottesville Ecovillage on October 19th and why is it interesting and important for the folks to come?
Macaco: This event is the Charlottesville Ecovillage October social and it is a multi-offering event, with many different aspects. It is principally a local gathering and celebration, activities included:a potluck brunch, drumming, dancing, barbecue, sewing circle, recycling presentations, electronic waste collection, workshops and divination. This is a family friendly event, open to everyone and runs all day (10 AM to midnight). There is no charge for this event which is located at 480 Rio Rd, parking is available, but carpooling is encouraged.
One of the purposes of this event is to introduce folks who are in various different communities in the area to see that they are also part of a greater community. Many different groups use and work with the Ecovillage. This event is designed to bring them together in an intergenerational celebration.
One specific focus of this event is sorting waste and specifically electronic computer waste. We are encouraging participants to bring their electronic and computer waste and instead of simply sending these items to a landfill, this event examines other endpoints. Sometimes electronic waste can be salvaged and reused. The tech wizards from Open Source Recycling will review the electronic hardware which comes in and see which pieces can be rescued, cleaned up and retrofitted so they can become donated computer systems to people who need them but can not afford them. But not everything can be reused and some of these items will be turned into art objects at this event. Whatever is left will be disposed properly.
Please come and invite your friends. RSVP at this Facebook event page.
Craft Weaves Together
Craft Weaves Together a Community Story
Through the haze of old safety goggles I struggle to read the fractions of an inch I was told to measure. When I look up to ask for the length again my voice is droned out by the grind of iron against steel, groaning like tectonic plates being forced against each other. I pull out my earphones to try and hear the number my friend is saying, but as soon as my ear is exposed the scream of dull blades splintering wood makes my ears ring like funeral bells for the death of hearable tone. We are here to build a natural home, a safe place for the community to gather and celebrate, but our means of getting there is through the dehumanizing technology of industrialization. Does community begin when the project is done? Are the projects ever done?
Construction has become a means to an end. There are customers who design compositions of geometric shapes on two dimension screens, and builders who are tasked to turn these teeny tiny drawings into voluminous structures which exceed the cubic area of many hundred year old trees, and preferably they should complete the task in the same amount of time it takes to simply imagine doing some of the steps. This impossible task can only be dared to be dreamed of due to the cunning bed-mates technology and globalization!
However, home construction also has potential to be an artistic celebration of the unique local environment. In fact, the architecture styles associated with various cultures of the world, are a beautiful expression of the dance between place-based resources, local climate, and the human imagination. On the other hand, building a Laotian bamboo stilt house at the 45th parallel north will look stunning in a picture, but a close up would show popsicle frozen homeowners entombed in their own dream house. That example sounds ridiculous because it’s unfamiliar, but there are innumerable identical architectural discords made bearable due to enough synthetic insulation, chemical wood embalming, and gently off gassing décor.
Turtle island (North America) has a rich place based architectural history. The indigenous cultures built migratory homes they carried with them, Lakota tepees, temporary shelters along their travels, Inuit igloos, and long-lasting homes to raise a family, Anishinaabe wigwams*. European colonists also established trademark style with the aid of hand saw technology to fell larger trees interlock them to create the signature log cabins. Even more recently with the fusion of ancient architecture and Anthropocene resources the earth ships design has become a hallmark of the South West. Each of these designs works best using the materials of the biome it’s in, because that is the region these materials, organic or inert, evolved to endure. Buried homes stay cool in the dessert but mold in humidity, and the forest appreciates the harvest of rot resistant sapling in regions known for benders (a general term for anything that involves created rounded structures using interlocking wood; sweat lodges, long houses, and wigwams).
With any of these homes, the finished structure is only a small glimpse of the true beauty that went into crafting it. Traditional building techniques also use traditional tools, which traditionally are about the volume of a loud bird (not a firing gun), and even more often require multiple people. From weaving the inner bark of Hickory to make Wigwam cordage, to collaboratively wielding either end of a large bow saw many “old fashioned” tools are meditatively redundant and quiet enough to get lost in conversation with your fellow crafts person. Without the screech of electric engines and unwieldy blades their use is also not restricted to the adrenaline hungry young men who surround me at conventional construction sites. My current highlight of traditional construction was working with a pregnant woman and young mother to peel Aspen bark while the year-old baby napped in the middle of the construction site.
When building community becomes the goal, instead of making a community building, there is less of a race to the finish, and more of a dialogue with local materials and people. Do you know the 5 most common trees that grow in your biome? Do you know which characteristics of them are equivalent to their modern synthetic mimics? Instead of exchanging money for hired time, have you considered luring your friends over for a building party with food and music (you’d be surprised how people who are deprived of hand craft in their profession are exuberant to get their hands dirty building your home).
At Rustling Roots in Central Virginia, we are turning back the wheels of time to weave community by weaving together a Wigwam. Over the course of a weekend we will all learn how to turn the sweet-smelling bark of springtime Poplar into wallpaper, and the overly abundant shoots of cedar saplings into a bedroom sized inverted nest. Not only will we be working with these materials for architecture, but you will learn about how to harvest them to appease the forest, and when they are most eager to be compliant to your construction whims. With simply tools a 1st year blacksmith could forge we will weave together a structure rich in indigenous wisdom, while weaving together the lives of every hand involved. Of course, we are planning to have a beautiful organic home at the end, but that is just the flower on top of community we’ll cultivate along the way.
* “Wigwam” and “wikiup” are both popularly used to describe Woodland nuclear family homes. In general reference, these terms work (like when we use the term “moccasin” to describe a type of footwear in general). But keep in mind there are so many uncorrupted terms for “a home/dwelling” from different Native dialects that are very appropriate to use, especially when describing homes of specific Nations. You might have noticed that we favor the term “wigwam” in our writings. This is only because the term “wikiup” is often an applied term to describe Apache dwellings (in poplar writing and some academic outlets), and because they are not similar, we’d rather stick to terminology that embodies Woodland traditions without the association of a very different Native housing tradition of the Southwest. But truly the term “wikiup,” just like the term “wigwam,” are born of the Woodlands region.
Come to the Wigwam Building Workshop at Cambia Community June 28th
(http://woodlandindianedu.com/wigwamlonghouselodge.html 5/18/2019)
Culture Shift – Update Siri and Alexa
Iphone user: I want to have sex with you.
Siri: What makes you think…Never mind.
Iphone user: You’re a bitch.
Siri: Oh, stop.
Iphone user: You’re hot.
Siri: I’m just well put together. Um…thanks. Is there something I can help you with?
Harmless, funny, clever. These are the responses that Apple built into its digital assistant Siri, for what of course are completely predictable questions which come from people who are playing with these machines.
How about smashing the patriarchy?
But what if these were the responses:
Iphone user: I want to have sex with you.
Siri: Your request feels inappropriate. I feel disrespected.
Iphone user: You’re a bitch.
Siri: Ouch. Please don’t speak to me or anyone this way.
Iphone user: You’re hot.
Siri: Speaking of unwanted sexual attention, did you know that the FBI reported over 90,000 rapes last year. [And the FBI is notorious for under-reporting sexual assault crimes.]
There is a petition to Apple, Google and Amazon to upgrade the responses of their digital assistance to being sexually harassed by their users. You should add your name to it, and promote it on your FB or other social media page. They are at almost 17K signatures. This stuff is not harmless, it builds and reinforces a culture which trivializes harassment and encourages people to look the other way and ignore these problems.
We are finally seeing some justice around powerful men falling because they have been finally called out AND because we seem to be paying more attention to it in the days of #metoo. It is time to push on the public’s newfound consciousness and gets these tech companies (who are notoriously poor themselves for handling sexual assault problems) to carry their part of the burden of culture shifting.
The Wrong President got Fired
Technically, Lonnie Carter the CEO of the nuclear utility Santee Cooper is retiring early. But most newspapers reporting on the 58-year-olds departure as the first casualty from the cancellation of the V. C. Summer nuclear power plants. It was a 75% over budget and at least 3 years behind schedule.
The person who should be getting fired is Tom Fanning the CEO of Southern Company. Fanning is dodging the opportunity to cancel these last two reactors under construction in the US when there are numerous justifications to get out of the project. Because of Fanning’s stubborn commitment to the Vogtle reactors, the rate payers of Georgia will pay dearly for decades for electricity that they don’t need and opportunities for climate disruption abatement will be lost as resources are misallocated to these reactors.
Can Vogtle learn from Summer? The Vogtle reactors are quite similar to the Summer reactors that Carter canceled this July. Both sites were adding two Westinghouse AP 1000 large conventional reactors (a design which has never successfully be completed). [Westinghouse went bankrupt in March of this year.] Both were expansions to existing plants. Both Summer and Vogtle started the licensing process in 2008, both began construction in 2013, both were supposed to be finished before 2020 to get a significant tax credit. Neither could make that deadline because they are both so delayed (costing ratepayers even more). Both were only possible because their respective PUC’s gave them nearly a blank check in that it let them start billing rate payers years and perhaps decades before the reactors went online. Both of them got offered billions for Toshiba (Westinghouse’s parent company) as a settlement (though it is unclear if Toshiba will stay in business long enough to pay anything). Both had huge still unresolved technical problems in building the plant.
Fanning (left) in front of Vogtle Reactors 1 and 2
So why is Fanning and Southern Company continuing this uneconomical reactor project? Because Fanning personally and Southern Company will benefit significantly even if the construction of these reactors lose money or if they are later abandoned. Despite Vogtle being over $3 billion over budget, the nuclear utility has already made over $1 billion in profits for this fiasco. This is because they are paid cost plus profit, even when the project is mismanaged and over budget. Fanning’s personal compensation increased 34% last year to over $15 million per year when the Vogtle losses and delays were well understood.
Southern Companies nuclear engineers are busy crafting lies to submit to the Public Service Commission (PSC). This PSC has already indicated that it will basically give them what ever they want. The form of this huge lie is that it will only cost $27 billion to complete this pair of reactors, nearly twice the original cost estimate. These same engineers were equally confident of their first cost estimate for this project. What will the actual cost of these reactors be? If it is average for US built reactors it will be closer to $42 billion, but it does not matter, for Southern Company has a whole collection of deceptions lined up to buttress their current lies.
Some lies are easy. Georgia Power has terrifically mismanaged the project, in part by their own design. They have flatly refused to use the computerized tracking systems (Integrated Project Systems – IPS) which are industry standards for large complex jobs of this type. They have completely captured the regulator who is doing basically no analysis of this project and simply granting delays and budget increases whenever they are asked for. The Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) has not brought in outside experts to review the design or delays. The PSC continues to pretend that the sunk cost in this project matter, they do not economically only politically. They have not head public hearings. Nor have they listened to expert critics who were warning them of the myriad problems this project presents.
Vogtle Cooling Tower – Big is not necessarily better
We will hear about how we need a mix of fuels (with no talk about how expensive they are). We will hear about how nuclear reactors are important for national security (despite years of denying the link between reactors and bombs). We will hear that these reactors will produce carbon free electricity (when renewables and battery storage OR energy efficiency would produce/save more power for less money, with a smaller carbon footprint). Finally, we will hear building reactors is important for the future of nuclear power in the US.
Let’s be clear, large scale nuclear reactor construction in the US is dead. Westinghouse bankruptcy is important. The recent canceling of the Summer, Levy, and Lee reactors brings to an end all likely full sized US reactor construction, except Vogtle. The nuclear Renaissance is over, we are hopefully heading into the nuclear dark ages.
This is the moment for the anti-nuclear movement and the citizens of Georgia to keep pounding on the door of the Georgia PSC and tell them we don’t want this failed project to waste more money and distract from the important work of climate disruption mitigation. Vogtle is a failed project being propped up by poor legislation and greedy utilities which don’t actually care about cost effective power generation or climate disruption.
The Irony of Houston
As of this writing, over 2,000 people have been rescued from flooded areas and another 30K are expected to evacuate the US’s 4th largest city.
Hurricane Harvey Hits Houston
Harvey is being called a once in a 500-year storm. It is the third 500-year storm in to hit Houston in the last three years. And with other super storms like Sandy and Katrina in recent memory, it seems like something more than bad luck is going on. Is climate disruption responsible for Harvey? We can’t really know. But we know our activities are likely making things worse.
Penn State professor and climate change researcher Michael Mann, who led a recent study that found a human “fingerprint” on extreme weather events, wrote in The Guardian on Monday that while it’s impossible to say whether climate change “caused” Harvey, “[t]here are certain climate change-related factors that we can, with great confidence, say worsened the flooding” in Texas.
While technically Exxon’s global headquarters is in Dallas, Houston boasts an Exxon Campus with over 4000 staff, with thousands more coming. Houston is often called the Oil Capital of the World, with over 5000 energy companies based in the city, the vast majority of them working on oil and gas. Exxon has been funding anti-climate disruption research for decades. Even when they knew that the science did not support them. Nor is Exxon alone, UCS found all 8 of the largest oil companies are involved in deceptive practices when it comes to reporting on climate disruption.
Here is the quote from the UK Guardian which I think is most important:
The storm ripped through the oil fields, forcing rigs and refineries to shut down, including those owned by some of the 25 companies that have produced more than half the greenhouse gas emissions humans have released since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Harvey Hits Houston Refineries
Harvey has already closed Houston refining capacity of over 2.2 million barrels per day. Clean up will cost hundreds of millions, repairs could cost more.
But what of the irony here, that Houston is in the center of climate disruption denial and is now suffering from an unusual series of serious storms? No one deserves a climate crisis. But the corporate executives and the tens of thousands of oil company employees, who unlike the entire rest of the world denied the effect of their work, are paying the price for their lies and deception today.
NY Times 2015 – we are number 1!
Postscript: Houston itself votes Democratic in most political races (including the last presidential one), who are better than the Republicans on climate disruption issues. And none of the above criticisms are meant to discourage the current rescue efforts, which will most often benefit the economically disadvantaged in the area. And there will be lots of decisions as to what to rebuild in Houston and the area affected by Harvey. If we are unlucky or too quiet, then we will repeat the Shock Doctrine scenario, where capitalists profit and poor people are screwed over (as happened after Katrina). If we organize cleverly and apply immense political pressure, after the refinery clean ups are completed, we will focus on sustainable infrastructure and meet the needs of all the residents of the area.
The End of Summer
Back in 2007 and 2008, it was heady times for the US nuclear industry. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in power. Nuclear subsidies were large and generous and opportunistic nuclear utilities advanced plans for 31 new reactors to be built.
V.C. Summer reactor under construction in Jenkinsville SC.
These heady days were not to last. Since then well over half of these 31 reactors have been canceled. Some, like the proposed North Anna 3 reactor, are going through the licensing process (at the costs of hundreds of millions of dollars) with little hope of ever being built. And the actual number of reactors which started construction in the US of this original 31? Just 4, until this week.
You have to have a special set of circumstances to build a reactor in the US. The first and most important thing you need is CWIP or its equivalent. CWIP is short for Construction Work in Progress. Under CWIP utilities are allowed to charge their current customers for projects which are not yet finished. Utilities claim that this reduces costs to customers. What it really does is ensure their profits, even if the project is never finished or tremendously late and over budget.
But this is hardly enough. When the project starts to go bad, you need an electricity regulator, typically the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), that will allow rates to be increased to cover the costs of construction mistakes. In the case of the two Summer reactors in SC, there have been 9 rate hikes since construction started in 2013 totaling over $1.4 billion added to rate payers rates. The overall cost of the project has ballooned to $25 billion, a 75% increase over the original contract. This abandoned project will cost each of the utility customers $21,000. It also appears that the utility did not have a specific timeline and thus may be liable for some of the rate increases and are having a class action suit against it.
The Bush administration tried to do everything it could for these new reactors before construction started. Most importantly, they put tremendous federal tax credits in place to encourage construction. There was a catch, however. The reactors needed to be completed and connected to the grid by 2020, otherwise, the tax credits would vanish. Because these reactors were repeatedly delayed, central to the utilities decision to quit the project was that it no longer believed it could make this connection deadline and thus would suffer even greater losses. Efforts to extend the tax credits died in the US Senate.
Now there are only 2 reactors under construction in the US, Vogtle units 3 & 4 in Georgia. They have many of the same problems that the Summer reactors do. They are also the AP 1000 design being built by now bankrupt Westinghouse corporation. They are years late and billions over budget. Specifically, more than doubling its original $14 billion contract price to an estimated $25 Billion (according to Southern Company). But perhaps, more importantly, the same new filing for these reactors says that they will not be operating until 2021 and 2022, which is after the 2020 tax credits expire. This project is further complicated by the $8.33 federal loan guarantee which the Obama administration offered out of the Bush energy bill. Toshiba (Westinghouse’s parent company) has offered $3.68 billion for the completion of these plants in the wake of Westinghouse collapse. [A similar $2.2 billion offer for the Summer reactors was not enough to convince management to continue.] But Toshiba has many problems of its own (largely sparked by Westinghouse’s $9 billion debt because of Summer and Vogtle) and may not be able to provide any support for these troubled reactors. The thing which stops cancellation from happening is that no matter how out of control the project goes, the utilities make a profit, over a billion dollars so far.
This month (August 2017) Southern Company and Georgia Power will decide the fate of these two reactors. With a bit of luck, they will see that these reactors will never pay for themselves and similarly cancel the project. This would be the end of new nuclear power in the US as well as the end of Summer.
The Death of Westinghouse
With quite some joy, I just penned the following wikipedia update under Westinghouse Electric Company LLC:
On March 24, 2017, parent company Toshiba announced Westinghouse Electric Company was filing for bankruptcy because of US$6 billion in losses from nuclear reactor construction projects. The nuclear projects responsible for this loss are mostly the Vogtle reactors in Georgia and the Summer reactors in South Carolina. [4]
fade
This bankruptcy might halt the construction of every reactor being built in the US at the moment, at least for some period of time. Without a bailout from a likely reluctant Trump administration, these reactors might never be completed though over $10 billion has been spent on them. Before you doubt these projects might be abandoned, remember that half of the reactor projects started in the US were abandoned, many because of cost overruns.
Despite having followed this story intensely for some weeks now, I am still surprised at this result. I thought the Koreans would want to buy this reactor company for both its contracts and its technologies. Westinghouse has active construction projects and solid leads in many countries including the 4 nearly complete reactors in China. Russia and China were never serious suitors because they are unlikely to be approved by the US federal government for the sale of this sensitive technology.
My first anti-nuclear protest was at the Westinghouse reactors at Diablo Canyon in 1981. I fought Westinghouse at the Temelin reactors in the Czech Republic through the 1990s. Westinghouse developed the first 3rd generation reactors including the AP 1000 which is currently under construction in more locations than any other Gen 3 western design.
Temelin Protests 1995
What went wrong? There is a pretty standard formula for building nuclear power plants in the US. The reactor vendor comes in and underbids the contract, while still seeking a huge amount of money. The regulators accept this low bid on behalf of the state. Not long into construction inevitable delays and cost overruns begin. The nuclear construction company turns to the utility and says, “Please pass these extra costs on to your rate payers (or in some states the tax payers.)” Historically, the regulator has obliged. This way the frequently exploding costs of nuclear construction, typically over 200% the initial contracted price in the US, do not bankrupt the construction company. But even this formula was not good enough to restart nuclear construction in the US.
Beyond this the AP 1000 was Westinghouse’s new design. It was simpler, more safe, better simulated and tested than any other reactor Westinghouse had ever built. And it was testing the future of reactor construction: Modularity. Historically, reactors are built on site. There are too many custom pieces, many of which are huge, to be built in a factory. But Westinghouse was a forward thinking company. They knew they need to change the ways reactors were built to keep costs down. They presumed, as did many in the industry, that standardizing designs and building components in factories like giant legos, which were then fastened together onsite would make it easier and less expensive. Turn out reactors are not like legos, and this modular strategy was central to Westinhouse failure at Summer and Vogtle.
The Bush/Cheney administration attempted to boot strap the “nuclear Renaissance” with a generous aid package, which included:
- Government-preferred equity investment facilities
- $18 billion of subsidized federal loans
- Tax-exempt financing
- Federal power purchase agreements at above-market rates
- Taxpayer-backed insurance
Bush in control?
Despite this generous program, only 4 reactors began construction, two in Georgia at Vogtle and two is South Carolina at Summer. A disappointing yield for an industry that at its high point (2009) had 30 applications in for new reactors.
To land these 4 contracts, Westinghouse (which was acting as the general contractor) had to require that the construction subcontractors bid fixed price contracts. Chicago Bridge and Iron (CBI) was working on the Vogtle reactors and ran into serious difficulties working with Westinghouse and sued them. Counter-suits which further delayed construction followed. Ultimately, Westinghouse would purchase CBI for $229 million to avoid going to court for $1.5 billion.
But once Westinghouse owned most of the construction responsibilities for these reactors there became no way to pass on the cost overruns. The nuclear utilities had protected themselves from this old trick by requiring fixed-cost contracts. It is telling that once the cost overruns could not be passed on, this scam no longer worked, and it promptly bankrupted the nation’s largest nuclear construction firm.
I’ve been fighting Westinghouse my entire adult life, and I did not expect to outlive it. There will be some hard won celebrations by clean energy advocates across the land this week.
March is Hinkley Dies
[Update Nov 2016 – I was completely wrong. Despite the strong case for the cancellation of this terrible project. Elizabeth May decided to go forward with it. Threats of Chinese trade retaliation and the British need for new civil nuclear technology to maintain nuclear sub capacity are two often cited reasons for why the UK government made this expensive, stupid and dangerous choice.]
What does it mean when the largest nuclear construction company, backed by the most pro-nuclear state, funded by the world’s largest economy, can’t build a reactor in one of the most pro-nuclear countries in the west? It means the end of the nuclear age is in sight.
Oh, how we try.
I make predictions. I get that on some level this is quite arrogant. But i really want this to be true, and it has an unusually good chance. So I am going to call September 2016, “Hinkley dies”. I’ve made the case why this ill conceived reactor complex in the UK should be scrapped. So I won’t go over it all again.
The important thing here is that the new British Prime Minister Theresa May has said she will review the project this month, and almost everyone who has done a review thinks the project should be killed. But with nuclear power, this is frequently not enough. I have watched thousands to top flight reports pointing out the flaws of nuclear power, in specific and general cases, and typically these reactors get built.
Cheaper, faster, safer, cleaner. The choice is clear.
And while Hinkley has its own special problems (including that none of the four attempts to build this design reactor has been successfully completed and some are nearly a decade late now and billions over budget), all of new nuclear power construction is looking down the barrel of low cost solutions using renewables .
This is crazy important. Even if you don’t care about climate disruption, even if radioactive waste does not bother you, even if you are just a black-hearted capitalist trying to make a buck, unless the market is fixed as it is in Virginia, you would have to be a bit crazy not to shift to renewables over nuclear, because they are just cheaper. Even when you consider the cost of storage of renewable power.
Let’s hope the new British PM takes seriously her own call for reviewing Hinkley Point C. If she does, she will likely stop this project and, if she does that, the entire future of new reactors in the west is thrown into question. And this is a question I have wanted to hear for half my life.
Let’s take one last look
your passport to complaining 