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The date for this joint presentation is February 20, not February 13.  I am sorry for the error.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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PGE’s announcement to shut down Boardman in 2020 reminds me of Yogi Berra’s quote, "deja vu all over again."  In 1992, two ballot measures proposed to permanently shut down the Trojan Nuclear Plant due to a lack of high level nuclear waste disposal and persistent corrosion in Trojan’s steam generator tubes.

PGE had operated Trojan for 16 years and desperately sought to keep it open.  Yet four months before the election, they announced they would voluntarily shut it down in 1996, and any effort to close it before that time would cause massive cost increases, combined with blackouts and brownouts.  Both ballot measures failed.

Six days after the election, a radioactive leak from a steam generator tube shut down Trojan.  Then a leak from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission showed that NRC scientists had opposed a waiver allowing Trojan to operate in 1992 with its deteriorating steam generator tubes.  On January 3, 1993, PGE permanently shut down Trojan.  No massive cost increases, blackouts or brownouts occurred.

Fast forward to Boardman.  This coal plant is a dangerous polluter and the risk of catastrophic climate change is driven in part by the five million tons of carbon dioxide that Boardman emits annually.  According to many scientists, we do not have much to time to prevent a tipping point in global warming.  While PGE willingly admits that this warming is taking place, their actions are similar to Trojan.   We should not let them gamble with our future.  PGE has had more than enough time to massively invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy.  Operating Boardman until 2020 spews 30 million more tons of carbon into the atmosphere, lasting a thousand years.  The Sierra Club analysis is correct.  PGE should close Boardman in 2014.

At 10:00 AM, on February 13, 2010, at the First Unitarian Church, SW 12th and Salmon, I will be participating in a joint presentation being put on by Community for Earth entitled “The Greening of Nuclear Power, Fact or Fiction?”  The other presenter will be Duane Ray a retired Physicist, who supports the use of nuclear energy to address global warming.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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As someone who has extensively used Oregon?s initiative process to raise concerns about the problems of the nuclear fuel cycle and the construction and operation of nuclear power plants, I know what it?s like to take these issues to the Oregon Legislature and be repeatedly shut down by the power and influence of utility lobbyists. Over and over I was forced to use the initiative process, where even there the utilities broke spending records year after year defeating the ballot measures that I helped to sponsor. Yet the problems with nuclear power did not go away and as they continued to grow more serious, Portland General Electric could no longer hide the significance of the mechanical failures that plagued the operation of their Trojan Nuclear Plant. If it was not for our ability to repeatedly sponsor initiative petitions addressing the growing number of these failures, I believe PGE might never have shut this nuclear plant down until it was too late.

In Oregon we are citizen legislators. We took this power upon ourselves because we have repeatedly seen how big moneyed interests control our legislature to the detriment of the people and the degradation of our environment. Without this check and balance we are lost. While we may not agree with the issues raised through the initiative process, even as we do not agree with bills sponsored by the legislature, the fault is not with the process but is the very nature of democracy itself, which contains the good, the bad and the ugly. Limiting our rights to the initiative only serves to empower those who can control and influence a much more manipulative legislative body. At least with Bill Sizemore we can see where he is coming and as demonstrated by this election stop him with our ballot.

I am reminded of the words of Thomas Jefferson:

?I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but inform their discretion.?

While I encourage activists to take raise their concerns with the legislature, I do not believe initiatives should be required to be submitted to the legislature before they can be enacted. I already know what the fox looks like in the hen house.

posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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