By Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (bannerofliberty.com)
March 28, 2001
Today's Sacramento Bee reports the capitulation, finally after their election year refusal to approve rate hikes, lest they cause Al Gore to lose California to George Bush, state's Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously yesterday to approve rate hikes of up to 46 percent for Pacific Gas and Electric Company and Southern California Edison Co. The rate hikes, which affect about 25 million of the state's 31 million people, take place immediately.
This turn of events was greeted with shouts of "Hell No, We Won't Pay!" by people in the audience. In fact, according to the Bee report "The meeting was disrupted at least five times by screaming protesters. Before the meeting, four women led by former Green Party senatorial candidate Medea Benjamin stood in the PUC chambers with yellow signs saying "We Won't Pay."
Maybe they can all send their electric bills to millionaire Ralph Nader who is the one responsible for their plight. It was Green Party founder Ralph Nader who managed to block the building of power plants, especially nuclear power plants with such diatribes as:
"Safe? Inexpensive? Clean?...The Chernobyl nuclear accident forced more than 135,000 people to be evacuated from the area nearest the reactor in Chernobyl, and another 4 million to live under conditions of severe radiological contamination. This accident created hundreds of thousands of refugees, immense damage to human life, the loss of vast areas of productive land, and may end up costing the Soviet Union roughly $400 billion. According to an article in the Times of London, "hospitals in the Ukraine, Byelorussia and adjacent provinces are filled with victims. Whole wards are lined with gaunt, dying children." The city of Pripyat, where 45,000 people once lived, is now a radioactive ghost town. Norwegian scientists at the State Institute for Radiation Hygiene said in 1990 that radiation from the Chernobyl accident is lingering in their country 10 times longer than predicted!"
Not only was he wrong about the extent of the damage of Chernobyl, and the "wards lined with gaunt, dying children", he never once mentioned that California's plants could not physically have the kind of accident that occurred at Chernobyl.
In a 1998 PBS Interview Nader was asked: : "How important were TMI and Chernobyl in solidifying opposition when you look back on it?"
He replied:
Nader: "Well, Three Mile Island, because it was in this country, it was highly publicized. And although it was not a nuclear disaster, it came very close. Indeed, direct and indirect costs made it the worst disaster in American history in terms of economics.
"Nine billion dollars to retrofit the plants around the country and also to deal with the Three Mile Island situation. But the very closeness of a catastrophic meltdown sobered up a lot of people. And it made the press believers that there was a real problem here."
Nader and his "Nader's Raiders" used unconscionable scare tactics to deceive the public into dismantling California Nuclear power plants, such as Rancho Seco, by saying that the water from the plant would "poison" the farmland around the plant. He knew that was a lie. He knew that the discharge canal at Rancho Seco had one-fourth the amount of radioactivity as the tap water in the area, one-twentieth the amount of radioactivity as the Sacramento river that runs through Sacramento. The rating of beer, for example, was 130 to the discharge canal's 5. The radioactivity of whiskey is 1200 to Rancho Seco's discharge canal rating of 5.
However, Ralph Nader's brags on his on web site about his success in closing down Rancho Seco. He founded his "Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Prograrm (CMEP) in 1974. He blocked the Nuclear Waste Policy Act which would have made it possible to store low level nuclear waste safely.
Yet, in 1977 Nader was quoted as saying: ""If they don't close these [nuclear] reactors down, we'll have civil war in five years." Twelve Years later he had convinced enough Sacramento voters with his extreme anti-power views that a slim majority voted to close it down. Every since, the million and one half people that Rancho Seco supplied cheap power to have had to use electricity bought from out of state. As the surrounding power-intact States began to grow, and Nader and his friends blocked the construction of ANY kind of power plant in California, electric power costs rose.
Last year I interviewed Russell Ball, who retired a number of years ago from working in the nuclear industry, about the public's conception of nuclear danger. He pointed out that the background radiation levels, the natural radiation, is far higher than radiation even from the fallout of nuclear bomb testing. In For example, the Environmental Protection Agency's air/water pollution report for December 6, 1971 showed the natural radioactivity rate for California at 115 compared to the radioactivity discharge from a nuclear power plant of 5. The US average for background radiation in the United States at the time was 130.
Among the charts the Russell Ball gave me was one on lung cancer among miners per year in a 100,000 person population. It showed that non-smokers had an average of 12.6 per 100,000, whereas uranium miners WHO SMOKED had an average rate of 700. However, in comparing the number of non-smoking uranium miners, they found only 4 in 100,000 who got lung cancer. So, was it the uranium, or was it smoking in the bad air of a mine that caused them to have cancer?
The media somehow never mentions these little points.
In 1996, five years ago just as California partially de-regulated electric power while placing price controls on its costs to the consumers, Nader organized a group of national and state advocacy groups to suppor his "Power for the People: A Public Interest Blueprint for Electricity Restructuring" plan. In it he demanded the following public policy:
* grant no recovery of costs for uneconomical utility assets except in special circumstances. (so, while he demanded the closure of Rancho Seco, he didn't want to have to pay any part of the multi-million dollar cost of the de-commisioning)* break up vertically integrated utility monopolies by requiring divestiture of assets.
* create an independent energy agency to administer and oversee energy efficiency, low-income, universal service and research & development programs.
* aggressively promote an array of energy efficiency programs funded by a system benefits charge.
* guarantee universal service and bill assistance to low-income and rural consumers.
* increase the use of cleaner energy by requiring all electric service providers to certify that a percentage of their energy comes from renewable technologies.
* enact standards on fossil fuel plants ensuring that the emissions of hazardous pollutants decreases
Not surprisingly, these demands made the cost of creating ANY kind of new power source uneconomical. Every effort to increase either water supplies or energy supplies in the 26 years I lived in California was blocked by a combination of Nader's fuzzy thinking and Al Gore's political support of his fuzzy thinking.
All I can say to my friends in California is simply this: in the future, beware of millionaires who want YOU to reduce your standard of living by resorting to candlepower and bicycles.
To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com
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