S. David Freeman: Time has come for California to embrace a nuclear-free future

[bananas]

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/02/4532500/time-has-come-for-california-to.html

Viewpoints: Time has come for California to embrace a nuclear-free future

By S. David Freeman
Special to The Bee
Published: Saturday, Jun. 2, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 11A

When I became general manager of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in 1990, SMUD was an embarrassment. The district was reeling from two decades of rate hikes, construction cost overruns, operating failures, equipment outages, worker injuries, poor morale and management scandals. At my first meeting with Gregory Favre, then the executive editor of The Bee, he told me that in the prior year the paper had run 480 stories about SMUD – "all bad."

Today SMUD is considered a model of efficiency, service and innovation. As much as I like to brag about my four years at the helm, the most important moment in the turnaround came six months before my arrival, when the people of Sacramento voted to close the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant.

Since opening in 1971, Rancho Seco had suffered dozens of emergencies, shutdowns, releases of radioactive material and accidents. Freed of the costly, unreliable and dangerous nuclear albatross, SMUD earned a worldwide reputation for its programs to provide affordable, clean, renewable energy.

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Anyone who says last year's catastrophe at Fukushima was an aberration is literally whistling past the graveyard. The risks are real, and it's time to get rid of these time bombs before they go off.

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S. David Freeman, general manager of SMUD from 1990 to 1994, is a former head of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority and the California Power Authority.

[kristopher]

1. Freeman was appointed to TVA by Jimmy Carter

Anyone who says last year's catastrophe at Fukushima was an aberration is literally whistling past the graveyard. The risks are real, and it's time to get rid of these time bombs before they go off.

<snip>

S. David Freeman, general manager of SMUD from 1990 to 1994, is a former head of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority and the California Power Authority.

I think that's supposed to be the New York Power Authority, not the CPA.

S. David Freeman

S. David Freeman (born January 14, 1926)[1] is an American engineer, attorney, and author, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who has had many key roles in energy policy. He currently heads The Hydrogen Car Company and was previously a member of the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners.
Freeman has been termed an "eco-pioneer" for his controversial and environmentally-oriented leadership of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).[2] He had done a similar job at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), after President Jimmy Carter appointed him to head the TVA board in 1977, changing the TVA focus from growth to conservation. Mr. Freeman decided to stop construction on several nuclear projects that may have contributed to several rate increases with TVA.[3] He also headed other major energy organizations, including the New York Power Authority and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._David_Freeman

Facilities
TVA's power mix as of 2010 is 11 coal-powered plants, 29 hydroelectric dams, three nuclear power plants (with six operating reactors), nine combustion turbine plants and three gas-fueled combined cycle plants. TVA is one of the largest producers of electricity in the United States and acts as a regional grid reliability coordinator. Fossil fuel plants produced 62% of TVA’s total generation in fiscal year 2005, nuclear power 28%, and hydropower 10%.[14] TVA's Watts Bar reactor produces tritium as a byproduct for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, which requires tritium for nuclear weapons.

...

Nuclear power plants
In the 1980s, TVA set out to build 17 nuclear reactors but finished only 5. Canceled nuclear facilities include Phipps Bend, Bellefonte, Hartsville, Yellow Creek, and the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. Currently, operational TVA nuclear power plants include Browns Ferry, Sequoyah and Watts Bar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#Nuclear_power_plants

New York Power Authority

The New York Power Authority (NYPA), officially the Power Authority of the State of New York (PASNY), is a New York State public benefit corporation and the largest state-owned power organization in the United States. NYPA provides some of the lowest-cost electricity in New York State, operating 17 generating facilities and more than 1,400 circuit-miles of transmission lines. It is based in White Plains.
...NYPA operates hydro-electric complexes at the Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station on the Niagara River, the St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project on the St. Lawrence River and the Blenheim-Gilboa Hydroelectric Power Station in the Catskill Mountains, producing a total of 4.2 million kilowatts of electricity. Each has a visitor center open to the public.
In November 2000, Entergy Corporation purchased the Fitzpatrick and Indian Point Unit 3 nuclear power plants from NYPA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Power_Authority

[bananas]

2. He was also head of CPA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

The California electricity crisis, also known as the Western U.S. Energy Crisis of 2000 and 2001 was a situation in which California had a shortage of electricity caused by market manipulations and illegal shutdowns of pipelines by Texas energy consortiums.

<snip>

S. David Freeman, who was appointed Chair of the California Power Authority in the midst of the crisis, made the following statements about Enron's involvement in testimony[21] submitted before the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs, Foreign Commerce and Tourism of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on May 15, 2002:

<snip>

[kristopher]

3. Thanks...

I didn't find that on his wiki bio page. I' like to hear his opinion about the tactics of the nuclear industry.

[bananas]

5. That would be interesting - he's had decades of first-hand experience with them. nt

[Kolesar]

4. SMUD is a leader in using efficiency programs for "cost avoidance"

...so that ratepayers don't have to finance expensive new generating plants. The leverage of efficiency programs is tremendous.

[NNadir]

6. Oh wow. SMUD is a real moral force in the world!

SMUD ever since they proved too damn stupid to run a nuclear plant, being scientifically illiterate like the rest of the anti-nuke community, has dumped millions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste directly into the planetary atmosphere.

The hatred of the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free primary energy, and the world's largest, by far, source of air pollution free energy is more or less responsible, in my view, for what the World Health Organization reports as 3.3 million people killed each year.

In order to be as dangerous and the dangerous fossil fuels dumped around the world, it follows that in its 50 year history of commercial operations, nuclear power would have needed to have killed as many people as died in World War II three times.

It didn't, although we do have a bunch of bourgeois anti-nukes hoping that someone, anyone, will die from the 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tsunami that struck the nuclear plants at Fukushima, although it would appear that it was infinitely safer to have been in a nuclear plant than in any of the other buildings in the area, where 20,000 people died from non-nuclear realted causes.

What Fukushima demonstrates - as the World Health Data on air pollution deaths demonstrates - is that the bourgeois brats who populate the anti-nuke cults have a very, very, very, very bizarre calculus about human suffering

It is assholes like the bourgeios morally vapid assholes who run SMUD, a natural gas burning ethical hellhole, who are responsible for the fact that the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atomsophere is scraping, as we speak, 400 pmm.

Heckuva job, anti-nukes, heckuva job! You must be very, very, very proud.

The ignorance, fear, superstition, and expensive wasteful wishful thinking by the citizens of California can be read in the State's record of how electricity is produced in that state: Where California's electricity comes from

Right now nuclear energy - despite the hatred of the purveyors of fear, ignorance, and superstition - produces easily more energy than wind, solar, and biomass combined in that State, this after 50 years of mindless and delusional cheering - coupled with the on going rape of budgets that are supposed to provide for the common good of Californians - for wind, solar and biomass.

And predictably, there are still gas bag liars trying to destroy that infrastructure to enrich their gas company allies.

No surprise there.

In the ethical sense, the people at SMUD are, in the ethical sense, typical of the mentality of people who live behind gated walls, their indifference to humanity knowing no bounds.

Thanks for telling us what provincial morons think.