Fukushima – One Step Forward and Four Steps Back as Each Unit Challenged by New Problems from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Arnie Gundersen, and GMD’s own Maggie Gundersen, both of Fairewinds Assoc., have served above-and-beyond the call,  since the three-fold disaster of March 11 hit Japan and the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Yes, it was three whole months ago, and the slowly spreading environmental catastrophe just goes on and on.

Fairewinds intelligent and clear analysis of the underlying science, provided in small digestible video “lessons,” has been invaluable for anyone attempting to keep up with the complex situation over there. It’s nice to see them get some of the credit they so richy deserve for excellence in analysis.   Maintaining the ongoing series of video links depends on contributions from visitors to their site, as the Gundersens are working without a financial “net” to provide this as a free information service.

Now Huffington Post has identified Fairewinds Associates as the “best site” for Fukushima analysis, observing that Gundersen

“analyzes the information … in a calm and scientific way”.

The overarching point of the Huffpo piece, penned by Vivian Norris, is to comment on the remarkable lack of information being provided officially from Japan and the equally remarkable lack of initiative on the part of the press to ask questions and demand answers.

Why is this not on the front page of every single newspaper in the world? Why are official agencies not measuring from many places around the world and reporting on what is going on in terms of contamination every single day since this disaster happened?

We couldn’t agree more.

Despite the bitter circumstances, congratulations are long overdue for Arnie and Maggie Gundersen!

Where are all the women in government here in Franklin County?  You certainly see enough of them behind desks, working for a wage, maintaining the functional underpinnings of every day life in our towns and villages.

How often have we heard: “things would fall apart around here without her?”

But where are the women in elected and appointed government positions? Though they represent half of the county’s population, you can count the number of women in those positions on a single hand.  The bigger the town, the more conspicuous the absence of female participation.  

The City of St. Albans has an all-male city council, and an all-male planning commission.  Yet, at a recent council meeting we heard how invaluable and versatile has been the thirty-year service of, Jane Kiser, the paid Community Development Manager.

“Things would fall apart around here without her.”

The Town of St. Albans has an all-male selectboard, an all male development review board, and with the notable exception of Chairwoman Cheryl Teague, an all-male planning commission.   Cheryl is something of a marvel IMHO, for her unwavering intellect, patience and tact.

The story is very much the same in Swanton.  Women occasionally crop-up among officials in some of the smaller towns of Franklin County, but they remain a dismal few.  They serve on development review boards, which are, for the most part, charged with enforcing the decisions made by higher officials.

Of the 46 representatives appointed by communities to the Northwest Regional Planning Commission, only nine are women.  Without exception, the female representatives are from the smallest towns and villages in the county.  One has to wonder if  the only way a woman is chosen by her community to serve is if there are simply no men available!

How can this be acceptable in the most progressive state in the Union?  And at what cost to the vitality of our towns and villages has this status-quo been maintained?  There is no doubt that we lack ethnic diversity in the demographics of our state, but surely we can do better in representing gender diversity among our decision-makers!  There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that, when communities disproportionately represent only the ideas and agendas of male decision-makers, society suffers as a whole.  We need the creativity and dexterity of female minds in the mix so that we may benefit from fresh perspectives on age-old civic problems.

This is my call to the women of our county to step-up and challenge that status-quo for the good of us all!   By and large, women are the majority of active voters in America.  Surely we can do better than this right here in our own back-yard!  I am offering my time and energy to credible female candidates for office in St. Albans City, so that together we can bring about a truly revitalized and forward-looking community.

Come on, gals… Let’s get uppity!

Into the idea vacuum left when Republican plans to dismantle Medicare blew-up in their faces, leaps our own caped crusader, Bernie Sanders, to boldly go where DC Dems fear to tread:  Single-Payer!

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced today that he introduced legislation to provide health care for every American through a Medicare-for-all type single-payer system.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) filed a companion bill in the House to provide better care for more patients at less cost by eliminating the middle-man role played by private insurance companies that rake off billions of dollars in profits.

The twin measures, both called the American Health Security Act of 2011, would provide federal guidelines and strong minimum standards for states to administer single-payer health care programs.

Observing the U.S.’s miserable standing as

the only major nation in the industrialized world that does not guarantee health care

Senator Sanders points out that this parsimony has only served to earn us the twin distinctions of having not only one of the most costly healthcare “systems” in the world, but one that doesn’t even begin to deliver results on a par with those who spend far less.

Supporting the Sanders-McDermott act are labor voices like the AFL-CIO, National Nurses United and International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.

Citing some damning statistical evidence of our failure as a country to provide even basic care to many millions of Americans in need, the Senator had this to say:

Under the current health care system, 45,000 Americans a year die because they delay seeking care they cannot afford.  Health care eats up one-fifth of the U.S. economy, but we rank 26th among major, developed nations on life expectancy and 31st on infant mortality.

He points out that Americans pay, on average, twice as much as Canadians and Europeans for exactly the same drugs; and that much of this inflated cost is due to the drug companies own spendthrift management and compensation practices.

Sanders did not forget to mention the landmark effort by Vermont lawmakers to move our state forward toward a single-payer system, thereby providing a model for the rest of the country.

Amid the chaos and cynicism of Congressional politics, it does my heart good to read of Bernie still shooting out those arrows of lightning clarity.

Thanks to nTodd for pointing us toward this choice piece of perspective on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and it’s pas de deux with the power industry.

Tom Zeller, writing on Huffington Post draws our attention to a 1992 document entitled “Perspectives on the License Renewal Process.” Sent to the NRC by Northern States Power Company, the paper advocated an extremely lenient approach to relicensing:

In a nutshell, the document argued that the NRC examined aspects of plant operation beyond the scope of what was necessary for license renewal, and the agency therefore ran the risk of making license renewal uneconomical.

Mr. Zeller points out that three years later, in 1995, the NRC changed its rules so as to eliminate entirely the part of the relicensing process that looked at whether or not a facility was in fact, operating in full compliance with it’s current license!

Precipitating the 1992 document and subsequent change in NRC rules was a development in the 1980’s when a nuclear plant in Monticello, Minnesota that was seeking renewal was found on examination to be so grievously out of compliance that it was forced to close even before its current license had expired.

a result, Monticello’s operators — and the wider industry — went on the offensive.

Now here is where Mr. Zeller really caught my attention because he linked that last phrase to a NY Times article that used a photo of the collapsed tower at Vermont Yankee to illustrate the point that perhaps the NRC is now entirely too cozy with the industry.  While this hardly is news to us, it gives some satisfaction to see others connecting the dots.

It would appear that the NRC has effectively taken the extraordinary step of mandating that a blind eye will be turned on any issues of current use. The only remaining criteria are the plans the applicant offers for future operation!  Furthermore,  it has taken this step soley for the economic advantage it gives to the industry.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster how can this betrayal of the public trust be tolerated?

Once again the best interests of the people of Vermont are on schedule to be derailed by the deep pockets of business.   It’s such a familiar story that it almost slips by unnoticed.

According to the Free Press, on the last day of the legislative session, language that was inserted into the budget bill to give the public a voice in the enforcement phase of ANR jurisdiction will be removed so as to not delay the end of the session.

The last-minute measure would have allowed public input on environmental enforcement cases, bringing the state partially into compliance with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules. Without it, the state risks losing $1.55 million in EPA funding, Agency of Natural Resources Deputy Secretary Chris Recchia told senators.

Nice.  So, not only are we once again left voiceless in a critical process, but we will essentially be taxed $1.55 million for that dis-privilege.  

Louis Porter of the Conservation Law Foundation said it best:

“The question here is whether we provide the public their right to participate in state-initiated environmental enforcement, or whether we protect polluters,”

Like it or not, the ANR essentially receives its marching orders from whoever happens to be the governor at the moment.  Right now, we’re pretty happy with how that worked out, but over the past eight years environmental activists have been in agony watching enforcement fail under the Douglas administration.  

This is why it is so essential that public input has a structural role in the enforcement process.  The EPA recognizes that need, why doesn’t a progressive state like Vermont?

Open government? Not so much.

Representing the views of business, I suppose, the Freeps quotes William Driscoll , vice-president of Associated Industries of Vermont:

“It creates greater uncertainty about how rules are going to be enforced,” he said. “Businesses like to know the rules.”

This seems somewhat disingenuous, as if the “rules” provide no more than an arbitrary yardstick.  The subtext is that businesses count on being able to “work” the ANR so that they can be seen as officially compliant even while falling short of strict adherence to the rules; and they can induce a benign culture in which penalties represent no more than a slap on the wrist.  

Introducing into the enforcement process the higher expectations of those who must live with the consequences of non-compliance will inevitably disrupt this deliberate calculus.

So add this local development to the growing body of evidence that individuals are becoming less than equal to corporations in post-Citizens-United America.  You, too, will soon know what it means to be a second-class citizen.

I used to love it in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy melted the witch.  Everybody sang and danced and then Dorothy was returned to a world of comfortable normalcy; but even as a child I had a nagging feeling that her problems weren’t entirely over.  After all, her family was still so dirt poor they couldn’t even afford color TV; and then there was that small matter of the bounty on Toto for biting Miss Gulch.

We’re kind of in the songy-dancey stage of the War on Terror at the moment, and it’s amazing to see how much joyful significance people read into the surgical elimination of Osama Bin Laden.  I’d have been more in the mood had it happened ten years ago before we leveled Iraq and tens-of-thousands of people became collateral victims of the “hunt for Bin Laden.”

Like Dorothy’s return to Kansas, our black-and-white reality check will come with news of the very next casualty in our branded “War on Terror.”

I know.  It isn’t called that anymore; but you can’t unring a bell, as the saying goes.

Unfortunately, we must accept the fact that, even though Bin Laden is dead, he probably accomplished his goals well-beyond his wildest imaginings.  Consider what might be the Al Quaida “checklist,” if theirs was a somewhat more sophisticated organization:

 1) Cause many thousands of Americans to die needlessly           check!

check and double-check!

True, we haven’t yet removed ourselves from their holy regions (which was, after all, what started the whole mess in the first place); but it’s purely a matter of time before the simple economics of the thing finally force us to withdraw.  Remember the Soviet Union in Afghanistan?  Remember what happened to the Soviet Union in the economic collapse and social discord that followed that fool-hearty adventure?

Worst of all, we gave Bin Laden and his pals these victories, one by one, of our own free will; because all were the collateral impacts of allowing the Bush White House to work on our emotions in order to aggrandize what were abhorrent criminal assaults on the 9/11 targets.  Simply by calling them “acts of war,” Bush at once dignified the perpetrators into nationhood, and set in motion a chain of events that lead inexorably to undermining the foundations of our own liberties and values.

I will not do the partisan thing and say he did so cynically or as part of any conspiracy.  I’ll leave that to other, less cool heads.  There has been too much of that heat developing over the past ten years; so much so that it is now rebounding on itself into a massive delusional distraction, shaped by all sides.  Rather, I will assume that Bush did so naively but in good faith; and the people followed like sheep.

Like Dorothy, I wish we could just click our heels and put things back to the way they were.  

“There’s no place like home!”

Public comments will be accepted until Tuesday, May 3.  Comments may be submitted by email to atvrule@state.vt.us

Last night’s public hearing over ATV use on public lands demonstrated VASA’s ability to pack a room, but provided no valid reasons why that use should be permitted.

Rather like the arguments in Congress that say we shouldn’t “raise” taxes on the rich even though it is only proposed to sunset temporary tax CUTS,  arguments offered by the ATV crowd are heavily dependent on the illusion that ATV users now have a “right” to traverse public lands. This, despite the fact that their access lasted just a single season and was awarded by a departing governor against the recommendations of a legislative committee and public comments that came in at a rate of three-to-one against.

The refrain of the riders is always the same, ” We will ride responsibly; and, If you take away our right to use the trails legally, don’t blame us for what goes on illegally!”  Apart from the hint of blackmail, this assertion completely ignores the established fact that even while riding “responsibly” on the trails, ATV traffic is inflicting harm on the wild environment.

And what about that right to access?  Is it purely a question of fairness, as one rider insists:

“It’s a question of fairness. People who own and ride ATVs are Vermonters just as much as anybody,” Ed Gallo of Richmond said. “There’s no question there are outlaw riders, there always will be, but 99 percent of the people want to ride legal.”

Even if we accept the legitimacy of  VASA’s petition that supposedly has 4,000 signatures, that leaves 617,000 Vermonters who may have a different idea of what constitutes fair access.  Judging from public comments the Legislature received against Gov. Douglas’ rule change, the majority of Vermonters believe it is unfair to make them suffer the exhaust and noise of ATV’s on public lands, when that is just about the only place where one can avoid motorized vehicles if one wishes to do so.  

As Liam McSweeney, a Montpelier high school senior put it

“you want to get away from the smells and sounds that ATVs create. Every generation, a little more wilderness disappears.”

If we were to take the “fairness” arguments from VASA at face value, we might as well permit bicycles on I-89 because undoubtedly there are bike riders who think it is unfair to be barred from use of that public route just because one doesn’t own a car.

It’s time to make your voice heard loud and clear by your legislators.  Tell them that the environmental evidence is overwhelming; and common sense about the purpose of public wilderness only makes the argument against ATV access more compelling.

There simply is no such thing as “responsible” ATV use on these public lands.

Some days, just opening the paper is enough to break a sweat.  Today’s Messenger editorial page held attacks on the move to universal healthcare in Vermont by two usual suspects, Sen. Randy Brock (no link available) and Vermont Tiger’s master of economic rationalizations, Art Woolf.  On-message for the insurance industry, both invoke the classic defense against radical change to a failed system: change is scary.

Yes, boys, it is scary.  No, we don’t know just yet exactly what the final plan will mean in terms of either savings or funding; but we do know that if we don’t gird ourselves to wade in and just do the work, the “system” as it stands is completely unsustainable and will ruin us all.  And what’s this bugaboo that Randy Brock resorts to as his closing zinger?

“We have only to look to our north and see where Single Payer will likely take us.  Higher taxes, long waits for care, shabby facilities, a loss of doctors, and a bloated bureaucracy.  It’s not a pretty picture.”

Maybe not from where you sit, Mr. Brock, comfortably wrapped in gold-plated private health insurance that will avail you of the best care that money will buy here in the land of commoditized healthcare.  But from where most people sit on the pavement, what Canada has looks like a very pretty picture indeed! And maybe you haven’t heard about their lower infant mortality rate, greater longevity and greater quotient of happiness.  

Do taxes make you squeamish, Mr. Brock?  Maybe the Canadians are happier than us because they have come to some sort of acceptance of taxes as part of the social contract that ensures a decent quality of life for everyone no matter how unlucky they might become.  Is that so hard to understand?  As far as long waits for care are concerned, do you have any idea how long forever is? That’s how long the working poor have to wait for preventive care in the U.S.

If Mr. Brock’s and Mr. Woolf’s ostrich imitations weren’t discouraging enough, there was an editorial reproduced from the Rutland Herald (also, no link available.)  The Herald piece started innocently enough, enjoying the left-handed compliment paid to Vermont by the New York Times in commenting about our lack of a balanced budget amendment in the state constitution.  As you may recall, the Times called the state a “fiscal goody two-shoes,” and the Herald was optimistic that this might help our bond-rating (I’m not kidding.)  

This leads into some hand-ringing on the part of the Herald over what might happen to that supposed bond-rating boost if we dipped into the rainy day fund to ease some of the pain and dysfunction in social services. Okay… I might not agree with the premise, but it was a positive enough observation.  Then the Herald, IMHO, went clean off the rails, pretty much dismissing the genuine pleas for help from that sector as a lot of overblown nonsense:

“During the budget debate, many advocates for those needing assistance went to the Legislature to argue for their clients.  That’s their job.  But if one were to catalogue all hardships they predicted collectively, one would expect to see the poor starving in the streets.  That’s simply not going to happen.”

Callous much lately?

It must be nice to move in social circles that belie the tremendous evidence of genuine need that are all around us.  It must be nice to have the luxury of financial security that allows you to turn up your nose at the care that is available to all Canadians, regardless of their ability to pay.

Peel me a grape, Beulah!

There is an excellent article on GlobalPost  that features a lengthy interview with Arnie Gundersen.  In the article, interviewer David Case raises a lot of the nagging questions to which we have only been getting vague answers through conventional media:  How do the radioactive releases at the Fukushima reactors compare to those from Chernobyl? What is the potential for the situation there to grow even worse?  What will be the long-term impacts on the health of the Japanese people?  What will be the long-term implications for human health around the world?

The answers, brutally honest and fully explained, are not encouraging.  Of the greatest immediate concern is the prossibility that a self-starting chain reaction is unfolding now in Reactor #4 where structural damage has allowed fuel rods to come in contact with each other.  That reactor is so severely compromised at this point that it would take little seismic activity to bring down the whole building.  With no functioning “brakes” to the chain reaction, it  could lead to a fuel pool fire, ejecting some very toxic materials directly into the atmosphere for wide distribution.

As Arnie points out, the accident at Chernobyl involved a single reactor, with a single catastrophic release.  At Fukushima, the ongoing crisis involves essentially four reactors and, counting the spent fuel pools, the equivalent of eight reactor cores!  He says that even without the massive explosion that jettisoned tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere at Chernobyl, the collective release of radioactivity from all the separate failures at Fukushima may already have more than equalled the release at Chernobyl.

Comparing the current industrial catastrophe to that at Bhopal, India in 1984, Arnie remarks

Take the time to read it all, including Arnie’s excellent perspective on how we should view our future energy needs.  It’s well worth the read.

Obama’s budget deficit speech will be a huge topic of conversation over the next few days.  Most progressives, not just those here in Vermont, will be curious to know how Bernie Sanders responds, so I’m posting his official statement verbatim:

“The very serious deficit crisis that we are in today is the result of the severe recession caused by Wall Street greed, two unpaid-for wars, huge tax breaks for the rich, the bailout of giant banks, and an unfunded Medicare Part D prescription drug program written by the insurance and drug companies.

“Meanwhile, while the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations are doing extremely well, the Republicans want more giant tax breaks for the very rich as they move to balance the budget on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the children and by cutting environmental protection and infrastructure. This is morally unacceptable and very bad economics.

“President Obama is right in suggesting that any serious effort toward deficit reduction should require shared sacrifice and that the pain should not simply be felt by working families and the most vulnerable people in our society.

“During the coming weeks I will be working with members of the Senate and the House on a deficit reduction proposal which cuts spending in those areas of government which are wasteful and unnecessary, while at the same time asking the wealthiest people in this country and the most profitable corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes.  I am especially interested in ending those loopholes which allow corporations and the wealthy to shelter income in tax havens overseas, costing the U.S. Treasury an estimated $100 billion a year in revenue.”

For questions, you can contact: Michael Briggs or Will Wiquist (202) 224-5141