EWEB board meeting December 5, 2023

comments of Mark Robinowitz

I wanted to call your attention to the recent financial meltdown of the NuScale smaller nuclear reactor company. As you may know, they were planning to build new nukes at the Idaho National Engineering Lab in cahoots with utilities in Utah. The finances behind this project have suffered a loss of coolant, excuse me, loss of finances accident and it has been canceled. This isn't the end of the smaller reactor concept but it is a significant setback.

While cost overruns are a tertiary concern with nuclear reactors - their synthesis of ultrahazardous isotopes incompatible with life that will remain dangerous for longer than civilization has existed is the primary problem - it is still noteworthy that building fission facilities is the most expensive - and dangerous - way to boil water.

Fiscal responsibility is one of the reasons EWEB abandoned efforts to build reactors near Coburg and on the coast north of Florence a half century ago. Since then, we are no closer to figuring out how to detoxify the hundreds of radioisotopes created by all reactors. The laws of physics are not subject to wishful thinking. Public relations and denial don't make plutonium safe in the environment.

You're considering utility legislative priorities this evening. It's worth remembering that EWEB was the only utility in Oregon to speak in favor of rescinding the 1980 citizens initiative to prohibit new nukes unless a national nuclear dump is some day built. EWEB isn't the only pro-nuclear utility in the state but the only one to submit testimony on a bill to overturn existing law.

In the current issue of The Nation, there is an article titled The Green New Deal Is the Opiate of the Masses. https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/degrowth-communism-green-new-deal/
It makes the obvious, yet unpalatable point, that solar panels, electric cars and other techno fixes are not capable of sustaining the unsustainable. Instead of hoping for green growth, we need to recognize that the Earth is a sphere and not getting any bigger. Abundance is not the same as infinity, whether regarding economic indicators, energy consumption, population, anything. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Perhaps we will continue to strive for endless growth until it's no longer physically possible. We're bumping up against those limits, temporarily obscured by fracked gas and oil, tar sands and other extreme measures. It's noteworthy that the largest energy source for electric grids, including the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, which EWEB is part of, is fracked natural gas. Last year, fracked gas was three quarters of all unnatural gas in the USA, since the conventional natural gas peaked in 1973 and is largely approaching depletion.
www.peakchoice.org/gas.pdf
www.peakchoice.org/electricity.pdf

And looming on the horizon is not mere natural limits, but political instability. One would be foolish to make predictions about the consequences of the war in Gaza but this could disrupt global energy shipments, perhaps more noticeably than 1973 (when only a few percent of global oil trade was disrupted).

Even without that we are playing musical chairs with the last of the concentrated resources but in collective denial and bargaining (pretending that digging up uranium in other countries will keep endless growth powered, for example). Radical honesty is long overdue but at this late date it will likely be forced by circumstance, not preemptively chosen.