Smoking Gun Part 8 – (Gas industry firing at coal with Sierra Club assist)
Every once in a while I come across articles that directly support the notion that much of the energy source debate is really a marketing battle, though the stated topic…
I have always tried to be clear when I talk about how fossil fuel interests have been responsible for much of the success of the organized anti-nuclear movement. Many people in various discussion forums have misinterpreted my words “fossil fuel interests” as meaning just major oil companies, but I am trying to encompass a larger group that that. It includes coal and “natural” gas companies, pipeline companies, fossil fuel burning utility companies, railroads, many bankers, lawyers, and a large number of powerful unions whose members are often quite militant about protecting their dangerous, dirty, debilitating, but reasonably well paying jobs.
Many of the very large anti-nuclear demonstrations that some people may remember or have seen on video have been led by unions of miners or freight railroad employees.
A good friend sent me a link to one of the most direct smoking guns I have been able to post in quite some time. It is a YouTube video of an August 2008 BBC interview with Arthur Scargill, the former President of the British National Union of Miners. The occasion for the interview was Scargill’s attendance at Climate Camp 2008. Please watch this brief interview to help you understand just what I am trying to say about the confluence of interest groups that might otherwise be considered to be very strange bedfellows that come together to oppose nuclear power plants.
Scargill has made the smoking gun series here before. One thing you have to admire about the man is that he is not devious about promoting coal while bashing nuclear. If you listen closely, you will find that he is very specific about the kind of coal he likes – it is deep underground, not from open pits and it is British, not imported. (Coal from open pits, South Africa or the US does not represent any employment for British coal miners.) Scargill is not a fan of imported oil and gas and emphasizes that British oil and gas are rapidly depleting.
If you spend much time studying the energy business and listening closely to the internal debates between oil, gas, coal, wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, biofuels, and even more exotic forms like fusion, you will hear a lot of bickering. Gas people talk about how they produce just 60% of the CO2 of coal, wind advocates claim that they are cheaper than solar, geothermal guys point out that they can be available round the clock, and fusion folks point to a point in the distant future where they will be able to power everything from nothing.
Like many large families, however, non nuclear energy interests unite when they confront a common enemy – fission – with the potential to make them all lose power, wealth and influence. Sometimes when I point out all of the people who have a vested interest in fighting nuclear, my fission fellow fission fans get discouraged. After all, there are some powerful forces at work.
My answer to that potential discouragement is to remind them that the energy consumers in the world are far more numerous than the establishment energy producers. When we open our pro-fission tent to all of the people who own lungs and have a vested interest in clean air, we can find a lot of friends to help in the fight.
Rod Adams is Managing Partner of Nucleation Capital, a venture fund that invests in advanced nuclear, which provides affordable access to this clean energy sector to pronuclear and impact investors. Rod, a former submarine Engineer Officer and founder of Adams Atomic Engines, Inc., which was one of the earliest advanced nuclear ventures, is an atomic energy expert with small nuclear plant operating and design experience. He has engaged in technical, strategic, political, historic and financial analysis of the nuclear industry, its technology, regulation, and policies for several decades through Atomic Insights, both as its primary blogger and as host of The Atomic Show Podcast. Please click here to subscribe to the Atomic Show RSS feed. To join Rod's pronuclear network and receive his occasional newsletter, click here.
Dick Armey is a former US Congressman (Republican) who now serves as the chairman of FreedomWorks, a conservative, issues-based organization founded in 1984 that includes “full time staff in ten states and over 800,000 grassroots volunteers nationwide.” (quote from the organization’s “About Us” page). The tag line for the group’s web site is “Lower taxes,…
Back on 14 January 2006, I posted a comment titled “Smoking gun – part 1” in which I told you that I would be on the look out for nuclear opposition that can be directly tied to the desires of competitive industries to maintain their market share. Though there is enough circumstantial evidence out there…
I came across a fascinating little book by Richard Meehan titled The Atom and the Fault: Experts, Earthquakes and Nuclear Power. It was published in 1984 by MIT University Press. Meehan is a geotechnical engineer who participated in several controversial nuclear plant projects in California, including Bodega Head, Malibu, and Diablo Canyon. Though the book…
In 1993, after I had made a decision to resign my active duty commission and design a small atomic engine, a colleague warned me that “the oil companies will never let you succeed.” At the time, I was pretty naive, so I didn’t heed his warning. Over the years, I have gradually learned more about…
Cape Wind is the leading offshore wind energy project in the United States. In 2001, more than 12 years ago, Jim Gordon, the project founder, started the process of promoting his vision of a building a 430 MWe (peak capacity) field of 130 massive (rotor diameter – 110 m, hub height – 80 m, nacelle…
In 1972, an Exxon internal audit disclosed that Esso Italiana, Exxon’s Italian subsidiary, had been making payments to Italian political parties that were tied by amount to specific corporate objectives. One of the objectives that was listed on documents seized by Italian authorities was halting nuclear energy development in Italy in favor of burning more…