PHOTO/ DAYMONJHARTLEY.COM
DETROIT, MI — Just after the fourth anniversary of the ongoing nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima on March 11, here in Michigan we stand at a pivotal moment in the direction of our state’s energy future. We are half a world apart from Japan, but we’re really too close for comfort.
DTE Energy’s Fermi-2 nuclear plant continues to operate just 30 miles away (the utility is seeking to extend Fermi-2’s license from 40 to 60 years). It has the same flawed containment design that failed in March 2011 and has been a major source of controversy for decades.
At the same time, DTE is about to receive approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for construction and operation of a Fermi-3, which if built would be the largest single nuclear reactor in the world, right next to Fermi-2. Cost projections are climbing toward $20 billion, and completion of Fermi-3 won’t be achieved without federal subsidies in the billions, plus Construction Work In Progress (CWIP, translated billing customers in advance with the approval of the Michigan Public Service Commission). DTE’s 1500-plus megawatt Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor would be the first of its kind built anywhere. It would require more concrete than to build the Pentagon, hardly a carbon-free operation.
Those who will remember will recall that Detroit Edison’s Fermi-1 (also a prototype) suffered a partial meltdown on October 5, 1966, chronicled in John Fuller’s excellent book “We Almost Lost Detroit.”
So as new Environmental Protection Agency regulations are mandating the shutdown of coal-fired power plants, we stand at an energy crossroads. After decades of pursuing the nuclear option at the direction of “experts” and multi-million dollar ad campaigns with no solutions for permanent waste storage in sight, with ever-multiplying reactor safety issues and construction price tags reaching into the stratosphere—at what point do we say “Yes!” in a big way to wind, solar, energy efficiency and conservation and green jobs?
Especially when demand projections by independent analysts agree that electricity from Fermi-3 isn’t needed. Especially when there’s some 650 tons of intensely radiated high-level nuclear waste in Fermi-2’s jammed fuel pool with no national repository. Especially when we come to the collective realization that safe, clean, “too cheap to meter” nuclear power has been a government/industry financed mirage all along.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology has estimated that global nuclear plant construction would have to triple to even begin to mitigate the effects of climate change with nuclear power.
But if DTE and NRC go ahead with their choreographed power tangos for Fermi-3 and Fermi-2, challenges await them emanating from the public square—questioning the Certificate Of Need for Fermi-3, and the 20-year license extension for Fermi-2.
From the public square, Albert Einstein once said, should come America’s voice about nukes.
