Out here in the Northwest, nuclear power has a long history of being dismissed as the kooky, plutocratic boondoggle it is, even while we have been spared the worst of the fears it understandably creates.  Back in the 70′s, when our local utility, Portland General Electric, built the Trojan nuclear power plant, its remote location in Rainier, Oregon, about 40 miles from Portland, perhaps contributed to the lack of significant opposition to its initial construction, so much so that by the time it went online, a consortium of public power utilities and the State of Washington decided to build five of their own, presciently dubbed WPPSS. Just as Trojan was soon discovered to have myriad design flaws large and small that caused constant shutdowns, and regional opposition to nuclear power began to flower, WPPSS had already spent billions, primarily benefitting Trojan’s contractor, Bechtel, and other corporate welfare queens building the plants when it was discovered that both revenue projections and costs estimates used to justify the plants had been startlingly manipulated, and I’m sure you can guess in which direction, respectively.

The Keystone Kops quality that plagued nuclear power in the Northwest was so much a part of the culture that it was mockingly parodied on the local rock FM station, KGON, which had a daily “Nukes in the News” segment (to which CHNN owes its “Nudes in the News” category..), and in it, from around the world and right here at home, tales of the perfidy, stupidity, and indifference to its inherent dangers fell like rain from the nuclear industry.  After WPPSS collapsed in an embarrassing heap, with only one of its five plants completed and the rest scaled back or mothballed, Three Mile Island put an end, one would have thought for good, to the ridiculous idea that it would be smart to mine and unleash the earth’s deadliest substances to, well, boil water.

For a time, anyway.  Like any professional freeloaders, the nuclear industry found that getting real jobs, that is, finding something to do that wouldn’t require permanent government subsidy, incur uninsurable and incalculable risks, and create waste that no one on earth knows what to do with, was just too taxing.  After expensively and deceptively fighting voter initiatives to close its unseemly white elephant at its own expense rather than ratepayers, PGE finally got tired of the whole thing and closed Trojan anyway, and not only charged ratepayers for its losses, but even for the expense of dynamiting the thing, like a cat charging its owner to bury its own poop.  That sort of coup was impressive enough that Enron came calling, and soon PGE was part of that fine example of Randian Producerism.

In spite of this pretty clear-cut history, the political establishment from the Obama Administration to the New York Times all decided recently that it was time to join the kleptocratic Republicans in supporting the one thing on which the Village can all agree, taxpayer handouts to the wealthy and unscrupulous, and nuclear power obviously fit the bill.  Where would the modern day John Galts go for their welfare checks if the war machine ran a little slow for a term or two?   A plutocrat’s gotta eat, you know, and their bar tabs can be astronomical, especially if John Boehner’s there, which he no doubt usually is.

The only fly in the ointment, of course, is as ever those liberally-biased facts.  The “Green Economy” that nuclear power advocates envision is only green because that’s what happens when you have to evacuate a couple hundred thousand people, perhaps for a week, perhaps for decades, from large areas of formerly habitable planet.  Plants flourish, especially in the streets.

I feel guilty, really; I live just a few dozen miles from Hanford, where the Manhattan Project devised the fiendish nuclear devices that vaporized thousands of Japanese were concocted, and the only impact on my life from that questionable endeavor was that a large stretch of the over-engineered Columbia River  was miraculously spared the salmon-destroying overdevelopment of its safer, non-quarantined parts.  Nuclear Power, I can safely say, is dead again here.   The Japanese, on the other hand, have once again been pressed into grisly service to remind the world of the idiocy of it all.

I hope someone’s listening this time.

The Oregonian’s one successful area of this sort of endeavor has been on matters of the environment; so far it has forestalled the only possible salvation of Columbia River salmon, Snake River dam removal, promoted the destructive and useless deepening of the Columbia River Channel, and it has gone a long way toward re-legitimizing nuclear power in the eyes of a forgetful public.  Win, win, you know?  So why not go whole hog for that absurd,  Enron-bred chimera, Liquified Natural Gas?  Why wouldn’t you transport flammable gas, expensively liquified, across the ocean where it could expensively be re-converted to gas, and piped under the property of thousands of unwilling property owners through eminent domain to people who may or may not need/want it?  As a business model, it’s hard to beat, particularly in the regulatory climate in which we find ourselves, where failures are all socialized and profits taken before they ever materialize, but c’mon, Oregonianistas….  LNG is like soooo 1999.  There’s better scams out there, now.  I guess  at the Oregonian, though, Kenny Boy Lay still lives, and the stupid idea of carrying refrigerated Sterno across the Pacific through the treacherous shoals at the mouth of the Columbia pencils out somehow.

This week, the front company designed for nothing but fleecing investors rolled up its tent, after its road show, the Bradwood Landing LNG Terminal, finally retreated from its makeshift stage under a hail of rotten vegetables.  While most people, particularly those who don’t want exploding gas pipes under their land, looked askance at such a cockamamie idea, the Oregonian thought this baby was pure gold, and my only wish is that they owned shares, so they could put their money where there mouths have been.  You see, ever since Enron’s ridiculous and immediately mothballed India plants made a mockery of the entire notion of LNG, and the two other heavily subsidized West Coast ports have failed to see any business, anyone deeply involved in LNG has been tossed under Ayn Rand’s bus, but the Oregonian maintains, to this day, that that’s because hippies must have been driving it that day.

Although the company’s withdrawal of the proposal (for indolence on the part of Bradwood’s hucksters, among other things) occurred just a day before the inevitable bankruptcy of the sham firm touting it, the Oregonian somhow decided that it wasn’t the Free Market, but rather that Oregon is run by a bunch of radical environmentalists too busy doing bong rips and making sand candles to faithfully expedite the March of Progress.

Bizarre, far-fetched crony capitalist deals that trash the planet and make no sense economically can never fail, they can only be failed.  I read it in the Oregonian.

Nice sunrise today on the Hag veranda

UPDATED BELOW:

When I was a kid in the 70′s, everybody listened to KGON, the local FM rock station, and it was avowedly liberal: pro-pot, anti-Nixon, anti-war, with a great cast of hippie-ish DJ’s that became like family.  As Archie and Edith wistfully sang, “Those Were the Days.”  They had a feature in the morning, “Nukes in the News,” which poked fun at the near-daily shutdowns, cost overruns, and other problems that always plagued that particular branch of corporate welfare, and this was before Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome.”  Somehow, back then people understood, and it was uncontroversial to say on the airwaves, that Nixon was a crook, drug laws were stupid, wars were pointless disasters, and nuclear power was about the dumbest idea anybody ever thought of.   All these things are of course still true today, but few in our media understand this, and fewer recognize that the fact that such plain truths are still contested, much less denied, is a searing indictment of the way these bozos have screwed up doing their jobs over the last few decades.

President Obama announced recently that part of our efforts to combat global warming would be to “invest” in “new” nuclear power.  This cuckoo idea has been a favorite of such “liberal” rags as the NYT and WaPoo, and of course involves large corporations scooping up copious amounts of taxpayer dough, so it’s the sort of idea any politician might find attractive.  But honestly, just because the media was born yesterday doesn’t mean actual Americans were, and will never support nuclear power in their communities, and all it will take is the first plant going up amid protests and doubling and trebling of its budget that this idea will slither into the swamps from which it emerged, along with the reputations of the feckless politicians who supported it.

Forty years of nuclear power fiascoes has taught us a number of things, President Obama, so please take note:

1) The private market will never risk its money on nuclear power, owing to the 50% default rate and ruinous risks.

2) There is still no permanent place to store waste that will remain toxic for 100,000 years.

3) There will be accidents, given the appalling safety record of the industry, and

4) There is ZERO public support for this demented waste of money.

Those who would forget history are doomed to repeat it, and too bad Obama didn’t listen to KGON.  Whenever government takes a big leap into nuclear power , it always turns out the same, just ask the bonkers former Republican governor of Washington, Dixy Lee Ray (KGON called her Risky Delay).  This outspoken anti-environmentalist plunged her state into a decade-long financial and public relations disaster with her wanton embrace of the aptly named WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply System), which set out to build seven nuclear plants based on wildly overstated demand projections; only one ever went briefly online, and the rest were mothballed, abandoned, or aborted after Bechtel and the like made off with billions in state funds.

This time, the giveaway is even more flagrant, since the federal government is proposing to take on all the risk without even participating in any of the potential upside like Dixy did; whatever fake “profits” the corporate welfare queen, in this case Southern Companies, makes by overcharging its customers for “new” nuclear power it will get to keep to buy lead-lined private planes, US Senators, and such.  Ain’t bipartisanship grand?

Had KGON not long ago been bought out by Clear Channel and vanished into prerecorded obscurity, they would undoubtedly be dusting off “Nukes in the News.”

UPDATE: Alert Hag reader Jebbie reports that one of the WPPSS plants is still operating, # 2.  What an interesting name.  A later google search also revealed that there were only 5 WPPSS plants, not seven.  CHNN regrets the error, and will fire whoever was responsible when the hangover wears off.