OPALCO: Please Stop Buying Nuclear Electricity

  • by: OrcasIsland.tv
  • recipient: Board of Directors: OPALCO, Friday Harbor, WA
Everyone who pays an electric bill in San Juan County is a part owner of Opalco - our energy Cooperative. Opalco encourages your participation in the Cooperative. This Petition will be sent to Opalco's Board of Directors, asking that our Cooperative stop buying 8% of our electric needs from Nuclear Power. This is one of the most effective ways of encouraging the development of alternatives. Let's make renewables the priority. You may disagree that Japan's Fukushima Nuclear plant is going to harm the world, but radiation from that single nuclear plant has produced fallout across the world. Radiation has been found in the air, water and milk in Washington state coming from the damaged Nuclear energy plant 5,000 miles away. America's nuclear plants are aging. If the radioactive material in just one power plant were dispersed across the planet, millions would lose their lives. There are over 500 nuclear reactors on this planet. Many are built on fault lines. All are heavily subsidized. Making all nuclear power plants, 100% safe, is impossible. Nuclear power plants will not survive all acts of nature. Making them immune to tornadoes, floods, aircraft accidents, is financially impossible. Ultimately there are no safe nuclear power plants. They all contain the kind of poison that is impossible to remove, once dispersed. An act of nature or terrorism could make large parts of the Earth - unlivable. 
Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: as Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes  Olof Gösta Alfvén said, "No acts of God can be permitted. Amory Lovins of RMI, a preeminent practical physicist wrote "Every currently operating light-water reactor, if deprived of power and cooling water, can melt down. Fukushima had eight-hour battery reserves, but fuel has melted in three reactors. Most U.S. reactors get in trouble after four hours. Some have had shorter blackouts. Much longer ones could happen."
"Nuclear-promoting regulators inspire even less confidence. The International Atomic Energy Agency's 2005 estimate of about 4,000 Chernobyl deaths contrasts with a rigorous 2009 review of 5,000 mainly Slavic-language scientific papers the IAEA overlooked. It found deaths approaching a million through 2004, nearly 170,000 of them in North America. The total toll now exceeds a million, plus a half-trillion dollars' economic damage"
"Nuclear power is the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away; the only one whose ingredients can help make and hide nuclear bombs; the only climate solution that substitutes proliferation, accident, and high-level radioactive waste dangers. Indeed, nuclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection."
"Japan, for its size, is even richer than America in benign, ample, but long-neglected energy choices. Perhaps this tragedy will call Japan to global leadership into a post-nuclear world. And before America suffers its own Fukushima, it too should ask, not whether unfinanceably costly new reactors are safe, but why build any more, and why keep running unsafe ones. China has suspended reactor approvals. Germany just shut down the oldest 41 percent of its nuclear capacity for study. America's nuclear lobby says it can't happen here, so pile on lavish new subsidies.""A durable myth claims Three Mile Island halted U.S. nuclear orders. Actually they stopped over a year before -dead of an incurable attack of market forces. No doubt when nuclear power's collapse in the global marketplace, already years old, is finally acknowledged, it will be blamed on Fukushima. While we pray for the best in Japan today, let us hope its people's sacrifice will help speed the world to a safer, more competitive energy future." - Rocky Mountain Institute
Currently, Opalco claims they are legally required to buy Nuclear energy because that is what the Membership/Owners of Opalco want. If you buy electricity in San Juan County, you are a Member/Owner of Opalco. This is your opportunity to speak up.
Sign this petition to request that Opalco, the San Juan Islands energy Cooperative to stop buying the 8% of electricity it does today from Nuclear power plants.
We the undersigned, as Member / Owners of Opalco do hereby ask that Opalco's Board of Directors, to instruct the management of Opalco to purchase no electricity made by nuclear energy electrical power plants, or from nuclear energy electric sources. We further ask that this policy be enforced by whatever changes are necessary to Opalco's Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation, and operating rules derived from them.
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