Seabrook now has an okay for low power testing. In Alaska they're still scraping goo off the rocks. What's the connection? The conventional answer is that we can no longer depend upon fossil fuels to answer our ever-increasing energy usage. We need reactors like Seabrook so that we can be assured of adequate energy and not be dependent on finite resources or brown-skinned people with towels on their heads.
But there's another way to look at this scenario. First, it's assumed that energy needs are "ever-increasing" and that the only way to solve this problem is to create more plants, nuclear or otherwise. But this ignores history as recent as a decade ago. When OPEC strangled the industrial nations, Americans and others adopted conservation measures that reduced oil imports from the Middle East significantly. Under the threat of a deteriorating standard of living, people began to accept "radical" ideas about energy. Smaller cars, retrofitted buildings, increased use of passive solar design -- these and other practices helped American society save a great deal of energy.
But now that world oil markets are glutted, Americans are forgetting. And this amnesia is abetted by gigantic corporations who tell us that we need more when we could be using what we have a lot better and by lackeys like Jim Finnegan who suggest that Seabrook protestors are really crypto-terrorists.
What Seabrook and the Exxon Valdez suggest is that we need to examine how our "free market" mentality and practices have made us unfree. If you believe in the virtue of free enterprise, consider the following. Exxon dumps 11,000,000 gallons of oil into pristine waters. The only one who gets blamed is Captain Hazelwood (no one suggests that president Lawrence Rawl be brought to trial) and Exxon gets to raise oil and gasoline prices with impunity and even be eligible to deduct clean-up expenses from their tax obligations (not that the obligations are all that high to begin with.) Those are the privileges one gets when one is a company whose profits last year were larger than most nations' economies. It's not a privilege you or I get. The glories of the free market will also soon saddle us with inflated electric rates to pay for a reactor with a useful lifetime of at most 20 years and then pay for the opportunity to take it apart.
Whatever one thinks of the Seabrook protestors, they at least do not swallow the party line. Thoreau said that people who love freedom should provide a "counter-friction" to any machine that threatens to take it away. In this case the machine is called "free enterprise," and it should be opposed whenever it opposes common sense and the needs of ordinary people.
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