Ohio’s NOT Clean Air Program
It’s called the “Ohio Clean Air Program.” If you live in Ohio and watch television, you’ve seen the commercials for it. A relatively young worker, talking about his or her job in the “clean energy” industry, worries that 2000 workers will lose their job to petroleum industry-financed forces who are against them unless House Bill 6 is passed. It is reasonable to assume that those workers are making wind turbines, or solar panels, or electric cars.
But they aren’t. The Nuclear industry has rebranded itself as “clean energy.” They have somewhat of a point; they aren’t burning hydrocarbons and putting pollutants in the air. But the “clean air program” in Ohio is actually a bailout for First Energy, the company that owns two nuclear reactors on Lake Erie; one at Oak Harbor near Toledo, and one at Perry northeast of Cleveland. These plants currently provide twelve percent of Ohio’s electricity. The Oak Harbor plant, Davis-Besse, started construction in 1970, while the Perry plant began in 1977. The passage of the “Clean Air Program,” aka House Bill 6, would give First Energy a $190 million per year windfall.
They, like all nuclear plants, are “clean” energy (with the exception of thermal pollution) until they aren’t. Standard operation produces nuclear waste that must be stored, currently onsite first in cooling pools, and then in concrete casks. With some of the byproducts hazardously radioactive for thousands of years, the ultimate disposal may be in deep mines. Currently, those wastes remain onsite at the plants.
But the great concern with nuclear reactors is accidental release of radiation. With both the two Ohio plants designed in the 1960’s and built in the 1970’s, fifty-year old technology is a serious concern. Both plants are working past their anticipated lifespan.
In the meantime, the “Ohio Clean Air Program” would cut subsidies to other “clean energy” programs such as wind and solar. In the political wrangling over the bill, when those industries refused their support, Republicans rewrote the bill to cut out what little access they had been given. It also removes targets for clean energy production from other Ohio utilities using natural gas and coal. And the “Clean Air Bill” would allow for coal-fired plants, the ones with the greatest amount of pollutants, to receive subsidies from their customers so they can continue to compete with cheaper natural gas plants.
This is where the “petroleum” industry angle comes in, allowing supporters to claim that the natural gas producers are opposed to the bill because it supports nuclear and coal. But they really aren’t.
Whether nuclear power is an acceptable “environmental” alternative to wind or solar is a subject for a different debate. As someone old enough to have lived during the Russian Chernobyl plant disaster, not an American design, and the Pennsylvania Three-Mile Island crisis, I think there are credible arguments for not using nuclear energy. But more importantly, the nuclear energy industry shouldn’t be using us.
First Energy is the main beneficiary of the House Bill 6, not the environment. They have branded themselves as “clean energy,” but the Bill cuts funding for other clean energy sources. They have picked the “straw-man” opponent of “big petroleum” as their opponent, trying to draw Ohio citizens to the conclusion that they are fighting petroleum-produced electricity in favor of the environment.
They aren’t. The “Ohio Clean Air Program” is a gift to the twice-bankrupted First Energy, and will ultimately result in more pollution. It will remove standards first set in 2008 for Ohio’s electricity producers, and allow subsidized coal energy production, the worst offending polluter.
It’s a Republican dominated State House in Ohio, and the number of political donations from coal, gas, and nuclear energy producers is high. It should be no surprise then, that the “winner” in the “Ohio Clean Air Program” isn’t Ohio’s clean air, or the citizens that breathe it. Nor are the truly “clean energy” industries, the wind farms, solar, and geo-thermal encouraged to keep producing in Ohio (an estimated 112,000 jobs versus the estimated 4000 combined at Davis-Besse and Perry.) They are left on their own, and we depend on the engineering of the 1960’s to protect us on Lake Erie.
Not a great choice.
