Nuclear power in Miami Dade county by gimleteye

I wasn't invited to the FPL victory party, after the Miami Dade county commission voted 11-1 to approve the special use permit, an important step on FPL's way to obtaining permits for two new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point.

It’s been a lousy week for the public interest, down at County Hall. Not that the public stands much of a chance in our deformed representative democracy.

Up on the dais, the county commissioners know that few people pay attention to a style of governance in which all important decisions are counted, before the issue ever reaches meeting day.

Meeting day, especially on controversial issues, are for the make-believe lawyers on the commission —like Joe Martinez—to single out citizens who stray from conscribed roles. They are disrespectful even to their own colleagues.

It deserves exposure by the mainstream media how Katy Sorenson, the lone “no” vote on the Turkey Point nuclear plant zoning issue, fired questions that sealed the issue of doubt, while the rest of the commissioners led by Natacha Seijas and Audrey Edmunson chattered away.

Katy takes it in stride. It's disgusting to watch and you have to be at the county commission to see it, because the TV cameras only frame who is speaking and miss the rest.

The mercenaries in the audience sat pleased as Cheshire cats, filling the front two rows: "We're getting paid to watch this!"

It was an impressive display of what money can buy by Florida Power and Light.

By the time of the vote, the long train of supporters who testified at the public hearing had gone: two dozen speakers assembled from the cast of stock characters in the seventh grade play that passes for government: the first to rush to the podium, the president of the Latin Builders Association (I'm the boss!), the Chamber of Commerce fellow with his stentorian tone descended from a long line of identical Chamber fellows, the thankful and humble African American owner of a small trucking business, a preacher from Florida City in love with the television camera, a former nuclear engineer who castigated in a calibrated accent of the exilio the dark motives of a minority of objectors, a mayor, etc. etc. (There is a plot line for "Dexter", somewhere here.)

The county commissioners, backed by agency heads, said ‘not to worry, we have assurances and conditions’ which is how FPL got its special use zoning approval without even touching the two major issues—whether you like nuclear power or not: where’s the water going to come from, and where is the fill to raise the 350 acre site up in the air, by twenty feet.

Just watch what happens to those conditions when they are challenged by a corporation, FPL, that has plainly stated is will spend $100 million in the planning and permitting of the new reactors.

This was the main point of those who objected to the zoning approval: it’s not about nuclear power which somehow made environmentalists out of the very same interests who have trashed south Florida—it is about where the hell the water is going to come from to cool the reactors so they don't melt down, it is about protecting environmentally sensitive lands bordering Biscyane National Park that are already badly compromised by pollution and neglect.

Isn't the public owed that basic information, before the permitting squirts away from Miami Dade to the industry friendly confines of Tallahassee and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? no.

It wouldn’t have taken much for the county commissioners to stick up for the people’s concern about water supply and the cost: make FPL show exactly how they would get the water, today. Not tomorrow, not after they’ve buried the public in “process”, hired engineers and lobbyists who are former legislators or former agency heads, to testify that it will all work out at some indeterminate point in the future and that what happened at Chernobyl could never happen here.

Well, it can’t happen until it does happen, and then all you will hear is “oops”. You might hear about higher incidence of leukemia in the children of Homestead, Keys Gate, or the poor folk who go to church faithfully every Sunday.

And once these plants are built, in the time of a water crisis the needs of people will not come first: no, that issue has already been broached in the water disaster unfolding in Georgia, where the cooling requirements of nearby nuclear facilities are taking first call of supply.

But Miami is easy pickings. And Homestead, even easier. No one said a word—from the assembled interests of the Growth Machine—about the particulars of evaporating 90 million gallons per day.

No TV cameras. No opinion from the Miami Herald. Nada.

So if re-use water is used, or even the Floridan, to cool the reactors through evaporation, the rain clouds above your head will be filled with unmentionables. Vaporized piss and shit raining down on us.

Oh it will be cleaned to federal standards, FPL will say. "Cleaner than drinking water."

Remember those words, and then remember that current federal standards for drinking water don’t even factor in the stuff that gets by the cleaning filters: the pharmaceuticals that some county commissioners take for blood pressure, or estrogen for menopause or birth control, or the medical waste byproducts from hospitals, or the heavy metals and other inorganic chemicals that aren’t even listed.

Miami Dade county government had no business letting a pie-in-the-sky plan go through, and now a costly battle will be waged.

But this is not going to be a David vs. Goliath battle. It is simply a battle to get the facts out, that FPL refused to give to the public and rate payers and which your representative democracy should have insisted on but did not, busy as they were with the sober business of taking care of people.

Who knows at what point the county commissioners on the dais today will be looking for a consulting contract with the mercenaries in the audience, or a campaign contribution, or a vacation on a yacht off the coast of Mexico or a hotel in Puerto Rico.