Mr. "P-stinger" has made much of his supposed "code of conduct", namely that commentors must identify themselves before he will air the comment. Aside from the fact that he has not identified himself .........except as a nom-de-plume alias, those few who have actually read his swarm of ever-changing blogs have seen that NO comments ever appear. Either nobody is reading, or P-stinger just ain't ever in the mood to discuss anything. Obviously, he has an idee fixe', and that is all he will publish.
The thoughts of local people are of no interest to him. He does , however, dissect, rearrange, and reuse whatever copy is sent to him, disrespectfully slicing, dicing, and cherry picking, to carefully appropriate only that part that will maintain his negative outlook, at all cost, (and destroying whatever truth generous stakeholders have sent him, intentionally obscuring their realities for his idee fixe'.). An uninvolved observer might call him a rabid propaganda hack. Those closer to the issue can see his epic struggles to evade the obvious, and sympathize with his strange discomfiture a bit.
This guy is in over his head.
P-stinger cites worker injury claims from an Ohio factory, as if they are relevant to Indian Point, and its place in the local community. Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from being some exploitive mine cartel, abusing West Virginia, or South Ohio Appalachian unfortunates , Entergy has come into the area to clean up whatever shoddy conditions it might find, and its relation to the local environment, and the local communities is an excellent, open, helpful stance, one which the few local "activists" like to suspect as not truly felt, but they are wrong.
Now on to a comment on "P-stinger's" Portsmouth Diffusion Plant article.
Let's talk about materials handling, versus a safe deposit box in a bank. If I have a business pouring concrete, there's a very good chance my entire business, and everyone in it, is going to end up with concrete dust on them.The job is to move the concrete around, to handle it, to process it, to change it from a dusty form into a wet form, and then to pour it. It is absolutely hands-on , in the most intimate sense.(when I built a wall on my property ten years ago, the concrete got in my clothing, under my nails, and even deep into my ears-- the texture of the skin on my hands was changed, roughened..it took months to get back to normal). On South Street in Peekskill, just outside the local concrete factory, the wheel tracks from the cement trucks are permanently etched into the blacktop, in grey. I would not buy, or live in, a house that was next to a cement company.
My safe deposit box, in a local bank, is entirely different from this. From outside my safe deposit box, there's no way to know that my house deed, and my securities ownership certificates are in the box. No dust emerges from the box, and I only visit it perhaps twice a year, preferring to allow its silent, hidden financial power to uphold my existence as a homeowner and citizen, from deep inside a secure, clean fortress, from which no threat emerges, no dirt, no dust, no wheel tracks etched in the road. Carefully reading my financial documents once a year does not roughen my hands, or make me cough with silicosis.
The process of mining and transforming any mineral is a dirty hands-on job, and America's miners suffer great sacrifices to bring us our coal, our gold, our copper.(two miners were killed in West Virginia just days ago). In China, 5000 mine workers are killed each year, in China's pursuit of modernity via coal power.When America had it all on the line, not knowing whether the Axis powers would prevail and conquer the USA, America's mining and materials handling capabilities were called on to save our country.The need was so great, that current notions of environmental preservation, or worker safety were totally ignored. The feeling was, that if 5000 young marines could sacrifice their lives on Iwo Jima, the injuries of a few miners or gaseous diffusion plant workers was a much more limited sacrifice. In fact it WAS a much more limited sacrifice. But that was then, that was mining, and that was materials handling. The material was uranium ore, fabricated into nuclear fuel at Portsmouth, Hanford, Savannah River, Paducah, Mound, and other sites.
Now on to the safe deposit box.
Not diminishing any rightful claim that workers may have been injured under cold war conditions at some nuclear materials handling plant, the conditions at a modern generation station are totally different, more akin to my safe deposit box. Unlike at Portsmouth uranium factory, inside any generating station, the high energy materials are never handled. As a matter of fact they are religiously isolated by both physical, and procedural means. Nobody gets sick. The minerals are never even touched. They are locked in a vessel, inside a protective shield, inside a protective dome, which is sealed to the outside, and just like my house deed and my financial documents, they grant power cleanly and silently simply by being in there. If you claim an unpaid environmental justice debt attaches to that clean, hidden power, then I challenge you to differentiate that debt from the environmental debt owed to all the miners, oil drillers, concrete handlers, with their black lung, their silicosis, their frequent deaths and sicknesses, and even the workmen who built your house 100 years ago, sick from handling creosote, asphalt, lead paint, openly used asbestos, lead plumbing pipes and their carelessly inhaled lead solder fumes, sulphuric acid solder flux, etc., etc.
Indian Point is a huge safe deposit box, containing New York State's power to prosper. You don't have to visit that power in order to use it. Clever, caring people, your own neighbors, manage your wealth for you without ever needing to bother you. Your fingernails gather no concrete, no lead, no solder flux. The safe deposit box stays locked. Only wealth comes out of it, on half a dozen high tension lines, powering every hospital, every political party office, every antinuclear activist's PC , and every single secure home in our flourishing Hudson Valley region.
There is no need to put the bank out of operation, or shred your own house deed, to make a point about mistreated materials workers 50 years ago. We are all innocent of that crime. Accept your own wellbeing, do not feel guilt over your own survival, those who suffered to bring it to you would have suffered, even if you threw off your clothes like Francis of Assisi, and sat naked in the street to wear their hurt, as if it were yours.
