FPL reactors will destroy Miami water supply
By Philip Stoddard
(Editor’s Note: This is a letter taken from the Letters section of a recent Miami Herald. Over the past few weeks Progreso Weekly has written about Florida Power & Light and its request for a 30% hike in rates paid for by Florida residents — despite record earning in the past few years. This South Miami resident complains on nuclear reactors — maybe that’s where the rate hike money will be employed?)
Florida Power & Light (FPL) must be stopped from endangering our lives, destroying our water supply and making us pay for it.
FPL plans to double the number of nuclear reactors at Turkey Point and to continue storing nuclear waste on-site indefinitely.
Radioactive tritium leaks reveal the existing cooling canals already push saltwater into South Dade well fields — new reactors will hasten this process. Further, FPL intends to run above-ground 230,000 volt transmission lines through Biscayne and Everglades National Parks, then up U.S. 1 adjacent to schools, hospitals, residences, businesses and commuter lines.
In study after study, cancer rates are elevated along high voltage transmission corridors.
FPL’s own consultant stated these cancer risks cannot be dismissed.
And we don’t even wish to imagine a nuclear accident close to a city of 2 million. Yet, after a contractor sabotaged a nuclear reactor at Turkey Point, FPL’s licensed operator, sworn to secrecy, resigned rather than follow orders to restart the reactor before finishing his safety checks.
Rate-payers are already paying FPL for future reactor construction, roughly $18 billion to provide electricity for 750,000 households. This money could fund solar/wind renewable energy at $25,000 per household with no new power lines.
We don’t need the nuclear option.
At recent public hearings FPL executives admitted they don’t know the cancer risk from their proposed transmission lines; how to get nuclear waste out of Miami-Dade County; the consequences of nuclear reactors to our water supply; nor eventual costs of these nuclear plants to rate-payers (FPL’s own estimates vary by 50 percent).
You might ask how nuclear reactors were sited on a fragile coastline in a hurricane zone in the first place. FPL employees have confided that FPL projects demand for new power upstate but they’re proposing nukes in Miami-Dade because our county commissioners are more easily “persuaded.” Indeed, by no small coincidence, lobbyists who work for local municipalities and for Gov. Charlie Crist’s Senate campaign also work for FPL.
Florida’s governor can stop this Turkey. Make Charlie Crist and his would-be successors promise: NO NEW NUKES.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/gables-smiami/story/1241181.html
