Who is Karl Grossman ?

Karl Grossman
•    Gender: Male
•    Industry: Education
•    Occupation: Journalist and Journalism Professor
•    Location: Sag Harbor : New York : United States

Biographical Sketch
I have specialized in doing investigative reporting in a variety of media for more than 40 years. I teach as well as practice journalism. I am a professor at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury where my courses include Investigative Reporting. My website is at www.karlgrossman.com. For over 15 years I have hosted the nationally-aired TV program Enviro Close-Up and have written and narrated TV documentaries for EnviroVideo (www.envirovideo.com) including "Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens." I am the chief investigative reporter for the WVVH-TV (www.wvvh.com) and do weekly commentary for WLIU-FM (www.wliu.org). I am the author of six books including "Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power;" "Power Crazy;" and "The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet." Honors I have received for journalism include the George Polk, James Aronson and John Peter Zenger Awards. My weekly column runs in newspapers of the Press Newspaper Group and in other papers. I have given presentations in the U.S. and around the world.

Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

By KARL GROSSMAN
The reaction from safe-energy advocates is mixed to the proposed appointment of Steven Chu as U.S. energy secretary by President-Elect Barak Obama. Mixed is a charitable response to the prospects of Chu being in charge of the U.S. Department of Energy. “He’s really big on efficiency and renewables,” says Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, of Chu. But he is “looking at nuclear as well. He and President-elect Obama are not anti-nuclear, and not perhaps as versed on it as they should be.” Mariotte has a major concern that “they will accede to demands to fund nuclear power made by Congress”—awash in contributions from the nuclear power industry and with many members loyal to the national nuclear laboratories in their districts.

Although Chu has directed the 4,000-employee Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory into research into solar and biomass and other work in renewable energy technologies since becoming its director in 2004, it’s not as broad in its approach as the Department of Energy’s lone laboratory dedicated to all forms of clean, sustainable energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado (with a staff of 1,000).
“He’s trapped in that nuclear mindset,” says Jim Riccio, nuclear policy analyst for  Greenpeace USA., of Chu. “He thinks we’re acting on fear, not reason. Why environmentalists oppose nuclear power is reason, not fear. And it is reason, not fear, why we say nuclear power can’t address global warming. In the time frame necessary, it would be prohibitively expensive and drive out the real solutions.” Riccio notes Chu has “backed alternatives” but he (Riccio) is concerned about what room there’ll be for them “in the portfolio” of the Department of Energy because of Chu’s nuclear power attachment


Thursday, July 23, 2009
Deadly Gamble: Nuclear Power and You

 WE’RE TOLD IT IS SAFE, BUT THE EVIDENCE INDICATES SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT.

By Karl Grossman

MYTHS

Nuclear power is needed

    The prestigious British magazine New Scientist pointed to a United Nations report declaring that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs”
From solar to wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy technology) to wave-power to tidal-power to bio-fuels to small hydropower to co-generation (combining the generation of heat and electricity) and on and on, a renewable energy windfall is here today.  Consider the breakthrough at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, regarding the use of solar power to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen, with the hydrogen then usable as a fuel. “It’s the forever fuel,” Dr. John Turner, senior scientist at NREL told me. “This uses our two most abundant natural resources—sunlight and water—to give us an energy supply that is inexhaustible.”

MYTH

 Nuclear Power “Doesn’t Contribute” to Global Warming

“The nuclear industry conveniently omits [that] the emissions related to nukes are caused by the fossil fuel-intensive processes involved in uranium mining, conversion, enrichment, transport and construction. As a result nuclear power produces direct and indirect emissions of 73 to 230 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of electricity produced. Wind and solar, by comparison, are virtually greenhouse-gas free, recouping construction emissions in the first years of operation.”

MYTH

 France’s nuclear “success” story.

The French nuclear power program is a health and economic mess. A Beyond Nuclear report—“Nuclear Power and France: Setting the Record Straight”—discloses leukemia clusters in communities around France’s La Hague nuclear reprocessing center. It notes that the facility discharges 100 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste yearly into the English Channel. Waters off La Hague have been “measured as 17 million times more radioactive than normal sea water,” and this contamination has affected waters as far as the Arctic Circle.A majority in France want nuclear power phased out, polling shows. There have been massive protests against construction of new nuclear plants.

MYTH
Uranium fuel is abundant.

 Sources for ore containing substantial amounts of high-grade uranium-235 are not abundant. “Startingly, there are only a few decades left of the proven high-grade uranium ore it [nuclear power] needs for fuel,” says Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation (NewEconomics.org).