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Caselist.CitesClass[14]

Cites

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1		-==1NC- DA==
2		-Phasing out nuclear power empirically increases use of coal and gas—other forms of green energy are too expensive
3		-Adler 16: Mother Jones; Bernie Sanders Wants to Phase Out Nuclear Power; Ben Adler; April 5, 2016, 6:00 AM; http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/grist-bernie-sanders-wants-to-phase-out-nuclear-power-plants Is hastening nuclear power's demise a good idea?
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5		-Holthaus, citing Nordhaus' frequent collaborator Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute, argues that if you ramp down nuclear too quickly, it will lead to an increase in the use of coal or gas. "The net effect of nuclear retirements will generally be increasing emissions." That's also the view of Devin Hartman, electricity policy manager for the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, and a former energy market analyst at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He points out that retired nuclear plants in the Northeast and California have been mostly replaced by increased natural gas usage. And in Japan and Germany, where the governments have been shutting down nuclear reactors since the Fukushima meltdown, coal use has spiked. "Shutting down nuclear plants would create a little more demand for energy efficiency and renewables, but the net effect of nuclear retirements will generally be increasing emissions," Hartman says. That's partly because there is excess coal- and gas-burning capacity in the current energy system. While generating an additional megawatt-hour of electricity from existing solar or wind facilities can be cheaper than burning coal, building a whole new set of wind turbines is more expensive than just feeding more gas into your existing gas-fired plant. Holthaus cites a report from centrist think tank Third Way on US nuclear plant retirements; it projects that shuttered plants would lead to more natural gas usage and increased CO2 emissions.
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8		-====Renewables aren’t an energy source—they require base loading from coal and fossil fuels due to the unpredictable nature of their natural factors—this is 2-4x worse than just nuclear power ====
9		-IAEA 15 ,,International Atomic Energy Agency "CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR POWER 2015" Vienna Austria 2015,,
10		-Renewable technologies (hydropower, wind, solar) do not face the risk of interruptions in fuel supplies, making them somewhat similar to nuclear power. The difficulty associated with their prospective major expansion in the first half of the twenty-first century forecasted by the IEA ~~11~~ is not in making reserves of energy sources but in creating storage for the produced energy. The reason is intermittency: in contrast to the dispatchable technologies powered by fuels (nuclear or fossils) with guaranteed energy output allowing long term planning, some renewables depend on unpredictable variations in natural conditions, such as windiness and insolation. Considering the fact that large scale storage of electricity is not yet affordable, this creates a significant challenge for the stable and reliable functioning of the power grid. In order to close the gap between demand and unstable supply, alternative energy sources are needed. Normally, these are thermal power plants (as the output of NPPs cannot change fast enough to balance the variations in wind or solar outputs), paradoxically increasing the importance of fossils fuels. It follows that in order to secure the dependability of electricity supply in systems using significant shares of intermittent renewables, such systems will have to include a substantial share of power plants fuelled by coal or gas. This reduces their environmental benefits significantly below the levels estimated by LCAs of various solar and wind technologies (see Section 2.3). Therefore, at the current level of development of energy storage technologies, power systems relying heavily on intermittent renewables will not only be subject to less stable supply but will also face the energy security threats associated with fossil fuels. Moreover, in terms of operational and environmental benefits, such systems are characterized by the inefficiency of fossil fuel power plant operation due to the unpredictable and abrupt changes in their required output. Though their ability to change output quickly makes them preferential options in comparison with nuclear, it leads to an inevitable trade-off in the form of significant N2O emissions that are hard to control under changing power rate regimes. The magnitude of such environmental penalties is not yet clear but, according to a study of the US National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), reductions in N2O emissions in energy systems with a 20 share of wind or solar PV are only 30–50 of those estimated by ignoring the fossil fuel backup. In the worst case scenarios, emissions of N2O from such systems can actually increase by 2–4 times ~~37~~.
11		-Coal and fossil fuels kill millions—quantifiably worse than nuclear power
12		-Shrope 13: Shrope, Mark. April 2, 2013. "Nuclear Power Prevents Deaths Causes." Climate Change: Study estimates that nuclear energy leads to substantially fewer pollution-related deaths and greenhouse gas emissions compared with fossil-fuel sources. http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Prevents-Deaths-Causes.html. RW
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14		-Using nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es3051197). In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, critics of nuclear power have questioned how heavily the world should rely on the energy source, due to possible risks it poses to the environment and human health. "I was very disturbed by all the negative and in many cases unfounded hysteria regarding nuclear power after the Fukushima accident," says report coauthor Pushker A. Kharecha, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York. Working with Goddard’s James E. Hansen, Kharecha set out to explore the benefits of nuclear power. The pair specifically wanted to look at nuclear power’s advantages over fossil fuels in terms of reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Kharecha was surprised to find no broad studies on preventable deaths that could be attributed to nuclear power’s pollution savings. But he did find data from a 2007 study on the average number of deaths per unit of energy generated with fossil fuels and nuclear power (Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61253-7). These estimates include deaths related to all aspects of each energy source from mining the necessary natural resources to power generation. For example, the data took into account chronic bronchitis among coal miners and air pollution-related conditions among the public, including lung cancer. The NASA researchers combined this information with historical energy generation data to estimate how many deaths would have been caused if fossil-fuel burning was used instead of nuclear power generation from 1971 to 2009. They similarly estimated that the use of nuclear power over that time caused 5,000 or so deaths, such as cancer deaths from radiation fallout and worker accidents. Comparing those two estimates, Kharecha and Hansen came up with the 1.8 million figure. They next estimated the total number of deaths that could be prevented through nuclear power over the next four decades using available estimates of future nuclear use. Replacing all forecasted nuclear power use until 2050 with natural gas would cause an additional 420,000 deaths, whereas swapping it with coal, which produces significantly more pollution than gas, would mean about 7 million additional deaths. The study focused strictly on deaths, not long-term health issues that might shorten lives, and the authors did not attempt to estimate potential deaths tied to climate change. Finally the pair compared carbon emissions from nuclear power to fossil fuel sources. They calculated that if coal or natural gas power had replaced nuclear energy from 1971 to 2009, the equivalent of an additional 64 gigatons of carbon would have reached the atmosphere. Looking forward, switching out nuclear for coal or natural gas power would lead to the release of 80 to 240 gigatons of additional carbon by 2050. By comparison, previous climate studies suggest that the total allowable emissions between now and 2050 are about 500 gigatons of carbon. This level of emissions would keep atmospheric CO,,2,, concentrations around 350 ppm, which would avoid detrimental warming. Because large-scale implementation of renewable energy options, such as wind or solar, faces significant challenges, the researchers say their results strongly support the case for nuclear as a critical energy source to help stabilize or reduce greenhouse gas concentrations. Bas van Ruijven, an environmental economist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., says the estimates on prevented deaths seem reasonable. But he wonders if the conclusion that nuclear power saves hundreds of times more lives than it claims will convince ardent critics. The nuclear power issue is "so polarized that people who oppose nuclear power will immediately dispute the numbers," Van Ruijven says. Nonetheless, he agrees with the pair’s conclusions on the importance of nuclear power.
15		-The coal industry is the epitome of capitalist violence worker exploitation—terrible working conditions magnify chances of toxic inhalations—turns and outweighs case
16		-Hopkins 16: The Insanity of Coal Mining. Joe Hopkins. June 4, 2016. World Socialist Party. http://www.wspus.org/2016/06/the-insanity-of-coal-mining/. RW
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18		-National Public Radio (NPR) and the Centre for Public Integrity (CPI) teamed up to produce a special investigative report on the increased incidence of black lung disease in coal miners. The results of their combined investigations were released on the NPR’s radio stations on July 9–10, 2012 and broadcast on Public Broadcasting Systems (PBS) television on July 9, 2012. The investigation found that black lung disease in miners had quadrupled since the 1980s and doubled since June–July 2002. This doubling coincides with an increase of 600 hours in the work year of the average miner since 2002. The NPR/CPI investigation focused on mining in West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky and found that over 10,000 miners had died of black lung disease and ‘massive fibrosis’ (the most advanced and deadly form of black lung disease) between 1985 and 1994 and that over 2,000 had died from the same causes in West Virginia alone. There is no treatment for black lung disease. Many victims report that at its ‘massive fibrosis’ stage they can either eat or breathe, but not both at the same time. One victim interviewed on NPR and PBS said that he could not even hold his two-year-old grandson for more than a minute or so before oxygen deprivation set in and he had to set the child down. It was too exerting for him. The coal seams in existing mines are thinner now than they were decades ago, and mining companies are extracting coal seams down to one inch thick. These seams are often embedded in quartz rock that has a high silica content. As deadly as coal dust is in itself, the dust produced from extracting these tiny seams is even more deadly. Hiding the dust In 1960 Congress passed a law to protect the health of coal miners by regulating coal dust levels in mines. The Big Coal lobby and the elected politicians of the area (and beyond) had a hand in weakening safety protections in the law that was actually passed. Senator Robert Byrd (known as ‘the coal miner’s friend’) helped weaken the law for economic reasons – to make it cheaper for mining companies to comply and ensure that Big Coal would continue to contribute money to his many, many re-election campaigns. The Senator had a vested interest in protecting coal industry profits. All politicians want corporate profits to be large. The law that finally passed to protect coal miners from the worst abuses of the industry was weak, flawed, and had many loopholes. The law was weak as it put in place the concept of self-policing by the company itself. It was flawed because inspectors were not allowed to enter the mines while production was going on (which was 24 hours a day) without the prior consent of the mining company. One of the loopholes is that when the coal dust samples collected by the industry do not agree with the coal dust samples collected by regulatory inspectors, industry is granted what in golf is called a ‘Mulligan’ — a replay — but one no opponent would ever accept. The company is allowed to collect dust samples from five locations chosen by itself and calculate an average that becomes the definitive coal dust concentration to compare with the figure derived from the samples collected by the government regulatory inspector. For some reason, the concentrations determined by the coal companies and those calculated by the inspectors very often do not agree! The coal companies, of course, come up with lower figures. Mining companies have still been cited with more than 53,000 violations during the last decade. For some strange reason fewer than 1,000 of them resulted in court action! Dust pumps were installed to collect coal dust samples at the coal face, often mounted on the mining machine itself. At a Massey Mine the bosses directed that plastic bags should be put over the intake of the pump to cheat the test. The workers were told that if the concentrations of coal dust were found to be too high the mine would be closed and "they’d be out of work." There is one tiny and tarnished silver lining. The Patriot Coal Company filed for bankruptcy on July 9, 2012. The tarnish is that Patriot miners are now without jobsThe reader may well ask why coal-mining companies would deliberately cheat on safety tests and regulations designed to protect the health (and thus the productivity) of their own workers. Big business is in business to make the greatest profit possible. Workers are expendable and can easily be replaced from the pool of the unemployed. Even during ‘good times’ 3.5 to 5 of the workforce are unemployed. During times of high unemployment (like now) a lost worker is even easier to replace and may even be got at a lower wage rate than the lost worker was being paid. Big business is the product and ultimate consequence of the capitalist system. Capitalism demands that companies grow their profits or lose out and die, to be taken over by more competitive companies. Competition, under the neoliberal ethos in vogue for the past 35–40 years, means upping productivity (through technology and/or getting workers to do more work in a shorter span of time) and cutting costs, the largest cost being the labor bill, i.e., reducing wagesThe capitalist system in its current form confounds many older folks who remember the capitalism-with-a-human-face of the Keynesian phase of capitalist development, when wages were tied to worker productivity. It also confounds younger workers, but for different reasons. Younger folks born in the last forty years have experienced the rise of neo-liberalism as an inevitable progression, an economic necessity, almost a natural law. In the capitalist world of today, the worker class hears big business bosses and corporate CEOs, economic experts, and even the workers’ own union bosses proclaiming that ‘we’re all in it together’ and ‘we’ve got to do more with less.’ The worker class hears nothing of viable alternatives to the rat race that has taken over their lives. They just keep plugging along thinking TINA — There Is No Alternative. The bosses, CEOs, economists, and union bosses, all committed to and doing just fine by the system, say that the status quo is natural, moral, and efficient on its own and that the ‘free market’ system can only function at its highest potential if government stays out of the market. Otherwise it won’t be ‘free’ to fairly distribute its blessings to those who work hard and play by the rulesDue to the $333–500 billions’ worth of externalities generated by the coal industry every year, with damage done by the coal industry amounting to an additional $1–1.5 trillion per year, coal mining would be a thing of the past were the US government, with its monopoly on violence, not in collusion with Big Business — in this case, the coal industry. There is no such thing as a ‘free market’ — and never has been. Government, with its law-making, courts, standing army, and security forces and its self-sustaining monopoly on violence, is necessary to camouflage the tremendous inequality and disequilibrium between the social classes and create the deliberately misleading impression of a society of normal human relations. If all of us, every working class person, were to just say no — and the military and police are working class people too — the means of production would pass into our hands and we could stop the insane production that destroys the world and has been destroying the world for over two hundred years now under the capitalist system.

EntryDate

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1		-2016-10-15 10:53:33.0

Judge

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1		-Jesus Caro

Opponent

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1		-Acton Boxborough JW

ParentRound

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1		-5

Round

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1		-3

Team

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1		-Lexington Weiler Neg

Title

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1		-SEPTOCT- Coal DA

Tournament

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1		-Bronx