Just Say NO to Smart Meters?

There are homeless people in California who blame their freshly installed PGE smart meter for forcing them to live out on the streets. These people are said to have little hope left, unless Californians save them by making PGE remove the meters.  Protests are mounting.  City councils are petitioning the California Public Utilities Commission to stop PGE's smart meter rollout over health issues. 

This kind of thing is very much like the irrational fear of radiation which causes no end of problems for the nuclear industry.  Renewables advocates might want to give this some thought. 

A report from San Francisco Aug 27 calling "Santa Cruzians" "crazy" quotes from a Stop Smart Meters Campaign pamphlet: 

"Those who are electrically sensitive have reported that the intense bursts of radiation from ‘smart’ meters are amongst the worst they have ever experienced. People throughout the state have been reporting headaches, nausea, dizziness, sleep disruption and other health impacts after smart meters are installed. PG&E has declined to remove the new meters even though they are causing adverse health impacts, leading some local residents to flee the state and stay with relatives. Some have even been forced into homelessness, living in their cars with the hope that their smart meter will be removed"

 But San Franciscans went "crazy" well before the good citizens of Santa Cruz:  Bay City News 10 reported August 6 that,

"The California Public Utilities Commission has received petitions from the City and County of San Francisco and other municipalities that want to delay implementation of the meters in Central and Northern California"

On the one hand, I'd like to see smart meters, and I wonder how solid anyone's evidence for a health concern with these meters can possibly be, given widespread use of the same wireless technology throughout society.   If people want to use cell phones and wireless computers but ban smart meters, I tend to suspect their motives. 

On the other hand, I find myself rooting for the "crazy" Santa Cruzians identified by the San Francisco paper, so that those renewables advocates who oppose nuclear power over simlilarly not very well founded criticism of its radiation hazard can experience first hand the frustration nuclear advocates have felt for decades. 

I'm not saying the entire critique of nuclear that all renewables promoters have is as unsound as the issue of the health threat posed by smart meters seems to be.  But there are many renewables promoters who appear to nuclear types exactly as these ban the smart meter types now appear to renewables advocates.  "Crazy", if I may quote from the San Francisco Business Times. 

For instance, when protestors at Vermont Yankee who want to close down that nuclear reactor over a tiny radiation leak were in the news, Joe Romm piled on with a blog post explaining to the world that "the National Academy of Sciences concluded after an exhaustive study that even the tiniest amount of ionizing radiation increases the risk of cancer".  This is called the Linear No Threshold theory, (LNT) and it is held up by the highest authorities in the US to be the best model that can explain all the data that has been discovered about radiation to date.  But people who say reactors should be shut down because of what they think LNT means, completely ignore the context.   The fact is each protestor would receive a greater radiation exposure by standing next to each other protestor (because people are very slightly radioactive because of radioactivity in the food they've eaten), than the radiation dose anyone received from the picocuries of radioactive tritium that leaked from Vermont Yankee. 

Pro-nuclear advocates who would like to see civilization limit CO2 emissions continue to be astonished as they see some climate activists assert that because of a "threat "such as a level of radiation lower than what you get by sleeping next to your spouse, a low carbon power source the size of all the solar PV installed in Germany in the last  ten years, i.e. that single Vermont Yankee reactor, should be simply thrown away. 

Romm's agenda seems clear:  stop nuclear power, so as civilization starts to turn away from fossil fuels it will only have renewables to turn to.  Stop nuclear power, so any private or public funds that would otherwise go to developing nuclear will go towards development of renewables.  Its all part of defining the solution to the climate problem as "clean", "renewables", as opposed to "low carbon".  It isn't just Romm.  The Sierra Club, the largest environmental organization in the world, has written policy calling for phasing out all existing nuclear power, never mind how hard that would be to replace with renewables over even the medium term.  Al Gore removed the word 'nuclear' from the McKinsey graph he published on page 246 in his book Our Choice, because otherwise the chart would have shown nuclear to be more cost effective at "reducing greenhouse gases" than plugin hybrid cars, wind, solar CSP, solar PV, CCS retrofit at coal or gas plants, and any number of other choices. 

Renewables advocates don't want to see the debate framed as "low carbon", even though that is how the solution is described by all science academies in the world. 

So I see comedy in the California controversy over the health effects of smart meters.  Black comedy.  Why not stop the rollout of something that would prove useful if anyone cared about stabilizing the planetary climate system - it makes about as much sense as some of the other activities of the people who say they care.