The Aquarium Gets LED Facelift

(Click image to enlarge full size)

Raymond Caddy of Brighten Your Home came by The Aquarium to disconnect the ballast and rewire the fluorescent fixture to accomodate the new UL certified T-8 replacement LED tubes supplies by Robert Van Winkle Jr.

The goal is to show the retrofit installation to many prospective buyers, including other tenants of our landlord's properties.

Feel free to drop in The (other) Aquarium on 10 Knight Street in Norwalk, CT to check out just how amazing the quality of the light coming from these LEDs is, and learn how you too can start saving up to 60% off your office, business or factory space utility bills while enjoying a quality of light and life far superior to the numbing flicker of old fluorescent tubes.

The Aquarium is (usually) open to the public from 1 to 3 in the afternoon, or by appointment. It's located next door to Galaxy Cookies, facing Fat Cat Pie off Wall St. in Norwalk, CT

Green Lighting Book Soon Off The Press

In a few days our long awaited Sword of Damocles will be off the press and in the hands of anti-nuclear warriors all over the land.

Sadly the beautiful cover image of Betcee May shot by photographer Courtney Dailey was rejected by the editors at McGraw-Hill because the Philips EnduraLED Betcee held was shot too wide, and they couldn't tell what kind of bulb it was.

There was no opportunity or time to reshoot, so instead McGraw-Hill went with a close-up of the Pharox, who are big supporters of Global Green USA and design some of the best LED greenhouse lighting in the world.

A lot of hearts were broken, tempers flared, dreams shattered, it would have been amazing to feature the Rock The Reactors muse on the cover of a book so many worked so hard to produce, a book which carries such a strong message, that for the retrofit cost of LEDs, you can easily make up all the replacement power necessary to decommission old and dirty nuclear power plants.

Not all is lost. Rock The Reactors is in talks with the Pharox publicity department and other LED companies about future opportunities for Betcee May, who can easily be reached through her agency, Next Models in Los Angeles, under her fashion name May Lindstrom.

The three authors of the Green Lighting book, project and team leader Green Living Guy Seth Leitman, writer and researcher Brian Clark Howard of the Daily Green, and lighting engineer William J. Brinsky, are planning book signings all over the country.

If you'd like to organize an event at your local bookstore, green store or lighting store, please contact Seth or the publicity department at McGraw-Hill.

For more information on LEDs and an up to date listing of companies selling them, go to the Rock The Reactors website. You can order copies of the book at Amazon or get quantity discounts directly from the publisher.

Entergy Is Broke! Long Live Duron!

Entergy is broke, all the tell tale signs are there... The workers at Indian Point are threatening to strike... Entergy is threatening to shut down Vermont Yankee if the Vermont legislature doesn't allow them to operate without sufficient decommissioning funds, because Entergy lost the nest egg playing the market. In turn the state of Vermont is threatening not to issue Entergy a new license because Entergy lied about the extent of a tritium leak which has spread to the Brattleboro water supply... and while all this is going on... Entergy decides to sue the Army Corps of Engineers for $68 million dollars in New Orleans, blaming the Corps for the failure of the levies which flooded their two nuclear power plants during Katrina!

No wonder ConEd decided to sell Indian Point, get itself out from under a jam. Now ConEd can paint itself as a green company, wash their hands of the whole Indian Point debacle, but they're still buying power from Entergy to flow through their grid. So it's still guilt by association!

Now I ask you, what happens if Entergy goes belly up? Who takes over the operation of all their crumbling reactors? And if nobody wants them, why would anyone want a bunch of broken down facilities long past their due date, ready for mothballs, what happens then? Homeland Security steps in? The Navy is the only branch of the Federal Government left which has the man power, the know how and the expertise to tackle such a task. The tax payer is going to flip the bill, or rather, the Bilderbergers keep minting more fresh bills.

We need to get ready not just for the collapse of the cooling tower at Vermont Yankee last year, but the total implosion of the Shaw/Entergy power company, and its consequences on the lives of the residents of reactor hosting communities. It's not about if Entergy keeps operating its reactors, it's about when their operation becomes so obviously, painfully insane do citizens and politicians finally step in to put Entergy out of its misery before another of their regularly scheduled incidents turn into an accident we can't walk away from.

Yes, Haiti... and so many other problems take precedence and seem so timely. But you know what they need most in Haiti right now? Lights! There's a company in India that makes battery solar powered LED lights, for just $130... and a group in Canada which raises money to install them in Haiti, despite so many relief workers getting shot as anarchy rules on the island. Entergy, which everyone in New Orleans keeps called "energy" because they've been trained since childhood to identity the company with power... should have invested in LED companies long ago. Now they probably will need to divest into them, and wouldn't that be a wonderful thing for 2010.

Take Your Pick! Spread Far and Wide...

LED streetlights to take over downtown Ann Arbor

From LED magazine

17 Oct 2007

Ann Arbor plans to become the first US city to convert 100 percent of its downtown streetlights to LED technology, with the installation of more than 1000 LED fixtures.

LED maker Cree and the City of Ann Arbor, Michigan, have announced that Ann Arbor will join Raleigh, North Carolina and Toronto, Canada, in the growing LED City initiative.

In an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption, Ann Arbor plans to become the first U.S. city to convert 100 percent of its downtown streetlights to LED technology.

Ann Arbor expects to install more than 1,000 LED streetlights beginning next month, after a successful trial of 25 fixtures. The City anticipates a 3.8-year payback on its initial investment. Each LED fixture draws 56 watts and is projected to last 10 years, replacing fixtures with bulbs that use more than 120 watts and last only two years.

“This decision is based on three years of extensive research on the energy and maintenance savings associated with LED lighting, citizen surveys and a very successful pilot of 25 LED lights spanning an entire city block,” said Mayor John Hieftje.

As a result, the City received a $630,000 grant from the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority to fund retrofits for the downtown lights. “This initial installation should save the City more than $100,000 per year and reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 294 tons of CO2. Our plan is to retrofit all downtown lights with LED alternatives over the next two years.”

Full implementation of LEDs is projected to cut Ann Arbor’s public lighting energy use in half and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2,425 tons of CO2 annually, the equivalent of taking 400 cars off the road for a year. Detroit Edison, Ann Arbor’s local utility provider, will meter the new LED streetlights with the intent to gather sufficient information to develop new LED-based tariffs.

The LED streetlights currently installed in Ann Arbor are based on the New Westminster Series made by Lumec, Inc., which contain LED light engines from Relume Technologies, Inc. In turn, the Relume light engines contains Cree XLamp LEDs.

What does it mean to be an environmentalist?

It's taken me this long to recover from Wednesday... The day left me reeling, in sadness, in pain, in simmering anger... at the rudeness, the intransigence, the impolite, almost cult-like demeanor the nuclear club Entergy and the NRC have suddenly brought to these public proceedings, as if it wouldn't be Christian or religious to oppose a pristine nuclear industry with nothing to reproach itself, above scrutiny.

For decades we've experienced the corporate culture surrounding the peaceful atom, seeping into our lives as a veiled pretext for uranium enrichment and weapons development, with complete abject disregard for the earth, the environment... fueled by a cold war race that didn't seem like it would ever end... but it did, miraculously perhaps, maybe because a younger generation of Russian kids just wanted to listen to heavy metal albums, and the only way they knew where to get them was over the wall in West Berlin.

Yet, this Russian rebellion didn't really stop there... the orchestrator of Glasnost, Gorbachev, is now the chairman of an environmental organization in America which is greatly influencing Hollywood... GlobalGreenUSA... which set the stage for the Green Car Red Carpet events at film premieres and award shows... promoting the use of electric vehicles in an industry which revels in technological innovation and liberal idealism.

This doesn't sit well with a lot of people, who fear environmentalism is like a watermelon, green on the outside, red on the inside. The poor and less fortunate often latch on to a dream of luxury and wealth, living vicariously through television and tabloid personalities like Paris Hilton... the sweet notion that suddenly sharing common goods might be possible, communal living in international communities, strikes them as a threat to the American dream... even if that dream is unattainable... lets a miracle like winning the lottery or inheriting great wealth from a forgotten distant relative.

This is why Leo DiCaprio's film 11th Hour is failing at the box office... not that it's not a great testament to our wrecking the planet with wild abandon, but it's not a populist statement... perhaps had Leo allowed his then girlfriend Gisele the narration alongside him... more people would have bought a ticket... It's never been about the message... it's always been about the messenger... While one person may relate to us the truth... if their appearance, their aura, their persona falls short of what an audience expects in a leader... it will fall on deaf ears... or worse antagonize.

It's interesting that the public accepts Leo DiCaprio as an actor, yet has difficulty taking him seriously as an environmentalist... despite his best intentions, there's a dimension missing in his rhetoric and his speech that erects a wall between himself and the audience... for you see... to care and feel for the earth, you must be of the earth... you must be at one with it... and the audience subconsciously feels it... it rings like a bell in every fiber of your body... it shows in your approach to all things... this is the connection both Gaia and the Green Man demand of us to restore ecological balance in our environment.

Corporate cultures, religions or cults based on anything other than harmony with the elements... instead aspiring to an entity or an idol, fails in that respect... there's a disconnect... and it is felt... by an audience which seeks solace in the comfort that man can be of nature, from nature... and aspire to a higher order, not a new world nuclear order, but a higher spiritual order... greater awareness, sharper senses.

But such feelings are not common... man strives for worldly power, riches, stature, standing in the community, power... these things take you away from the feeling of oneness one can have that fulfills... replenishes... makes saints out of all of us perhaps, or at least humble, reasonable caring individuals... extreme kindness can easily be mistaken for weakness... weakness is an opportunity for aggression, for superiority... over nature, over other races, creed... so where am I going with this?

The fact that yesterday I was told that a conversation I was attempting to have with a gentleman would lead nowhere was extraordinarily insulting in the context of a forum designed for just such exchange. This, not just on one or two or three, but numerous occasions from members of this same SHARE coalition, whose objective is not to learn or to listen, grasp that perhaps the 35 years I have spend studying the biological systems of this earth amount to something... that perhaps I have something I can contribute to their community in terms of understanding... but this was not to be the case. In their eyes, I was but an old fool, out of step with the times.

Rather, as you walked in the door, you were immediately imposed by two giant laminated posters, which surely cost at least $1000 a piece each... depicting a white family on one, and a black family on the other... each were identical, but for the color of both families. These posters were so large, they obstructed the view of our table as you walked in the room. They were in the path of traffic... intentionally blocking vision and access to our table.

They came to filibuster! Pure and simple. To throw the race card into the proceedings... to claim being environmentalists, while peddling non-organic t-shirts which kill thousands of women in Asia from pesticide poisoning as young as 30 years old... as if our desire to see an aging, dangerous nuclear power plant be mothballed, be an overture for more coal fired plants... when in fact, if they only took the time to listen, they would learn that already hundreds of communities all over the country are switching to Light Emitting Diode lighting, which will in a matter of just a few years, as their cost dramatically plummets in mass production, reduce electrical consumption in this country, around the world, by as much as 60%! There won't be any need to build any new power plants, in fact we'll be able to progressively shut down many of the more polluting ones, also as solar and wind becomes more affordable with all the new nano-chemistries now in production.

I was reminded today of what it's really like to be a creature of this earth, by these simple words from Betcee May, the fashion model who lent her image to our first days developing this anti-nuclear campaign: "Living in the middle of Los Angeles, it is easy to lose track of our planet, our connection with the earth and ground and our human existence." This is what happens to us living with concrete under our feet for too long... we forget the air in our lungs comes from trees and oceans, the cars and the trucks, the power plants, coal and nuke alike, contribute to the destruction of our life's breath, and we must do something.

This something comes in the form of the balance green design and green technologies bring, new systems, not stepping backward to a technology that already has us leaving as legacy to future generations the responsibility of watching over the more dangerous poison known to man... a substance, if released to the atmosphere, without proper shielding, kills everything in its path for miles around, which doesn't discriminate.

If there is a singular issue that is more important than any other today in the green movement, it is nuclear power... radioactive isotopes are the most dangerous and lethal elements released to the environment... and right now, these isotopes are leaking below Indian Point, into the rock bed, into our ground water... reason enough to immediately shut down the plant and stop this insanity. And yet, the money that the plant makes, the millions in revenue it generates, allows this industry to lavish those in need with a mission they don't understand, other than the immediate relief a few checks, and new suits, can bring.

I spent the day looking to find how many environmental groups with people of color existed in America today... there are hundreds, and I guarantee you, that the majority do not support nuclear power as a solution to global warming... you can find them all on this page.

These NRC public meetings have become parodies, three ring circus, as I expected the first day I walked in one of them... organized and orchestrated by the industry to undermine and intimidate the people in the community who have already voted for their representatives... who in every county surrounding Indian Point have Congressmen and women, each asking themselves why democracy doesn't work in regards to the nuclear power industry. Why suddenly, environmentalists asking for an end to Entergy's autocracy are being labeled "terrorists," a "security threat" prohibited from taking a public tour of the plant like other tax paying citizens! Which makes the majority of Hudson Valley residents a threat to the plant's safety, doesn't it?

Our message isn't getting out at these meetings, because it falls on deaf ears and closed hearts, our own constituency has stopped attending... nobody wants to be subjected to this type of verbal and psychological abuse. Everywhere we go in the community, members of FUSE USA get nothing but pats on the back, and words of encouragement... but people have been so beaten down they also feel it's hopeless... that we're all crazy to waste our time doing this, that we should just let it be, let it go... stop making ourselves sick over it... there will be an accident one day, every one will say we told you so... man only learns from his mistakes, reacts to disaster, over and over and over.

Well, NO! I'm here to tell you, we're not going to let ourselves be manipulated and relegated to second class citizens because our sensivitivity tells us that something is wrong, dramatically wrong, and that if there is a guiding star, and if our species wants to restore balance on this earth... so beauty and kindness, will overcome selfishness and fear... this may be the place to make a stand. Save Manhattan! I might be naive, I might be washed away in my own idealism... but I want to beleive that we have a good team of people, who now represent a National coalition... we just need money and resources... media... support... because Entergy has millions to spend, while the older Shut Down Indian Point groups are just going through the motions.

We can stop them here. But it's suddenly been made so much harder by the millions Entergy gets to spend, money our electrical bills gives them... so they can wine and dine and bus hundreds of ringers into what should instead be a forum for local residents, and folks directly concerned by the fate of this plant, who live down wind and down water from it.

I want to ask again, why are none of the local representatives, who were all elected because of their firm stance on seeing Indian Point be decommissioned, not present at these hearings? What are they all afraid of? Why won't Robert Kennedy Jr. make an appearance? The night before, Robert was at yet another high paying speaking engagement at the fancy clothing store GANT in New York... while his organization was claiming credit for our work, allowing a tired Patrick Moore to grab the local television spotlight... spreading lies for his money... lies we all know, those of us who have lived through the history of nuclear electricity, we can't live with.

Can you be Green & Pro-Nuke?

Robert Prol on the RockNet list asked the question:

"Is it a requirement to be against the nuclear power plant in order to be considered an environmentalist?"

I posted this reply below to the list, here it is again on Green Nuclear Butterfly, for good measure!

~ Yes!

Now's the time to remove this threat from the Hudson river...

FUSE USA has the experts, the whistleblowers, the inside track, this plant is a disaster waiting to happen.

At one NRC meeting a few weeks ago, which hundreds of union workers attend to strong arm and intimidate, one of them came to me in confidence, to say that the only reason he worked at the plant, was because his sister was terrified something might happen, and that if it did, he'd be right there, would be able to call her on his cell phone, tell her to get out of town...

That's what you have in your back yard... a time bomb. Don't wait till the rest of the world tells you we told you so... Indian Point is a complete rust bucket.

Please support FUSE USA and the work we are doing.

We have a chance right now because of the relicensing period to mothball and dismantle this horror. Imagine how beautiful the view would be from the Monteverde Inn if Indian Point wasn't there anymore!

When I asked the Yoga center there how they could medidate with such a monstrosity behind them, they said: "People come here to relax, not think about negative environmental issues."

You are all being lied to about the consequences of constant exposure to leaks released from this plant! The still birth rate around Indian Point is 25% higher the National average... Go ask the doctors at the Peekskill hospital, who are terrified to speak out because Entergy afforded them their emergency wing!

LED bulbs in mass production would cost less than either fluorescent or incandescent... it's been calculated that if we switch all lighting to LEDs, which is now preferred by interior designers for aesthetic reasons, we could reduce our electrical consumption by as much as 60%.

Isn't that a more worthwhile effort?

Rem

http://www.rockthereactors.com

The photo is from a great new UK rock band which you can find here:
http://www.myspace.com/wfanfc