Billy, the reason I stated DU is almost a bad as plutonium, is because we have scattered thousands of TONS of DU all around the globe, and most of the plutonium humanity has produced is stored, or sealed in nuclear warheads. Therefore, right now, DU is even more dangerous for mankind than plutonium.

The DU in natural atomic reactors, like the one you suggested we read about is not a hazard to mankind in any way, that underground fire went out two million years ago. I was very surprised you brought it up, as your blog read to me, as if DU was really not a big deal.

You might wish to continue looking for more info on the type of depleted uranium we should all be concered about and the enormous ammont of health problems which HAVE already ocurred when people inhale DU dust. Read about DU which is produced by atomic power plants and used in weaponry, not DU which was formed millions of years ago in natural formations of uranium in the Earth's crust.

I'd prefer to live downwind from wind, and or solar generation power stations. Of course a gang of windmills in the Blue Ridge Mountains would not enhance the scenery, but it would be far better than the smog created from burning coal, or the possible evacuation of everyone, because of a meltdown or any type of disaster at a nuke plant in Tennessee.

Art,

Although my major reason for advocating nuclear power is global warming, if we can replace coal burning with nuclear power there are major health benefits.

The radioactive emissions from a coal plant are pretty impressive if the plant does not have advanced pollution controls. Coal in the US averages about 5 parts per million uranium and can be as high as 60ppm. Depending on the source of the coal, it can also have significant quantities of thorium which is also radioactive. If the coal has uranium, it also has its daughter products radium and radon.

The effect of particulate emissions from a coal plant are very hard on asthmatics and others with compromised lung capacity.

I live near the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia. From the crest of the ridge, visibility used to be about 25 miles. It now typically is 6 or 7 miles thanks to AEP's coal burning power plants in West Virginia. The trees on the top of Mount Rodgers, the highest mountain in Virginia are either dead or dying because of acid rain.

I would much prefer to live downwind from a nuclear power plant than a coal plant.

Yes. How about a tea party!!!!!! Yea. Or, should we just go with what is "cost effective" and the hell with the cancer and the lives. Nuclear accidents put people to work.

Paul,

Lovins advocates distributed generation. Translated, this means burning fossil fuel in small plants rather than large ones. It still is CO2 emitting.

I am fully in favor of conservation, as is Lovins. It ranks right up there with mom and apple pie. My house is 90% converted to CFLs (they don't work with dimmers so it is not 100%). If I can hold off buying a new car that long, I hope to purchase a White Star as my next vehicle.

The cost of wind power is competitive with natural gas for power generation, given the production subsidies. The turbine manufacturers are backordered and the lead time is pretty severe right now. Up to about 6% of grid capacity, the intermittency of wind is not a serious problem. Even in California and Texas we are not approaching that.

Solar is a very expensive means to generate electricity. For central generation, concentrating solar is less expensive than photovoltaic. A 64MW (peak) concentrating plant was recently installed in Nevada for about $4000/kw or about 2X a nuclear plant. When you add in the fact that it only works about 6 hours a day, it really gets expensive.

Evelyn is a supporter of the solar power tower. This is an alternative to more conventional concentrating solar power. It has not been demonstrated on a large scale and the costs are not clear. A smaller prototype operated for a few years in Spain and had vortex flow problems with the turbines and glazing stability problems.

Distributed PV (i.e domestic roof top) can, in a high cost market approach cost effectiveness. This is, by definition, not grid power. PV manufacturing is expanding but currently suffers from long lead time.

The intermittency of solar power is not a problem for the grid operator up to about 25% of grid capacity because the output matches peak demand pretty well and it is predictable.

in the US, 70% of our electrity comes from fossil fuel. About two thirds of that is coal. If we are to reduce our CO2 emissions, we need to reduce these numbers or sequester the CO2.

CO2 sequester on the scale needed is not a demonstrated technology. The costs are not clearly defined nor is the best technology identified. Clearly CO2 sequestering is not ready for prime time.

The only affordable option for massive coal replacement is nuclear.

Evelyn/Kathy,

What part of my post did you find unreasonable? All I basically said is: "If you find depleted uranium outside a warzone, it is probably from munitions". I did not speak to the possible health effects at all.

As to the health effects, I have searched the medical literature and have not been able to confirm your statements of widespread veteran disability from uranium exposure. I have not been able to find any primary source on a DU munitions and rectal cancer relationship. It is true that soldiers who inhale uranium dust or have uranium shrapnel wounds will excrete it in their urine but this is not indicative of disability, only exposure.

Certainly I was aware of battlefield contamination from the use of DU munitions. Bagdhad is one such battlefield.

I do need to challenge your equating depleted uranium with plutonium. Plutonium is approximately 200,000 times more radioactive than uranium-238. Equivalent risk?-I don't think so.

Evelyn, they should offer a reverse auction to melt the ice.

Hey Billy,

Regarding your statement:

"My personal passion is a belief that nuclear power is the only hope for continued civilization. Solar and wind are not up to the task alone of electrical power generation for the western world."

I will refer you to a press release that came out from WWW.rmi.org two years ago:

Nuclear Power's Scorned Small-Scale Competitors Are Walloping It in the Marketplace, Rocky Mountain Institute Research Shows
Snowmass, Colo., 22 June 2005—Rocky Mountain Institute researchers today doused the hype about "nuclear revival" in an icy bath of real-world data. They documented that worldwide, the decentralized, low- or no-carbon sources of electricity—cogeneration and renewables, all claimed by nuclear advocates to be too small and too slow to help much with climate change—are already bigger than nuclear power and are quickly leaving it in the dust.
"Nuclear advocates are desperately trying to create an illusion that their failed option is being revived," said RMI CEO and cofounder Amory Lovins, the lead author of the analysis, "so all its remaining costs and risks, which private investors have rejected, can be loaded onto taxpayers. This bailout, now being debated in Washington, is claimed to be vital because nuclear power is the only power source big and fast enough to combat climate change. But industry and official data reveal that claim to be false. While nuclear power dies of an incurable attack of market forces, its derided smaller-scale competitors are already a bigger global power source and are growing very rapidly, while nuclear power continues to fade away."

***And this was two years ago, Billy, and despite the lack of funding from this administration that is all for the big centralized power sources like fossil fuel & nuclear power plants. These big power suppliers also get massive subsidies, while renewables get a pittance in comparison. Imagine if renewables were funded equally, creating a level playing field, so the comparison could be apples to apples instead of grapes to watermelons. Follow the money. What kind of graft, bribes, or slice of the pie can politicians, MSM, and big corporations get from someone who has a windmill (or solar panels) at their house and are off the grid? Of course they are going to pump up the virtues of extant power sources, while they downplay the alternates. It's kind of like my western civ professor said many years ago, when referring to kings, rulers of empires, dictators, and tyrannies, "The 'Ins' stay in", meaning when there is a power struggle the people already in positions of power will do just about anything to retain their position. Corporations have become the lords of our day over us, but the dynamic in the statement is the same. They will do anything they have to do to maintain control, and won't let anyone with a chance to become independant of them do that if they can prevent it somehow. A prime example is what Evelyn mentioned about EXXON paying their own funded scientists to obfuscate the climate change debate.

Yes Kathy, the government is attempting to hide it and Exxon/Mobil will pay any scientist ten thousand dollars to write a paper that global warming is a myth. Big business and governments make BIG money from selling ammo and waging wars.

I won't advoccate it, but I will not be surprised to see our troops refuse to go back to Iraq in the near future. Many of the military wives, over three thousand so far, have joined together and formed an alliance and are openly protesting. That Has never happened in our history.

The Navy has banned DU on their ships.

Kathy, Here is a great one, if you have't heard it, it was on CNN once yesterday. Nothing to do with DU or global warming. But it's a great example of government graft, corruption and probable under the counter payoffs.

Fema paid a contractor $36 million to furnish bags of ice to people in New Orleans after the hurricane two years ago. Then they paid the contractor $12 million to store the ice they didn't hand out.___ Now Fema is paying them $3.5 million to melt the ice, they say it may not be safe to use.

I'd melt it for a hundred thou, even fifty.

I'm with Evelyn on the DU. They're trying to muzzle this story, but a military doctor tested the urine of soldiers with "Gulf War Syndrome" and found radiation readings through the roof. DU is harmless until impact, then it leaves radioactive dust everywhere. Like little mini nuclear bombs going off. Iraq is full of it.

Bill, there is no argument that two thirds of the first Gulf War ground troops are permanently disabled, they are still young men and wemon. That is not the ratio of air force or naval vets.___ Not even close!!

If you were unaware of the fallout of DU in the Mid-East, then you are not well read on the subject. I am. There are over a hundred published papers on the subject and they are the writing of people who have the necessary credentials too offer expert opinions. They state, DU in weapons is the worst crime humanity has ever committed. And it is.

There are also experts who deny it is harmful, for awhile, even WHO denied the danger. The deaths and huge numbers of young people suffering from radiation posioning, the unbelievable cancer rates of the chldren in Iraq are finally telling the truth.

Ahhh, com-on Bill.

You and I are both aware, that depleted uranium is relatively harmless in solid form. You know very well that when used in ammo it burns when it strikes a target and that is when the uranium isoptopes are deadly. They are almost as deadly as plutonium. If you or I inhale a single microscopic speck of DU, we WILL suffer from cancer of the lung. Just one single speck. That is only one off it's horrible hazards.

The radiation readings in Baghdad are 2,000 times the normal background readings. There is enough of that poison lying all over Iraq to kill every single person on this planet ten times. The natural DU in solid state is not the problem and you know it. You should be shamed for writing that blog. And I like you, I think you are a nice man. You are just writing stupid bull and you probably don't realize it.

Let's be honest about this subject it is far too serious to publish bullshit about the dangers of using DU in ammunition___ someone might believe you.

Evelyn,

There is actually a very interesting natural source of depleted uranium. If you are interested, google "Oklo natural reactor". This was a set of nuclear reactors that operated in Gabon for over 100,000 years.

Billy

Hi Evelyn,

I read your referenced article on DU. I did not find it particularly enlightening. His description of the ammunition and its immediate combat effects was accurate enough but then he blurs the injuries (the unintentional ones) with fallout and blast injuries from WW2. He then went on seamlessly into an antiwar discussion. He does not give citation for his DU injury claims.

I have no difficulty with antiwar protesters or discussions although I am not a pacificist. I do believe the nation has made a profound error in invading Iraq and, having done so, blundered and screwed up the occupation.

I had not heard before the start of our sparring of DU fallout outside a warzone. I have not been able to verify the data but it makes sense. In the general environment there should be NO depleted uranium detected since there is almost no natural source. Dust from uranium mining should have a natural enrichment (0.7% U-235). Fallout from WW2 and weapons testing should be high enriched (20-90% U-235). Leaking, if it occured, from a western style power reactor should be low enriched (2-5% U-235). I don't know offhand the enrichment used in the Chernobyl style reactor but it would not be depleted.

The only manmade source of airborne depeleted uranium would be leakage from the enrichment process (DOE reports that they have had 8 storage cylinders leaking depleted UF6) or airborne dust from either the manufacture of use of DU material, predominantly the munitions.

My personal passion is a belief that nuclear power is the only hope for continued civilization. Solar and wind are not up to the task alone of electrical power generation for the western world. My posts have generally tried to correct or improve the accuracy of nuclear information. I believe an informed citizenry is more likely to make better decisions. This probably comes off as sounding defensive or pedantic.

I am not a conspiracy nut but I do believe that the coal industry underwrites much of the antinuclear power disinformation and zeal. (In much the same way, the oil and auto companies are pushing the so called hydrogen economy and E-85 flex fuel cars so that, in reality, they can continue business as usual.)

Nuclear power is not perfectly safe. Nothing is. It is profoundly safer than the continued profligate use of fossil fuels without sequestration of the CO2.

Billy, how ya doin? Hey, why not stop just reading the old stuff? There are many current articles, mostly from foreign countries, which are written by world renowned doctors and scientists that dispute the figures you give. They dispute them by many thousands of deaths and cancers caused by nuclear waste accidents.

Therzal,___ You write that I snipe from the covers? I do believe I am as up front here as you or anyone else is.___ I also did read the article about Brussard's theory and articles written by scientists who are both in partial and in full disagreement with his theories.

I suggest humanity begins a massive world wide program, primarily funded by the United States; as we are the worst polluters by far. Spend one half of the money we've spent on the Iraq disaster and construct safe and clean electrical power plants using solar, wind, tide and thermal energy. For one thing it would provide millions of good jobs, then we could shut down the dangerous nuclear power plants and killing coal fired plants. And also stop using depleted uranium for weapons. That is what I would do for starters, ___ if I could.

What would you do Therzal?

I wasn't refering to the good points you made Shane, I was refering to your comment, "that I was part of the problem and contribute nothing". You know what I meant and any attempt to evade that is just a lame excuse.

The subject matter is the dangers of nuclear power, and there we may peacefully disagree.

Well Evelyn Smith, you are either sarcastic, or joking, but you cannot be both. Looking through your belittling responses to others, I certainly would not like to see you get nasty.

I repeat my assertion in case you do not understand: Until we stop consuming, whether it be running the A/C, building McMansions, going shopping for useless junk, keep up with the Jones', eating meat, or talking the talk, we cannot reduce our demands for energy and we cannot fight the threat of global warming. Alternative energy is not a panacea: Alternative energy may reduce immediate concerns of pollution, but they still contribute to global warming. That is stated by the Law of Thermodynamics. As Lord Kelvin eloquently stated, It is impossible to convert heat completely into work. The excess heat is stored in our atmosphere. We have overcome our planet's ability to remove heat. We will stew in our own juices.

Oh and if anyone here does like to drink a beer when they want one, you'd better stop it!!!___ Shane will brand you as the problem.

Well Shane, I was joking aboout the beer, don't drink alcahol or do drugs either. It was saracasm aimed at your prior blog. I'm a flaming activist, a progressive person and an independent,__ and as a matter of fact I have run for office, won the primary and lost to a Democrat in the general. I just do not agree with your opinions, but I don't get nasty about that with you. I could except it would be pointless to do so with a fool.

Well, Evelyn Smith, I hope you enjoyed your beer. It demonstrates that you are part of the problem, and contribute nothing to the solution. Like many people, you excel in talking the talk. Perhaps you should consider in running for public office.

correction... "the beginning of a solution??.."

Don't think anybody on this thread has actually read the paper by Bussasrd. If anybody has and can understand it (which I doubt as it is incredibly complex and rarified physics).I would like to read what they have to say.
Naysayers need not apply... "that will never get of the ground, Wilbur"
Evelyn_Smith.. you snipe from the covers, what do you sugest as the beif-ginning of a solution??

Sober as a judge-I was going to a baseball game and it got rained out.

From what I have been able to glean from the internet:

Water from the used fuel cooling pool got splashed out (perhaps more than one-there are a total of 7 reactors on the site). The water, slightly radioactive, ran off into the sea of Japan in accordance with the site safety plan. The level of release was well below the legal limit. I don't know for sure, but I would suspect there radiation was in the form of tritiated water (i.e. radioactive hydrogen, tritium). One reference (nei.org) said the total release was less than 1% of the individual treatment dosage for hyperthyroidism. Tritium is not a long term hazard; it has a half life of 12 years.

Apparently many barrels of low level waste were overturned and some spilled. These are (my guess here) 55 gallon drums with snap band lids. These would typically contain worn shoe covers, coveralls and gloves from workers who had worked in a possibly contaminated area and the clothing is hypothetically contaminated. It also would include clean up tissues, sponges or abrasives from possibly contaminated surfaces. Some of the material may actually have a low level of contamination but, in real world terms, this is nothing to fret about unless you are phobic by nature.

All seven reactors 'scrammed' as they were supposed to. It sounds like there was extensive site damage and at least some of the reactors will be offline for a quite a while.

It also sounds as if the seismic survey missed the fault that contained this earthquake and that is quite close to the reactor site. It also sounds as if this earthquake was greater than the design basis for the reactors. If true, the Japanese liscensing authority will need to look at these issues very closely before they permit the reactors to restart.

I heard on NPR, which is usually pretty reliable, that iodine was released. Depending on the amount, this could be a very troubling aspect of the accident. The only source that I am aware of for radioactive iodine in the reactor is if there has been a breach of the cladding on some portion of the fuel.

Iodine can be a very bad actor. Most of the cancer from the Chernobyl accident was caused by radioactive iodine in the smoke. It fell out on grass, was eaten by cows and transfered to the milk. About 4000 human cases of thyroid cancer are attributed to this mechanism. Most of the cases were children who are both big milk drinkers and more susceptable to radiation injury than adults. (Thyroid cancer is not usually fatal if properly treated but at least 8 kids died.)

The fire was an industrial transformer fire. From a nuclear standpoint it was a no-never-mind. It did not involve nuclear systems. It was not inside the containment or reactor control areas.

On an overall basis, it sounds like the safety systems performed as expected in a quake twice the design basis. No one got hurt. No one got zapped with radiation. The offsite release was minimal (assuming the iodine was not an extensive release).
Reactor designers: A+
Seismic survey: C- (for missing a nearby active fault)

Hope you're sober if you do come back Billy. Better read the whole skit, it's fun seeing people like Shane and PJD so readily displaying their ignorance. Well it's time for a beer. ___ Throw ya later

Have not had a chance to read all the thoughtful comments and the chaff above so I hope my comments are not too redundant.

Dead from the quake: 9
Dead from the reactor problems: 0

Injured from the quake: 1000
Injured from the reactor problems: 0

No technology has absolute safety. A modern western design nuclear reactor is much closer than most.

For 2006 in the US:
43,000 highway deaths
600 aviation deaths
4800 pedestrian deaths
48 coal mining deaths
0 nuclear power

On my way out for the evening. More comments later if I get a chance.

Everyone of you are all so wrong, so full of BS, so mislead.

Our real problem is energy CONSUMPTION. It matters not it's source, whether nuclear, coal, wind, solar, etc. Everything we do is inefficient. Boil water, turn on a light, whatever, most of the energy required is wasted. Waste is given off as heat. That heat adds to the planet's heat budget. Because we have an atmosphere, the heat is trapped and cannot radiate into space. And so the planet warms.

The argument is not how we can cleanly generate energy, the argument is how can we reduce our demands!

I repeat PJD's request: Doesn't ANYONE in this forum, or in the USA, have any knowlege of science or engineering? This thread sure has demonstrated that no-one here is capable of thinking beyond the cold beer waiting for them at home.

Have not had a chance to read all the thoughtful comments and the chaff above so I hope my comments are not too redundant.

Dead from the quake: 9
Dead from the reactor problems: 0

Injured from the quake: 1000
Injured from the reactor problems: 0

No technology has absolute safety. A modern western design nuclear reactor is much closer than most.

For 2006 in the US:
43,000 highway deaths
600 aviation deaths
4800 pedestrian deaths
48 coal mining deaths

On my way out for the evening. More comments later if I get a chance.

@ Ron: No, I wasn't kidding.
~ maybe there are Fusion methods out there which do not specifically have to re-invent the sun, but it can be done some other way? Why rule out the as-yet undiscovered?

Try this article:
www. jet. efda.org / pages / content / fusion1
-[remove spaces in the URL] where it says: "To harness fusion on Earth, different, more efficient fusion reactions than those at work in the Sun are chosen..."

I checked out Wikipedia and there are several different types of fusion mentioned there.

On www. ipp. mpg.de/~Wolfgang.Suttrop/ppcfsites . html
[remove spaces again, this BB seemingly doesn't like too many links] there is another bunch of sites listed for those interested.

I fully admit that I am a complete amateur on this topic, but... I have an inkling that it is all-too easy for we humans to dismiss things, which, -(a little farther down the line) are then shown to have been completely viable after all.
~ Mr Galileo and the Catholic church spring readily to mind here! ;)

I do like the sound of phrases such as, "One kilogram of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000 kg of fossil fuel."

This bit at the Christian Science Monitor was interesting: http : // www. csmonitor.com / 2005/0606/p25s01-stss . html ...
...wherein: "Is there any way of getting protons close enough together for fusion to occur that doesn't require the energy output of a large city to make it happen? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Instead of using high temperatures and incredible densities to ram protons together, the scientists at UCLA cleverly used the structure of an unusual crystal..."

____________________

http : // discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/radioactive-boy-scout
- is but one story I've read about young folk building home fusion devices, this features Thiago Olson, who 'got bubbles in his Dosimeter'.
__________

~~Have YOU got bubbles in your Dosimeter folks?
I sure hope so!!

:)
_____________

Feeling now quite cheery with all those bubbles in my Dosimeter, :) I shall end with a song. The following is from John Prine, it's called 'Paradise':

" When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born,
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.

~ Chorus:
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
[Chorus]

Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
[Chorus]

When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am."

That's right Jstevens, mankind will continue merrily skipping down the Primrose Lane, the problem is,___ sometimes the Primrose turn out to be lillies.

I don't believe we have ten years. If industrial wastes kill off the ocean's pytoplanton, all life on this planet, save some specie of microbes would be dead in a matter of a few days. The atomic waste spills in sea water only accelerate the problem.

The clues that there is something terribly wrong with our atmosphere and ocean waters are clearly obvious. The dramatic decrease of almost all specie of birds and many specie of ocean life in the past few months is not a wake up call, it's Mother Nature screaming at us___ that it is already too late.

Another Einstein?_____ Well, we do have PJD.

@ Ron: No, I wasn't kidding.
~ maybe there are Fusion methods out there which do not specifically have to re-invent the sun, but it can be done some other way? Why rule out the as-yet undiscovered?

Try this article: http://www.jet.efda.org/pages/content/fusion1.html -where it says: "To harness fusion on Earth, different, more efficient fusion reactions than those at work in the Sun are chosen..."

I checked out Wikipedia and there are several different types of fusion mentioned there.

On http://www.ipp.mpg.de/~Wolfgang.Suttrop/ppcfsites.html there is another bunch of sites listed for those interested.

I fully admit that I am a complete amateur on this topic, but... I have an inkling that it is all-too easy for we humans to dismiss things, which, -(a little farther down the line) are then shown to have been completely viable after all.
~ Mr Galileo and the Catholic church spring readily to mind here! ;)

I do like the sound of phrases such as, "One kilogram of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000 kg of fossil fuel."

This bit at the Christian Science Monitor was interesting: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0606/p25s01-stss.html ...
...wherein: "Is there any way of getting protons close enough together for fusion to occur that doesn't require the energy output of a large city to make it happen? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Instead of using high temperatures and incredible densities to ram protons together, the scientists at UCLA cleverly used the structure of an unusual crystal..."

____________________

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/radioactive-boy-scout and the following is but one story I've read about young folk building home fusion devices, this features Thiago Olson, who 'got bubbles in his Dosimeter'.
__________

~~Have YOU got bubbles in your Dosimeter folks?
I sure hope so!!

:)
_____________

Feeling now quite cheery with all those bubbles in my Dosimeter, :) I shall end with a song. The following is from John Prine, it's called 'Paradise':

" When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born,
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.

~ Chorus:
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
[Chorus]

Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
[Chorus]

When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am."

kathyodat and Evelyn Smith: well said and undeniable. We all suspect that mankind is going to choose maintaining our current lifestyle over the longterm viability of the Earth. Of course, giving up is unthinkable. Perhaps the planet is more resilient than it appears. Perhaps nature will have some surprise mechanisms that prevent carbon and methane from soaring. We are in completely unchartered waters here. Anything could happen. We could certainly use an Einstein today.

Liers should be liars. Edit function seemed to let me change it but did not seem to record the change.

PJD,

The guys who wrote the article you linked to are total idiots or liers. Actually I pick liers. Terrorists aren't going to look for the biggest body of water they can find to introduce poisons into a water system. They will find a way to get it into the pipes. Yes, there is background radiation. I had a high school teacher who let us use a Geiger counter. The highest counts we got were from the bricks of the school buildings. But, but, but, students were't eating or drinking the bricks.

Kathy,___ I do not care who is elected to run The white House, as long as they have your sensibilities, honesty, goodness and common sense.___ Your writings give you away. There are many bloggers here who would fit that category.__ But you are rather special.

Jstevens, I do believe you and I do thank you for so often bringing the seriousness of burning coal to our attention.

If we only have ten years, and I will agree it may very well be so, rhen we are screwed. The coal burning plants will still be spewing out their poisons ten years from today, no matter what we may write here. The atomic power plants will continue to operate also, unless there are at least three horrible nuclear power accidents world wide. That may shut them all down. Humanity usually acts after a disaster occurs, we do not think ahead and work to prevent the disasters. That is how it is.

The only thing we can do right now to stop some of the madness, is a world wide ban of the use of DU weapons. All three of those enviromental disasters should be matters of the most importance to all of the world governments.___ Sadly, the most important item is oil, followed by uranium and coal mining. And of course, high on the list, is selling military hardware and conducting war.

If I was the landlord of this very rare, and once beautiful, blue and white water planet, I would evict humanity.___ Maybe our landlord will.

jstevens, I've been following the issue of global warming for many years now, starting with the first observation of the increasing ozone hole. From what I see, I am positive that we have less and perhaps much less than 10 years to change what we're doing. I base this mostly on the fact that the scientists are repeatedly horrified to see that their projections get shorter every time they reassess the situation. Shorter and shorter. They keep learning that the consequence of one thing leads to unexpected dramatic changes that accelerate melting of ice, release of carbon/methane into the environment, which leads to... Call it the domino effect, or in medicine, we refer to homeostasis as natures' way of maintaining balance and when things get out of whack, compensating mechanisms kick in which sets up further mechanisms to compensate for the effects the compensations create, but the outcome is ultimately failure of the system.

I agree, we are approaching uninhabitable. Perhaps the only way to protect ourselves from the rich grabbing all our money and using it to make themselves comfortable in a future we can't even imagine is to reject money and develop a barter system, exchanging goods and services. And let them sit on their useless gold.

How bout' a tea party?

Evelyn, I have a better idea. Instead of voting for someone who would get one vote (yours), since my family and friends know me all too well, how about we all vote for a non-corporate candidate, ie: Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Ron Paul or, should he run, Ralph Nader? And throw out all those corporate legislators aiding and abetting this lawless administration. Then you won't have to keep an eye on my rear or backside.

Wouldn't it be great if the public refused to go along with the corporate takeover of our country?

My biggest fear in the science crowd is that there is not enough philosophy in the sciences. Just facts. "IF you can show me the article I'll believe you then." Is something I have heard so many times, its like one has to force feed these scientific fools some CAUTION. Einstein knows what I'm talking about NOW! So does the latest teen who just got killed in a car wreck! We understand nothing of what we do or its future implications. it like we just want to get famous and rich at the expense of the "nobodies" (like me). I don't care if you can tell me 50 of the most poisonous chemicals, I want to know if you can treat a broken leg or a case of strep throat in the wild, while you're teaching your kids to read! Only the literary can explain the similarities between the Oklahoma city bombing and 'Crime and Punishment'! Only historians can explain the legislation that allowed the "minutemen" and our need for them (now federally disbanded in exchange for the Blackwater cronies it seems) What does this word "Caution" mean? It means we need to watch our ass!

O.K. some scientists can explain the Ok bombing if they are explosives experts and do buildings for a living, if they watch the building come down.
Why do I feel like I'm in the Utopian novel "WE"?
PJD you are like the main character.

Environmentalists are usually quite powerless against big corporations, for obvious reasons. However, environmentalists have been remarkably successful in bringing the nuclear industry to a halt. As a result, the percentage of energy coming from coal fired power plants has soared. Because of our (along with China and India's) coal burning, we are facing a climate crisis that renders all other concerns moot. I don't think I need to go into the details; everyone on this website most likely realizes that we are on the fast track of rendering our beautiful planet uninhabitable because of carbon. We may not have even ten years to turn it around.

Uninhabitable.

Governments as we are all well aware, do not turn on a dime. Awareness and change come incredibly slowly. Because of an enormous increase in the burning of coal, this environmental crisis is spiraling out of control, far ahead of our abiity to deal with it. Nuclear power is difficult to understand. It is easy for imaginations to run wild about what could happen. But look at the reality. A nuclear plant built on a fault line(Bad idea, granted). A big earthquake. A small amount of radiation leaks. Although the Japanese incident is being used to showcase the dangers of nuclear energy, there have been no explosions, no deaths. As was pointed out above, no one died at TMI. and the tragedy at Chernobyl is attributable to Russian mismanagement of an antiquated plant.

I apologize for repeating myself so often (I know Mr. Evelyn Smith will recognize this line) but hold coal to the same standard to which you are holding nuclear power. Coal is a million times worse, because coal is going to be the immediate destruction of the planet. This is not an exaggeration.

Some uranium buried in the ground.
We got it out of the ground in the first place.
Or carbon levels of 381 ppm--a 37% increase since the Industrial Revolution.

I will take the uranium buried in the ground.

Oh, BTW, Kathy knows that I'm a boy, my code name here is confusing. Sorry Kathy, that comment could have been taken the wrong way. I should have written, I'll keep an eye on your backside. ___ Later, Kem Patrick

Hi jungleboy good points.

Remember when the scientists set off the first nuclear explosion at Trinity?

They proceeded, even though some of the top rated nuke fellas there feared it may blow up our entire solar system. Wonder what happens when we heat material that has temperatures ten times hotter than the interior of the sun?

What's that term?__ Oh yeah,___ playing with fire. ___KA-BOOOM!!!

Doctor Bussard has not worked out the problem of magnetic stabilization and he wants two hundred million to test his theories. Hope his tests are sucessful and he is correct.___ we'll see.__ There are some very bright guys and gals who are afraid of what he is attempting. "Oops, oh no, did I do that?!! I hate it when that happens, darn it".

"Research" is the last thing we need right now in terms of truly sustainable solar and wind energy. We just to do it! Not to allow the salaries of some corporate scientists to inflate while try to find just the right weak, failed experiment that will produce a sound bite for cnn: "researchers find renewable energy not viable." We know more about green, non-nuclear energy right now than we ever knew about coal, nuclear, and oil before we started using them. So we need to just start installing the windmills and solar panels right now. Nuclear is not an option, it is dangerous, toxic, and extremely time consuming; we have better things to do now. Renewable energy will not be put off just so that a few contractors will make billions of dollars in government money on building new plants!

http://www.dreamingearth.net

Boy if I read more I would know you know! You all smarty pants up in here.....I've seen photos though! I should just rename myself as woodbutcher, or something the like, with fancy sayings like "I know the power of flowers, Maaan!"

Hey Evelyn, the fusion problem is about to start. Funding has been found and its supposed to be 100 times the plant size as nuclear is today. Plans are drawn. Plasma scientist are working on it but its all a theory. They can only hold the reaction for a thousandths of a second or they will cause a meltdown. They have done this much, taken an atom, caused it to drop all its protons and electrons, thats plasma, from there on, I don't know what. What these guys are doing is trying to fill in the gaps of their theory with experiments and push for more funding. I do know this much, with that much science in their blood, they don't care about caution, just facts. I know one guy and he didn't know what the doomsday clock was and voted for Bush twice. That is a fact.

I'll watch your rear Kathy.

We can get Jeb Bush for your VP, no one would dare hurt you.

Fusion power??__ Not likely in our life time. A major nuclear disaster in our life time is very likely.

There has been a great deal of scientific work accomplished in the past thirty years, working out the problems associated with fusion atomic power, both in the UK and at Princeton University to name two.

Basically, fusion is a process of heating a plasma to temperatures ten times the temperature of the sun. There are some hazards and potentially some extreme hazards associated with the process.

It will be decades before an operational test plant could be built, it could be as long as a century and then it may be found it is not feasible. Check websites on Google for detailed information.

In the meantime, we can and should begin working to use solar/wind power generation. Norway for one is presently generating 20% of their electrical power with wind generation and will be up to 60% in a few years.

China is way ahead of the United States in this endeavor also. They and Australia in a joint venture, will use the solar/wind power towers to crack sea water and produce hydrogen fuel at a very reasonable cost. Hydrogen fuel is also a clean energy source and people could then drive their SUVs and not feel guilty about it.

If any would like to read an excellent article about depleted uranium, here is the website. DU use is the most serious problem we currently face.

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/DU/KYagasakiOnDU.pdf

Hey Evelyn, are you trying to get me assassinated?

So far nobody has commented on the FUSION work done by Dr Bussard.
This is astonishing because it could well be the beginning of the answer.
In a nutshell..
Uses Boron as the fuel, therefore fuel source is ubiquitous, (end of age of Oil at last) minimal dangerous waste (in fact could be used to "burn" up much of current stores of waste), safe (stop fuel flow, it stops) cheap and very compact (compared to existing plant) so could be mass produced..
The question is why has this very promising exciting development been kept in the dark?? Google for "google fusion bussard"

The development team currently need approx $200 million to build a "proof of concept" full scale generator. Now, whilst I am short of that a few 100 million (otherwise I would write the cheque tomorrow) it is peanuts to governments who spend MILLIONS per civilian killed.

I did some 'Googling' once on the topic of Fusion, and apparently it's feasible even for amateurs to build a small Fusion plant in their backyards…

UN common dreams: I hope you are kidding. Billions have been spent on fusion technology and so far we have about one-billionth of a second of fusion to show for that sum. Amateurs? Backyards? Create the sun in your backyard?

I don't know if it's because there are more people around now, but there does seem to be quite a few people with cancer.

WHO report: alarming increase in cancer rates
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/canc-a26.shtml

Reminds me of a place I used to live that became toxic and unihabitable due to Krypto- er... chryptosporadia, yeah that's the stuff.

Er... I agree with both sides of this debate! :)

--that is to say: I think Nuclear Energy is a *great* idea... but only nuclear *FUSION*, -not the more hazardous nuclear FISSION.

In debates such as this I hear just about every alternative to Fission discussed, but seldom hear of Fusion being proposed as a viable alternative.
Can someone expert here say why? To me (a rank novice in such matters) it would appear to be the best option of all?

I did some 'Googling' once on the topic of Fusion, and apparently it's feasible even for amateurs to build a small Fusion plant in their backyards...

And, sorry PJD, I have a lot of strings to my bow, but material science / engineering are not among them, ~ none-the-less, I appreciate your and others prowess in this area.
~ "Horses for courses" and all that...?

You forgot the cost of purchasing the land and the under the table graft money. It's Okay, you sure did make some excellent points Shaker.

OK lets go with nukes.

1. All neighborhoods should vote on putting the next unit in their back yard not someone else's.

2. Remove all subsidies and secure investors for the funds to build and operate the plant.

3. Find adequate insurance for the health and safety of the workers and all potential accident victims as well as environmental insurance.

4. Arrange for prepaid disposal for waste and contaminated materials upon purchase of the radioactive fuel.

5. Set aside funds to decommission the plant and secure it.

6. Now calculate the cost of the electricity produced based on above and anything I have missed.

7. Compare with the cost of other forms of energy and cost of CONSERVATION to provide this quantity of power.

If this was done, nuclear power would be no problem at all.

PJD: We all know, even little kids know, there are poisons that can kill one almost immediately. So will a bullet to the brain. I'd prefer the bullet than to die a long, slow death from inhling DU or plutonium.

A single microsopic speck of DU entering one's lung, will positively insure cancer. DU also attacks the immune system and will alter DNA, which is often passed on to a fetus. The resuts are horribly deformed babies with serious medical problems. Babies are born with no eyes, or mouths, missing arms or legs or both, no sex organs and serious brain damage. And we contine to use DU in weapons,THOUSANDS OF TONS of it!

A question PJD. If the ammount of stored nuclear waste is as small as you stated; why is it, that after that site in Nevada is ready, if ever, why will it be necessary to have a dozen or more tractor trailer loads of nuclear waste, criss-crossing the country delvering it for the next hundred years?

Ezeflyer: Thank you so much for posting the entire NADER interview. He's my hero, and his comments once again validate why he was chosen (by yours truly, in fiction, anyway) as the # 1 person worth cloning! (Presuming INTELLECT and soul were part of the clone combo!)
Paul Magill Smith: Many thanks for your informed commentary on the dangers of nuclear technology. I wish they could be read at the meetings these scoundrels host to get their profits on the cutting board.
Evelyn Smith: Thanks for your tireless pleas against mass stupidity, a/k/a nuclear detritus being tossed to the winds of time.

A childhood friend was living in Harrisburg, PA when the TMI accident took place in 1978. 18 years later, I visited her as she died of brain cancer. There's no way to prove the connection, but I always believed she was a casualty of the TMI accident.

And what about that reactor on the West Bank that the French helped the Israelis construct?

You know, the one whose radiation is blown by the wind directly into Jordan--and has been causing cancer at record rates?

I personally experienced it 2 years ago--when my system lupus condition which had been in remission for several years was shot into high gear after 4 days in Amman!

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0000137A-C4BF-14E5-84BF83414B7F0000&sc=I100322

http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=0009F4FE-09A2-14B4-881E83414B7F0000&sc=I100322

Above are links to 2 articles on nuclear energy that I found at Scientific American while trying to find an article that would support nuclear energy that john prichett seemed to indicate existed. If there is an article there that supports nuclear energy, I ask john to give a more specific link.

The first article I found refused to claim that there was more than a 40 year supply of uraniun if the citizens of the world were to depend on it for the majority of their electricity, maybe 50 years. The storage problem may never be solved. There seems to be a water problem with that mountain that may preclude it from ever being licensed as a storage facility for nuclear waste.

The second article mentioned how dangerous some types of plants are. Jimmy Carter, who knows a little about nuclear energy, had some plants shut down.

Nuclear energy is a way for some corporations to get their hands on lots of money. They can't get that from wind or solar because of the "low" startup costs. That is unless they were actually willing to do honest work. My guess is that the profit to work ratio is to small to interest the major players in wind or solar.

If the proponents of nuclear energy could prove their case,
I am sure the readers of CommonDreams would be delighted.

You all seem to be winging this word "deadly" without a lot of thought. I think most people would consider "deadly" to mean "kills instantly or within days". In the case of radioactive materials, exposure may entail an unacceptable elevated human cancer risk - but would not be considered "deadly" in a way that poisonous chemical substances are.

If you had a choice of entering a closed room with a 100 gram lump of Plutonium in it or a room with an bowl containing 100 gm of nickel carbonyl - a common chemical usen in a number of industrial proceses, you better pick the room with the plutonium in it! Unless you can find a way to grind the plutonium into fine respirable-size dust, the plutonuim is going to remain relativiely harmless. but the nickel carbonyl would quicly fill the air in the room with vapor that remains odorless well above the lethal level, and a few minutes exposure would consign you to death in a few days.

And as far as persistence, there are a number of persistent organic compounds notably various chlorinated and other halogenated organic compounds which are quite carcinogenic and mutagenic and last indefinitely.

And, by knowlege of science I don't mean expertise, I only mean a level that everyone in a democratic and technological society should have, so they can evaluate the merits of a science or non-science-based claim. Note that source of employment and biases of the person producing the information does not, in itself, influence the validity of the information. With that in mind, read this:

http://www.llnl.gov/csts/publications/sutcliffe/

OK, PJD, here is the problem as I see it and I hope we will find some sort of common ground we can agree on.

You said: "I prefer renewables or hydro to nuclear also. But for now, we need to keep nuclear as one of the options on the table."

To which I must refer back to the original article: ""Nuclear power undermines real solutions to climate change, by diverting resources away from the massive development of clean energy sources the world urgently needs," "

***While I will agree that our current energy needs mandate keeping existing nuclear facilities in operation FOR AWHILE, the problem is construction money for new plants must be re-directed toward renewables instead of building more plants.

The can-o-worms is in the political & economic details of how to break away from nuclear. With the nuclear industry lobbys bribing our politicians for subsidies & construction deals, and the fossil fuel industry trying to prevent renewables from taking away their market share & subsidies, renewables stand little chance of the funds necessary to grow the way they can & we vitally need them to.

The energy status quo will fight tooth-and-nail to remain so, and we have seen they will cheat the public, lie to us, and spend tens of millions of dollars in efforts to cloud the truth. How much has Exxon alone spent on trying to bamboozle the public with erroneous information about links between carbon emissions & climate change? The nuclear industry is currently (and has been) involved in a similar PR campaign, trying to convince the public nuclear is a better investment than renewables. Consequently, the investment in truly green technologies is only a minute fraction of what it should, and could be.

What I would really like to see is:

No new nuclear power plant construction permits issued and those recently issued rescinded.

A huge subsidy for energy conservation directed toward buildings (old & new), and transportation means efficiency. Doesn't it make sense that if we have the technological savvy to make something as complex as a nuclear facility or space shuttle we damned sure ought to be able to come up with a car that gets upwards of 100 MPG? Or barring that, how about an IMMEDIATE penalty for gas guzzling SUV's and other inefficient vehicles? Actually, why not do both? My musical partner's father has a VW station wagon that gets 57 MPG, but it's not a land yacht or 'tank' like many we see on the road now. With six airbags I'm pretty sure it's just as safe, though.

I think I'm about to exceed the 4000character limit, and I have a dinner date with a real beauty, so I'll continue later***
pmsinva2@hotmail.com

We all know the risks of nuclear, so why would you use it when there are many more MUCH safer alternatives?

You might need nuclear on an aircraft carrier or submarine for extended operation, but not for just an electric power plant.

The vast amount of dangerous waste that these plants generate remains lethal for 1000s of years!

We would have to protect the safety of these waste sites for 5000 years and more. Is this country going to be around for 5000 years to insure that safety? The pyramids are the only thing comparable and they have been looted many times.

I am not against nucear power or for it ! I am for intense research for alternative fule's. I also think we need to disscuss acceptable risk in what ever we do that is the underlying topic. I had to say that Just incase knowone esle noticed life it self is not safe nor is the advancement of our quality of life without determenation or agreed purpose for our well being intact. I dont believe our elders should be forced to roast with growing health concerns or children the most vulnerable of our society. Only our moral decay beggs us to ask these questions in hindsight. Mental illness maybe ?

AMY GOODMAN: We return to my interview with Ralph Nader about the presidential candidates for 2008 and their relation to corporate power. I asked him for his assessment of John Edwards.
0. RALPH NADER: Edwards making a good point on poverty. That was a no-no with Democratic [inaudible]. You look at Clinton's speeches. It's all middle class. He never would say "poverty." He'd never talk about 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of more Americans in a state called -- a category called "near poverty." And, but, you know he's got to become much more populist in a much more specific way. He should become the solar energy candidate. He should become the free communications candidate. He should become the affordable housing. More specific, not just, you know, the two Americas. And above all, he should become the law enforcement candidate against the corporate outlaws, the corporate exploiters. And he knows how to do that, but, you know, he has to raise money, too.
0.
0. AMY GOODMAN: Rudolph Giuliani.
0.
0. RALPH NADER: And I might add, he's not good on foreign policy -- Edwards is not good on foreign policy. Rudy Giuliani? Rudy Giuliani is the one-note candidate. No one has ever made more political capital out of what might be called "9/11 showupmanship." I mean, what did he really do? He showed up, which is -- quicker than Bush did, right? He did nothing for the massive contamination of the lungs of the firefighters. In fact, he opposed their full compensation rights. Or the police or the volunteers? He just turned his back on these people. There have been very good books written deflating the fraud of Rudy Giuliani. He's also an authoritarian candidate. Don't bet your civil liberties on Giuliani. He thinks the PATRIOT Act is weak. So there's a real authoritarian language. If you look at the language that he's conveying around the country, it's frightening.
0.
0. AMY GOODMAN: John McCain?
0.
0. RALPH NADER: John McCain? He's good on auto safety. He tries to do something on campaign finance reform, although he plays the game and has to raise it from the K Street lobbyists. He's terrible on the war. I don't know what got into this mind of his. I mean, he had great authority to be as good as Senator Chuck Hagel on it and to say it was the wrong war. He could have opposed it. But he stuck, and that's why he's going to have trouble even getting the nomination. And if he gets it, he's not going to get elected. The American people will not elect a Republican in 2008, but they will definitely not elect a Republican who is for continuing the war in Iraq. 70% of the American people now want out of Iraq. That means a very sizeable chunk of conservative voters want out of Iraq. And all the Republican candidates of any significance who are running want to continue that war. They want victory.
0.
0. AMY GOODMAN: The unannounceds: Fred Thompson, Mayor Bloomberg.
0.
0. RALPH NADER: Bloomberg is the wildcard. He could easily turn it into a three-way race if he runs as an Independent. There's talk of a Bloomberg-Senator Hagel ticket, and that could not just be another Perot rerun, it could really be a winning ticket. You know, Bloomberg is a surprise to most people. He's got a Republican label. He's a former registered Democrat. I don't think he's good on corporate welfare. But he's got a way where he could really appeal to people who call themselves Republicans, Independents, Democrats. He is big business, so he's not afraid to talk turkey to them if he wants to. Nobody can say he didn't meet a payroll. But we're still waiting to see whether the inside Bloomberg office talk about running is actually going to materialize.
0.
0. AMY GOODMAN: The Independent unannounced: Ralph Nader.
0.
0. RALPH NADER: Too early to say. It's too early to say. If I was going to run -- and I have not decided at all -- the biggest problem is getting on the ballot. The Democrats filed twenty-one phony suits against us. We won most of them, but it was very draining. In Pennsylvania, they got a Democratic judge, using a Republican law firm, Reed Smith, to assess me and Peter Camejo $81,000 in transcription costs and handwriting expert fees for defending our right to be on the ballot, which they got us off through all kinds of shenanigans. First people in American legal history who had to pay court costs for defending their right to be on the ballot. So ballot access obstructions is the political bigotry of American politics. It's very hard to get liberals who love civil rights and civil liberties and who are Democrats to be at all excited about the systemic obstruction of fifty state laws at one level or another that can be used by either Democrat or Republicans against third-party candidates.
0.
0. And historically, Amy, that's where all the great ideas came from. In the nineteenth century it was the anti-slavery party, the women's suffrage party, the farmer party, all the things we read about briefly in our history books that pushed these social justice movements before one or both of the two parties picked up on them. So they're -- you know what I like to say? What would happen to nature if it prohibited seeds from sprouting? What would happen if big business could totally extinguish small business? That's what the big two-party elected dictatorship is doing to a whole array of local, state and national candidates who would like to give the American people more voices and choices.
0.
0. AMY GOODMAN: How do you think mass movements should organize themselves and hold politicians accountable, make them more accountable to citizen, civilian, non-citizen movements than corporations?
0.
0. RALPH NADER: Well, let's start with the easy things, like half of democracy is showing up. So why don't workers who have lost their jobs or their pensions to industries that have gone to communist China with US Department of Commerce subsidy and encouragement, why don't they mass and rally? I mean, who's keeping them from rallying and massing? American Idol? Is that what's doing it? I mean, let's stop making excuses for ourselves. Let's take the farmers, the dwindling number of farmers. They have great important causes that mesh with environmental causes at times, and the whole issue of genetic engineering and the dispossession of the small family farm by the big suppliers corporations and the big buying corporations. Why don't they come to Washington, the way they did twenty years ago with their tractors? Show up!
0.
0. Why, for example, can't a coalition of existing groups -- the Urban Coalition, the NAACP, the trade unions, the consumer, the environmental groups, the neighborhood groups -- in each city sponsor auditorium sessions for the major candidates or whatever candidates they want to invite that are going through New York or Boston or Houston or Denver or Los Angeles or St. Louis or Miami? They couldn't turn them down. And they could say, "We want you to be here at the auditorium to respond to our agenda. We're the ones who are going to say no. We're the ones who are going to say yes."
0.
0. AMY GOODMAN: I want to end with healthcare, I think one of the critical issues of the day that is so rarely explained. If there was a healthcare system in this country that you designed, what would it look like?
0.
0. RALPH NADER: Well, it would look like full Medicare for everybody, whereby the government is the payer. The government now pays over 50% of the healthcare bill. Huge amount of waste in fraud inflicted by these corporations on Medicare and Medicaid, for example, drug companies getting all kinds of corporate subsidies. So the government is already over 50% -- federal, state and local government. So it's full government -- it's called a single payer, which means it can almost eliminate $200 billion of computerized billing fraud and abuse, which has been documented by the General Accounting Office and by the leading expert on this, who should be on your program, Malcolm Sparrow, a lecturer at Harvard University. And when I said, "$200 billion, Mr. Sparrow? Every year?" he said, "That's the lowest estimate." That's just computerized billing fraud and abuse in the healthcare industry.
0.
0. It would dramatically reduce administrative expenses. A doctor was at the hearing today -- no, yesterday, I guess -- and she said that the per capita administrative expense in this country in healthcare is almost $1,900. In Canada, it's under $500. So it's more efficient. It's less corporate crime. It covers everybody. It saves lives. 18,000 people die in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine, because they can't afford healthcare. That's six 9/11s every year. And the outcomes are better. In Western countries, the outcomes in terms of infant mortality, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of lower levels of anxiety -- they don't have to worry about losing their life savings for a tragic illness -- are all better than the United States system.
0.
0. AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think it would take to achieve this?
0.
0. RALPH NADER: It would take about a million people spending 800 million hours over a period of two years in key congressional districts. You've got about 25% of the Congress already for it. And once the Washington politicos hear the rumble of the people, you will see a change that will surprise even the cynics among us. They've got to hear the rumble of the people and about 2,000 organized people in each congressional district, connecting with a popular sentiment that's all for this. And they can give you chapter and verse in their own family, in terms of tragedies due to the healthcare system -- denial, malpractice, corruption, insensitivity, deferral. It can happen.
0.
0. AMY GOODMAN: Does George W. Bush matter anymore?
0.
0. RALPH NADER: Yeah, he matters, because he's a national security menace. He's a destroyer of our Constitution, a violator of our statutes, a revoker of our regulations. He's a war monger. He's a war criminal, clinically a war criminal. And he's still in charge. And I said some time ago, he's a giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being, although I sometimes wonder about the word "human." I don't think it's possible to see a more obsessively compulsive person with so much contempt for the traditions of our country, including conservative traditions, which is why so many libertarians and conservatives like Pat Buchanan have opposed him again and again.
0.
0. What's important is to basically get back to self-determination. Do we really believe in self-government? Do we really believe in accountable government? And do we really believe that the supremacy of the people has to be reinstalled over the supremacy of what Jefferson called the moneyed interests and which today are the giant corporations? And I think that in addition to the various tools of accountability that we've discussed here at this conference, such as regulation; litigation; investor power; public delivery systems, when the corporations aren't interested, like the Tennessee Valley Authority; stronger labor unions; organized consumers; cooperatives; here's what we really need in a broad sense: we need to exercise the ownership that we already have of the great public assets of the United States of America, from the public airwaves to the public lands, to the government's research and development, to trillions of dollars of labor pension funds, all of which are owned by the people and controlled by corporations. And so, that's no big deal, theoretically, is it? To revert control back to the owners? That's a basic conservative principle.
0.
0. The second thing we have to do is increasingly displace the operations of corporations with better operations: more efficient energy, more renewable energy, more credit unions that are accountable to their small investors, more Medicare replacing the HMOs. All over the country, we see examples of displacement of corporation, and that is really a very powerful and exciting movement, if it obtains a magnitude of significance.
0.
0. And then, the third, we have to structurally, constitutionally -- every way -- subordinate this robot called the corporate entity, not its employees or its people. The robot has to be subordinated to the supremacy of human rights of real individuals. And that shouldn't be a hard sell, either, if we start talking about these things more often, if we don't leave it up to Democracy Now! to talk about it, if we don't leave it up to an occasional TV, you know? An occasional TV, a very occasional TV.
0.
0. We have to increase our expectation levels. It all starts with increasing our expectation levels of what kind of society we want and what kind of world we want to bequeath to our descendants. If we're not motivated enough by the past great reformers and civic patriots of our past, the fighters against slavery, women's rights and all the rest of the social justice movement, if that isn't enough to motivate us, then just look around this country and see the tragedies, the dispossession, the injustice, the exclusions, the disrespect, the gouging, the rip-offs, the using of taxpayer dollars against those small taxpayers themselves, the lack of health and safety, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost every year in occupational disease and medical malpractice and air and water pollution and denial of healthcare and so on -- who weeps for those people?
0.
0. And we have to stop making excuses for ourselves. That's the key. We have to multiply our own civic energies with our neighbors, our relatives, our coworkers, our friends. When that happens, when word of mouth takes over as the prime communications system in this country, nothing can stop it. We have to replace big talk with small talk. And we have to make it apparent to millions of people that striving for justice is one of life's greatest gratifications. In fact, outside of the family, it is the greatest gratification. Without justice, there's no such thing as liberty and freedom, there's no such thing as fulfilling life's possibilities. And I want to thank the people who came to this conference and lent us their energies and energized themselves and hope they'll go throughout the country and do the same thing. Thank you.
0.
AMY GOODMAN: Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, speaking at a three-day conference on "Taming the Giant Corporation." I spoke to him in Washington, D.C. in June.

AMY GOODMAN: We return to my interview with Ralph Nader. I asked him about labor unions today, how they can regain their momentum and power at one of their lowest points in history.
0. RALPH NADER: One is they've got to mount an assault on the WTO and NAFTA. WTO and NAFTA are basically an albatross around the neck of workers, of consumers and of clean environments, to begin with. They are an end run around our courts and regulatory agencies. We couldn't have gotten airbags under WTO, because that would have been considered a unilateral move under this global trade agreement and a non-tariff trade barrier. It would have been considered too high a standard imposed on importing cars, even though it's the same standard on domestically produced cars. What WTO does, it prevents us from being first in the world. It pulls down our standards so our workers have to compete with brutalized child labor in third world countries. It makes this impossible to prohibit the importation of products from child labor -- that's a violation of the WTO -- even though you can't buy a product here in the US made from child labor in the US. It is the greatest loss of sovereignty -- local, state and national -- in American history. And it's an autocratic system with secret courts and secret equivalency procedures. I mean, it's just a total contradiction in subversion of our democratic society. So that's the first thing that has to be done, to invoke the six-month notice of withdraw and renegotiate pull-up trade agreements, where we pull up the rest of the world and our standards, instead of pull-down trade agreements that subordinate health and safety to trade agreements. That's the first time that's ever been done. Trade usually stuck to trade, trade agreements. Now, they've become very imperialist, and they subordinate health and safety, consumer, environmental, and worker rights.
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0. The second that has to be done is something no Democratic politician will ever utter, except maybe for Dennis Kucinich. Not one Democratic politician will say, "We should repeal the notorious anti-worker Taft-Hartley law of 1947."
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0. AMY GOODMAN: Explain what it is.
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0. RALPH NADER: Which basically obstructs the organization of unions, which transfers control of union pension funds to management. With all these trillions of dollars, imagine the power that workers could have. They would own a third of the New York Stock Exchange. They would be able to put real muscle in investor ownership. And it prevents workers from helping one another, called secondary boycotts, among many other notorious provisions.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about these secret trade deals that are being made behind closed doors between the Democrats and the White House, that reports say are being the language being drafted by the White House. Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper's, said on Democracy Now! that "[Congressman] Rangel, [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi are saying, '[], we're gearing up for the 2008 election. We've got to raise a lot of money.' They're closer to the Clinton wing of the party, which is the pro-so-called-free-trade wing of the party, the pro-NAFTA, pro-permanent-normal-trade-relations-with-China part of the party. And this is a way of saying to the corporate community [] -- Wall Street, Wal-Mart -- [] we're open for business, we want to raise money from you." In order to compete for campaign money, the logic goes, the Democrats have to cater to big corporate donors.
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0. RALPH NADER: The corporate Democrats in action again. Why should we all be surprised? When you ask Democrats in Congress, "How are you doing against the Republicans in the coming election?" the first answer is about money. It's not about justice. It's not about agenda. It's not about mobilizing people. It's about dialing for corporate dollars. These two parties have sold the US government and the American people to the highest bidders. And that's why we have a corporate sovereign political economy, and that's why workers are daily in peril of losing their economic security and their pensions and retirement or their jobs or their health and safety in the workplace.
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0. You know, we have to pay attention, Amy, to something very important, and that is the language. We are in the process of seeing the corporatization of our highways, the corporatization of our water systems, and still people on our side use the word "privatization." They use the word "white-collar crime," instead of using the word "corporate crime." They use the word "private sector" instead of "corporate sector." We have to stop using the words of the opponents, because they control the language. Democrats should use the words "corporate welfare" more often. They should talk about cracking down on corporate crime, fraud and abuse, that are ripping off Medicare and Medicaid and the US taxpayer across the board. But you can say that ad infinitum, but they're not going to do it as long as they view their electoral processes in terms of dollar signs.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: Ralph, let's talk about "NABbing" the elections. That's National Association of Broadcasters. The money you mentioned that these candidates are raising, tens of millions of dollars, will be well over a billion dollars in 2008. What would you see as a different way for the media to play a role here? How do you see the media being challenged? Explain how the process works right now.
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0. RALPH NADER: Right now, the media focuses on the horse race: who's raising the most money. The candidates who raise the most money get the most attention. They get the most specific polls. And the ones who aren't raising the money, even though their record is far superior and their rhetoric is far superior, like Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, they don't get hardly any attention. So the networks and the mass media have bought into the wealth election. That's one.
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0. The second is, they have made possible a private form of corporate government, known as the Commission on Presidential Debates. So this commission was created in 1987, as you know, to get rid of the League of Women Voters, which sponsored presidential debates, and they went around and they got money from Philip Morris and Ford and AT&T and Coors beer, and they now control the main gateway to tens of millions of Americans. No matter how many states you run in as a third party or independent candidate, if you don't get on those debates, you don't reach tens of millions of people.
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0. And who is the gatekeeper? The Democrat and Republican parties, who even kept Ross Perot off in 1996, after he got 19 million votes in 1992. I called him up, and I said, "Ross, how does it feel for a billionaire to be excluded?" And he says, "Absolutely right." He said, "I couldn't even buy thirty minutes of airtime." They refused him to buy thirty minutes of airtime so he could do his charts on, you know, on the deficit.
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0. And, yeah, these TV stations are using our property. We own the public airwaves. We're the landlords. They're just tenants. And they use our property free. They don't pay as much as you pay for your auto license. And they decide who is on and who isn't on TV or on the national debates. So if you don't break that connection between the Debate Commission and ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN, you can't break the power of this corporation called the Debate Commission and have more diverse debates with more voices and choices, which, by the way, the American people want. In the year 2000, at least three national polls had a majority of the people wanting me and Buchanan on the national debates, and I don't think that's just because people wanted to stay awake.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of corporate power, let's go through the leading Democratic candidates and where they stand. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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0. RALPH NADER: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a corporatist. She's on the Senate Armed Services Committee, didn't lift a finger against major corrupt, unnecessary weapons system contracting or even weapons system. Hey, there are people all over the Defense Department who think we should scrap the F-22, the Raptor, which is now over $250 billion program. The plane has gone from about $40 million to almost $200 million. You could put two or three of them in this room. And she's never taken on any of the corruption, the fraud, even though she complains that there's not enough money for children's programs. Well, she's on the Senate Armed Services Committee. She's signaling that she is going to play ball with the military-industrial complex.
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0. She has never taken a stand on corporate subsidies, handouts, giveaways, bailouts. You know, stadiums in New York subsidized by taxpayers, while so much in New York City is crumbling for lack of repair.
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0. And finally, she doesn't even do what Spitzer did. Her fellow Democrat gave her cover by prosecuting Wall Street crooks, rode all the way to the governorship in a landslide election based on his prosecuting corporate crooks. People like prosecuting corporate crooks. And she won't even sponsor tough corporate crime legislation and tougher penalties, law and order for corporate crooks, in the US Congress.
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0. So, to be kind to her, one can summarize as saying, she is severely lacking in political fortitude. She knows she's the frontrunner, and therefore she's going around the country pandering to powerful interest groups and flattering the people. Now, maybe they'll get tired of it after a while. Maybe they'll say enough is enough. Do we want eight more years of the Clintons? And, you know, you get a "twofer."
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0. AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean, "eight more years of the Clintons"? How would you summarize the Clinton-Gore years?
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0. RALPH NADER: The Clinton-Gore years were -- they further allowed and even encouraged, with this reinventing governments movement, the further consolidation of corporate power, agency by agency, department by department. Eight years went by, and there wasn't a single chemical control standard issued by OSHA initiated by the Clinton administration. 58,000 American workers died from worker-related disease. You'd think they'd at least issue one. And there's a big backlog of them. There's been a lot of scientific work done. They didn't do it. They didn't issue one fuel efficiency standard. Where was Gore? Gore knew about this. He called the internal combustion engine, in his first book that came out in 1992, a major threat to the planet. But when he was vice president, he was either muzzled or went along with Clinton, who right from the beginning signaled to the auto companies: you've got a four-year pass; in fact, we're going to spend a billion dollars subsidizing a joint program, which was a complete waste of money, to develop some sort of improved engine efficiency -- a partnership between the White House and the three auto companies. So the Clinton-Gore years were the final evidence that the Democratic Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of giant corporations, with a few luminous exceptions, like George Miller, Dennis Kucinich, some of the older Democrats, Ed Markey. But even Ed Markey has lost some of his vigor in the telecommunications area.
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0. Washington, D.C. is corporate occupied territory. The Democrat and Republican candidates are fighting against one another to see who's going to go into the White House and start taking orders from their corporate paymasters. When are we going to understand that either the people are going to control our government or we're going to cede control increasingly to global corporations that have no allegiance to America, no allegiance to communities, other than to control them or abandon them as they see fit to communist China, with the industries, or elsewhere?
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0. AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Al Gore. He's seen as the major voice now on the environment. I don't know if it's exactly on taking on the corporations, but he was in power for eight years. So what is your assessment of a Gore candidate for president?
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0. RALPH NADER: Gore has been environmentally reborn. He is experiencing a important redemption. He is doing something very important. He is now basically a full-time citizen alerting the world to the peril of global warming and getting some pretty muscular forces behind them, behind his efforts. Maybe he'll be restrained in terms of what needs to be done, in terms of the democratization of technology and the expansion of solar energy. I stood in line waiting for, you know, the book signing, when he came here in Washington. There were 300 people at a bookstore, and I just stood in line and finally got up to his desk, and he was very cordial. Anybody who thinks that the Greens cost Gore the election should ask Gore. He not only won the election, he knows how it was stolen from him. He knows he made some very serious failures himself, including not winning his own state of Tennessee, which would have put him in the White House. But he was very cordial, and I said to him, "Al," -- because I've known him since years ago -- I said, "Al, how does it feel to be liberated?" He said, "Very good." And that's really the description of his present state. It's quite the testimony. When he had real power, he couldn't deploy it.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: If he were to become president, what makes you think he would remain reborn?
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0. RALPH NADER: He wouldn't. See, the only politicians who are liberated once they're elected are those who come out of mass movements, so that they know who they're accountable for. And we have an electoral system where everybody tosses their hat in the ring and then goes around trying to raise money and expects people to be spectators on their campaign voyages through their cities and states instead of participants. I mean, that's what they do. They don't campaign with the people, with the citizen groups, with these struggles at the local level against pig farms or blowing off mountaintops for the coal industry or South Central LA and the poverty, and so on. They parade in front of the people. And that's no way to win elected office and expect to represent the people.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: Barack Obama.
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0. RALPH NADER: Great capacity. He knows the score. He knows who has power in the country. He was a community organizer in Chicago after a sterling record at the Harvard Law School. He could have gone and cashed in. But, as he said in his book, how can you keep raising that kind of money from those kind of interests and not have it affect you? And he's now in a race with Hillary to raise 300 million bucks. He's trying to do a lot of it on the internet in small amounts, but he's going to one economic sector interest after another raising money. And so, the question is whether he's going to mobilize the people or he's going to parade in front of the people. And if he does that, he's not going to be a distinguished winner if he wins.
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0. I was very upset the other day when I heard him say publicly that he wanted to expand and modernize the military. I mean, really, the military needs more Trident submarines, huh? It needs more aircraft carriers. It's already half of the budget, the operating budget of the US government. And there's no major enemy left. The Soviet Union is gone, unless you thing Moldova is a threat, and communist China is converting into -- from criminal communism to criminal capitalism. They want our jobs and industry. They're not going to send missiles over here. So, of course, other perils are being wildly exaggerated and provoked into further expansion: the so-called war on terrorism and a criminal war in Iraq, which even Bush's CIA chief and General Casey and others have said are provoking the insurgency, enlarging it and attracting more people to be trained in sabotage and terrorism from other countries. So that's a real powerful antiterrorist policy. You pursue a policy against terrorists with state terrorism. You pursue a policy against terrorists and expand the number of terrorists. I mean, this should be a concept that could be easily enveloped by the limited mind of George W. Bush.
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AMY GOODMAN: Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader. When we come back from break, he talks about John Edwards and talks about some of the Republican candidates as well, as well as his own plan for 2008. Stay with us.
[break]

Ralph Nader on the Candidates, Corporate Power and His Own Plans for 2008
Democracy Now, July 9, 2007

The race for the 2008 election is on, and all we hear about is the race for the money. Presidential hopefuls are vying with each other to raise tens of millions of dollars for what is projected to be the most expensive election in history. But hardly anyone is talking about where this money comes from or where it ends up. Fewer still have asked persistent questions about corporate America's grip over not just the elections, but most policy decisions out of Washington, DC.
Today, we spend the hour with a man who has spent the last four decades doing all of this and more. I'm talking about consumer advocate, corporate critic, and three-time (will it be more?) presidential candidate Ralph Nader. We spoke with him in June at the end of a conference called "Taming the Giant Corporation."

0. Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, corporate critic and three-time presidential candidate.

AMY GOODMAN: The race for the 2008 election is on, and all we hear about is the race for the money. Presidential hopefuls are vying with each other to raise tens of millions of dollars for what's projected to be the most expensive election in history. But hardly anyone is talking about where that money comes from or where it ends up. Fewer still have asked persistent questions about corporate America's grip over not just the elections, but most policy decisions out of Washington, D.C.
Today, we spend the hour with a man who's spent more than four decades doing all of this and more. I'm talking about the consumer advocate, corporate critic and three-time -- will it be more? -- presidential candidate Ralph Nader. I interviewed him in June at the end of a conference called "Taming the Giant Corporation." I began by asking Ralph Nader, why hold a three-day conference on corporate power, rather than on war?
0. RALPH NADER: Well, first of all, the corporations are very involved in the war machine. Remember President Eisenhower's statement about the military-industrial complex. He might have called it today the industrial-military complex, because the industrial part is now a supreme influence on the US military budget, which now is half of the entire federal government's operating budget, and as well as effecting foreign policy. Even Mr. Koppel has written that oil is very much involved in the invasion of Iraq. In fact, he went to say it's mostly about oil in an op-ed in the New York Times -- Ted Koppel. So the domination, the corporate sovereignty over our political economy is very much related to our foreign, military and economic policy, including GATT and NAFTA, which are architectures of corporate supremacy over civil values and the rights of workers, environment and consumers.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: Can you recap from this conference of three days -- people coming at corporations, dealing with them in many different ways -- what you think are the biggest problems and the most effective strategies for dealing with them?
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0. RALPH NADER: Well, the biggest problem is that the avenues to challenge corporate power, to restrain it, to break it up in its present concentrated form, to take it away from the political arena, because corporations are artificial entities. They're not real human beings. They don't vote. They don't die in Iraq. They don't have children. They are entities that are dominating our politics, our electoral systems, our universities, increasingly, dominate almost everything, even moving into areas that were once prohibited by custom in our country, like commercializing childhood.
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0. And so, this conference really challenges the corporations at every interface that affects people -- taxpayers, consumers, workers, communities, children, healthcare, living wage, the varieties of opportunities that people should have that are being denied. We are in the advanced stages of being a corporate state, where -- as Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned Congress in 1938 that when government is controlled by private economic power, he called that fascism. And he would consider today's control by private economic power -- namely, giant corporations astride the world -- as an even more advanced form of what he called fascism: control of government by corporate interests.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: Would you call it fascism?
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0. RALPH NADER: Yeah. The clinical definition is what he was saying. It was obviously colored in a different context in World War II, but the clinical definition of "fascism" is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power. And corporations now have their executives in high government positions. They have 35,000 full-time lobbies here, like the drug companies getting all kinds of subsidies from Congress. And they have 10,000 political action committees.
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0. Now, if you look at the civic side, there's very little of that, although as this conference showed, they've achieved an enormous amount, given their small numbers. I think, basically, if you could quantify corporate power and civic power in Washington, D.C., civic power is probably 1% of corporate power. And, yeah, look what it has achieved. And I think the hope coming out of this conference is not only that we have a lot of solutions that we don't apply in our country, because concentration of power in the hands of the few allows the few to decide for the many, but we have a large amount of unused democratic power, unused civic power, that can be unleashed, organized, to take back our government, if people stopped believing that they were powerless, which they are inbred in ever since we entered elementary school. You know the old phrase, "You can't fight City Hall."
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0. But if we want a society where people have the opportunity to fulfill life's possibilities, doesn't that tell you what the priorities are, which is focusing on subordinating the corporate entity to the sovereignty of the American people, as implied in the Constitution, so that they are our servants, not our masters, so that they have to compete against other models of economic development, like cooperatives, like replacing the HMO insurance companies with full Medicare, like decentralized solar replacing more and more of Exxon and Peabody Coal and the nuclear industry, like a redefinition of efficiency in productivity as if people mattered, not as if corporations dominate? They actually define our economic terms, and if we defined "efficiency" as if people mattered, we would have a massive energy efficiency program, which would, of course, reduce the sales of Exxon and Peabody Coal and Commonwealth Edison and all the rest, because we would be using less electricity and less gasoline, because we would democratize technology.
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0. Instead, we have what Andrew Kimbrell called, at the conference, these giant corporations are dictatorships. And they have enormous power without anywhere near the commensurate responsibility. They are highly autocratic dictatorships that prevent constitutional rights from being with workers when they go to the workplace. They lose their constitutional rights when they enter that corporate domain.
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0. And because of all this, it is interesting that our political leaders don't like to discuss it. I mean, every politician in this town knows who runs this town. They know who runs the Defense Department, the Department of Interior, Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration. And there are only a tiny handful of politicians who will raise the banner of subordinating corporate power to the sovereignty of the American people. The debates are sterile. The debates are exercises in parallel news conferences repeating ad infinitum the same words and phrases of evasion. They will not confront the corporate crime wave. They will not confront the destruction of our democracy. They will not confront the usurpation of our electoral processes, even though they can go back to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and others, who have condemned corporate power as a perilous threat to even a modest democratic society.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: So if corporations are dictatorships, you have a choice of regulating a dictatorship or getting rid of it.
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0. RALPH NADER: Well, you've got to do all these things. For example, you have to strengthen the traditional tools that have curbed corporate crime, fraud, violence, outrages, bigotry. And these are regulation, adequate opportunity for litigation. These are anti-trust, which has been caricatured, but it is a powerful tool if it's adequately applied. You have to give the owners, the mutual fund people, the pension shareholders, more power. They are the owners of the corporation, but they have no power. Just imagine the violation of capitalist principles. These guys at the top, who are paying themselves $10,000-$12,000 an hour in compensation, the CEOs, basically have repudiated the cardinal principle of capitalism, which is if you own property, you should control it. And now they have said to their owners, "Get lost! Don't dare tell us what we're going to pay ourselves. After all, we're only your hired hands." And so, that's a very important front or initiative.
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0. We have to ask ourselves, why not more cooperatives. With the internet, you can develop cooperative purchasing and develop specifications for the kind of cars or the kind of insurance policies people should be able to buy. We need stronger trade unions. We need trade unions unlike SEIU. We need trade unions like the California Nurses Association, who see themselves as a powerful countervailing force.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: Explain that difference.
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0. RALPH NADER: SEIU is the inheritor of the tradition of company unionism, basically.
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0. AMY GOODMAN: The Service Employees International Union.
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0. RALPH NADER: Yeah, the Service Employees, Andrew Stern. I mean, basically he spends more -- sometimes you think he spends more time with corporate executives than he does with workers. He's constantly trying to collaborate with corporate executives in ways that weaken the morale, undermine the rights and horizons of workers. And most prominently, the way he signs these full-page ads with the US Chamber of Commerce and all the other corporate lobbies, saying Americans should have universal healthcare. Yeah, more universal healthcare gouging, more universal healthcare exploitation, not full Medicare for all.
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AMY GOODMAN: Coming up, Ralph Nader will talk about the presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican, one by one, and talk about his own plans for 2008.
[break]

It's one falsehood after another with PJD. First false claim: "Nuclear power generation has a better safety record than any other form of large-scale power generation . . ." When I bring up the largest power generation disaster in history, Chernobyl, the response is that Chernobyl doesn't count?

Next false claim: there are "many equally deadly, and persistent . . . products." OK, what other toxic substance remains deadly to humans for a quarter million years, even at a distance of 300 miles down wind?

I am a civil engineer who's early work expeience was with the TVA on some of their nuclear plant projects as well as at their coal fired plants, like the notorious high sulfur coal burning, SO2-spewing, Paradise, KY plant.

I have no doubt what type of facility I rather work.

I work in a government mine-safety technical support and research facility, with access to materials engineers, chemists, physicists, and occupational toxicologists.

I prefer renewables or hydro to nuclear also. But for now, we need to keep nuclear as one of the options on the table. Those who don't like it need to cut their electricity consumption. I don't use air conditioning, and as far as I'm concerned, there should be a mandated device that prevent's it's use at outside temperatures below 90F.

Clean, safe, renewable energy is the urgent need of America and the world - and we need it now. The longer we drag our heels with fossil fuel dependency, or flirt with new nuclear installations, the more our country is at risk. Clean, safe, renewable, and DISTRIBUTED NOT CENTRALIZED energy is the need.

Think solar panels on every home and vehicle rooftop.
Think hydrogen created from water on an as-needed basis.
Think Manhattan Project for energy R&D - and fast!

Once the mess the nuclear industry has already made is all cleaned up. I'm talking about a permanent solution then we can have a discussion on building more. Is that to much to ask. I live in Washington State and we still have the waste from the original nuclear bombs sitting in steel tanks waiting to cause a disaster. They have already spent billions but I haven't heard anything about a permanent solution.
The people running our government have shown to be stupid and can be bought by campaign donations.

PJD, you are wrong!

In 1991 the NRC stated there are millions of tons of deadly radio-avctive waste stored in the US alone. They don't count the tons that are just buried in thirty foot ditches and the raiation leakage is forever polluting rivers, lakes and the aquifers.

Those are not a rumors, it's facts. One retired nuclear facility worker in Tennessee said, and I quote. " We used to take that shit and put it in boxcars and roll them onto unused rail sidings". There are TONS of "strictly" controlled plutonium missing and unacounted for according to the NRC.

Once again, in case you missed it. We have scattered thousands of TONS of DU in the Mid East and a single microscopic speck of that poison will kill anyone who inhales it. A very slow but painful death is insured. Go to the article on today's issue of Common Dreams concernig depleted uranium and find the websites offered in comments and read them. Very scary. You scare me too PJD, you don't help at all.

It matter little that the neocon lie of safe nuclear energy is possible. Sane people know that to find a solution to a problem, first do no harm. They haven't made it to first base.

Point is, our energy needs can and should be made by safe renewable sources.

Bah! All those problems are because of faulty designs and construction in other countries. That will never happen in the USA. Our technologically advanced and cutting edge construction industry can build the best there is for clean, safe nuclear energy.And terrorism against our plants? Unthinkable. Remember we're taking care of it over there so they don't hit us here. Oh...what? Three Mile Island was in the USA? Their coming across the Mexican border? Forget I said anything.

"The MAJOR problem is, the millions of TONS of deadly wastes..."

The only type of waste that one might reasonably characterize as "deadly" - spent fuel - has not been produced in anything like those quantities. There is currently about 45,000 tons of spent fuel stored in the US. If all spent fuel-rod assemblies are put in one place, it would fit in a football field piled about 16 feet high. And it is stored under far more strict regualtory oversight than, many equally deadly, and persistent, and vastly morewidely-used chemical products.

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/brochures/br0216/

Thanks Kathy & Evelyn for putting sensibility & rational good judgement into the discussion.

Just because a patient doesn't know exactly what is wrong with them doesn't mean they don't know when they are hurting...and they don't need someone with an advanced degree to tell them that.

Since you asked, PJD, here it is. While I don't have a degree in nuclear physics, I am the son of a ME & RN. I have 2 years in a geology major and university degrees from two places in management & administration. My two brothers are EE's, and hold numerous patents in avionics, medical electronics, and on a little radiation detection device & alarm called a Nukalert (see: www.nukalert.com). They invented it and we have manufactured about 50,000 of them so far. Our conversations are often technology related, and of course, due to the nature of the business often revolve around any threat that is nuclear. Since you brought up the point, why don't you give us your mini-bio & credentials, and why you are so adamant about your support of this dangerous technology, ok?

PJD said, "It is as different from a light-water moderated reactor as, say, gasoline is from nitroglycerine."

Good comparison. I think I'd rather deal with gasoline than nitro, and as a nuclear veteran, I'd just as soon skip nukes altogether.

Reminds me of the old joke.
Dr. to patient. "Mr, Johnson, I want you to remain very calm, for the slightest shock could kill you."

"Mr, Johnson? Mr. Johnson!"

Kathy,____ what are you doing here? You are supposed to be in DC filing the necessary papers to replace Bush and company.

UBrew12 asked (above) what the susceptibility of nuclear plants is to terrorist action, and said he'd think that would be part of the discussion. BINGO!

All 104 nuclear power plants in America have spent-fuel pools that are not "hardened" against terrorist attacks. These pools contain huge amounts of radioactive material which, if subject to explosion, would cause a horrendous radioactive fire that would ride on the wind and irradiate a huge swath of land (remember that the Chernobyl fire irradiated reindeer way up in Lapland!).

So not only is the economics of nuclear power just plain ridiculous, and not only do we NOT know how or where to store the high-level radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years, but any new nuclear plant just adds to the number of terrorist targets in the U.S.

Anyone who claims more nuclear plants are part of the "solution" is not paying attention to the facts.

The most vocal opponents of nuclear energy are reacting to the lack of information on the subject coming from the media and the politicians who don't have the guts to change the popular myths. The U.S. has frozen nuclear power since TMI. There is a new (third) generation of technology that is an order of magnitude mor safe and more importantly, it does not produce the deadly, unspent fuel rod assemblies that are truly a ticking time bomb. Safe nuclear power is achievable and is the only practical alternative to carbon burning. See the story of Fast Nuclear Reactors in Dec 2005 Scientific American. www.sciam.com

PJD I think you are missing the point.

Anything man has ever made eventually broke. Name one machine that hasn't.

Another point is that materials to power nuclear reactors are a finite supply, just like oil. It will run out. A recent article just said there likely isn't enough material to supply the 2,000 reactors it is estimated necessary to meet the world's energy demands.

Will the wind continuously blow, sun shine, rivers flow, geo-thermals renew perpetually---yes, so why expend all our dwindling resources chasing a technology that will eventually have to be replaced?

Why not fund something, and devote our energy toward something that is sustainable rather than temporary?

There are Chernobyl type power plants operating in other countries and Cheery- nobel is still in operation. And every nuke plant produces deadly waste. And one does not have to have a degree in any subject to have common sense. PJD, have you ever had a brain scan?

There is another issue involved here. Remember Silkwood? A true story, still officially ignored, and with her death, the xrays of the welding seams have disappeared. So we have aging nuclear power plants and are at the tender mercies of contractors and subcontractors' ethical sensibilities. And our present political climate is the worst possible one in terms of oversight for public safety. Russian roulette anyone?

Chernobyl was an entirely different kind of reactor - an inherently hazardous graphite-moderated reactor used because it's capability for weapons material production with power producion being secondary. It is as different from a light-water moderated reactor as, say, gasoline is from nitroglycerine.

Doesn't ANYONE in this forum, or in the USA, have any knowlege of science or engineering??? What do you all do for a living?

Well well, I don't have to wait for Billy, he has some cheer leaders here. Discounting cheery-nobil and a few other smaller disasters, I won't argue the safety issue in nuclear power plants. It's a pretty good record for the plant's workers.

But PJD and some others are writing while wearing blinders. They have written as one issue cheerers on the subject of nuclear power. I suspect they will deny that comment.

The MAJOR problem is, the millions of TONS of deadly wastes produced by using enrched uranium for fuel in nuclear power plants and the small but ever building and continuing deadly emissions that do get into the Earth's atmosphere. Those super deadly wastes will have to be safely stored for millions of years. Is that possible? How about just sixty years?

No,__ it is not possible and it never will be possible. There are hundreds of factual reports of abuses, where radioactive wastes have created deadly damage to the earth, ground waters, to humans and all animal life__damage that cannot ever be rectified, from now thru perpituity. Those facts are unarguable, the crime speaks for itself.

There is no question that coal fired plants are deadly for the enviroment and for all life also. We must all,___ all of humanity work to use natural means of producing electrical power, the methods given to us by nature.

The human barracades to prevent us from achieving sensible goals, are the people in power and those before them, who are greedy and will do any and everything possible, to insure they have their blood money. They do not own the sun, the prevailing winds, the geo-thermal heat, or tide power that we should__ and easily could be using. It is strictly greed combined with power, a lack of common sense and a decent human soul. They also have their blind cheer leaders who speak out and attempt to confuse the real issues.

With out nuclear power, we would not have depleted uranium weapons and the resulting tragedy of using that deadly and forever lasting poison, a poison which can never be cleansed from the Earth's land, oceans or atmosphere. Later, Kem Patrick

Safe??? This was easy to Google:

The new estimates have been collated by researchers commissioned by European parliamentary groups, Greenpeace International and medical foundations in Britain, Germany, Ukraine, Scandinavia and elsewhere. They take into account more than 50 published scientific studies.

"At least 500,000 people - perhaps more - have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine," said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine. "[Studies show] that 34,499 people who took part in the clean-up of Chernobyl have died in the years since the catastrophe. The deaths of these people from cancers was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the population.

"We have found that infant mortality increased 20% to 30% because of chronic exposure to radiation after the accident. All this information has been ignored by the IAEA and WHO. We sent it to them in March last year and again in June. They've not said why they haven't accepted it."

Evgenia Stepanova, of the Ukrainian government's Scientific Centre for Radiation Medicine, said: "We're overwhelmed by thyroid cancers, leukaemias and genetic mutations that are not recorded in the WHO data and which were practically unknown 20 years ago."

The IAEA and WHO, however, say that apart from an increase in thyroid cancer in children there is no evidence of a large-scale impact on public health. "No increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality that could be associated with radiation exposure have been observed," said the agencies' report in September.

In the Rivne region of Ukraine, 310 miles west of Chernobyl, doctors say they are coming across an unusual rate of cancers and mutations. "In the 30 hospitals of our region we find that up to 30% of people who were in highly radiated areas have physical disorders, including heart and blood diseases, cancers and respiratory diseases. Nearly one in three of all the newborn babies have deformities, mostly internal," said Alexander Vewremchuk, of the Special Hospital for the Radiological Protection of the Population in Vilne.

Figures on the health effects of Chernobyl have always been disputed. Soviet authorities covered up many of the details at the time. The largest radiation doses were received by the 600,000 people involved in the clean-up, many drawn from army conscripts all over the Soviet Union.

RE: Bolondvero July 18th, 2007 2:18 pm

"Nuclear power is safe if you make it so."

***Right, sure, Okay-doke. And you can still die in a car wreck with a seat belt on and airbags around you. Also, you can tow a wreck away, but you can't tow hundreds of square miles of contaminated land away, or villages, towns, and cities.***

Nuclear power is safe if you make it so. Nothing can resist earthquakes, so what is the buzz?
Nuclear power is safe and environmentally acceptable energy source.

PJD - "Nuclear power generation has a better safety record than any other form of large-scale power generation except perhaps hydropower. It also exposes surrounding communities to much less pollution, even radionucleide pollution . . ."

Huh? What was Chernobyl? A day at the spa?