RE: Nightwatch October 24th, 2007 10:47 am

"But we might have to consider nuclear power as part of an energy mix. Some environmental extremists want to return humanity to the Stone Age but it ain't gonna happen. Modern societies need energy, lots of it. Nuclear power needs to be part of that. Coal? Terribly polluting. Oil? Just as bad. Wind power? Sure, but it is not very efficient at this point in time and it creates visual blights and kills birds. Dams? Generally disastrous in the long run. Solar power? Getting better (although still pretty inefficient) but will need vast farms to equal one nuclear plant. Wave energy? Still in its infancy."

Nightwatch, I agree with much of what you say, but am in disagreement with some of your other points. When you say, "...we might have to consider nuclear power as part of an energy mix.", you are absolutely correct. Our reliance on fossil fuels, and the continued subsidizing of these enterprises, has placed us in a position where our societal backs are against the wall. Unfortnately, the thinking of many in congress & the fossil fuel industries, aside from being influenced by the enormous sums of money involved, is just as archaic as the dinosaur age fuel they continually are proponents of. They feel it is acceptable to plunder the earth, pollute the sky & seas, initiate resource wars of agression, manipulate the price structure of vital resources, and use illegal & unethical practices just to improve the bottom line for essentially a small percentage of Americans (and foreign citzens) who are shareholders...and damn the consequences, even if it means millions could die & or be displaced from their homes due to a climate change their greed is now known to be directly responsible for. Theirs is a very un-patriotic profit driven attitude that must change---and rapidly for our survival as world spanning civilizations.

Of course the public at large, with their/our penchant for inefficient wasteful vehicles, appliances, building techniques, an ingrained belief an ever expanding economy is not only possible but a right/norm, and a blind social & financial support for a military industrial complex that demands an ever increasing quantity of men, materials, funding, and abbrogation of hard won civil & constitutional rights to 'feed the beast' shares responsibility also. The day is not too far off when conservation of resources will be seen as the mark of the truly conscientious patriot, mostly by necessity rather than design.

You stated, "Some environmental extremists want to return humanity to the Stone Age but it ain't gonna happen", and we are in complete agreement that, given the overpopulated world in which we live, this is an impossibility. The days of Walden Pond lifestyles died with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. P.J. O'Rourke might disagree, due to a land calculation vs. population study he did, but he failed to take into account it's not a matter of how much land is availble per capita (if equitably dstributed), but the resources available on that piece of property. With a perpetually increasing population, along with the attendant ever increasig demands on resources, the only scenario I foresee of people trying a massive 'back to the land' movement is anarchy on a massive scale, and a continual worldwide conflict between the 'haves' and 'have nots'.

So what are our options? Oil will run out, and uranium will very quickly follow shortly thereafter (it's in limited finite supply also even now). Coal will choke the life out us, cause unacceptable genetic mutations & disases (already does right now), or collapse our atmosphere with a Greenhouse Effect as happened on Venus.

Frankly, I don't give a hoot about visual blight, or a few dead birds, when compared to the survival of humans. We kill billions of chickens, turkeys, and ducks for food yearly already don't we? When people realize seeing acres (or even miles) of windmills spinning means survivability, I believe they will start to view them as things of beauty.

We have a limited timeframe & resources to accomplish the task of a paradigm shift in our energy generation & consumption. When you state, "Wind power.. not very efficient at this point in time...Solar power? Getting better (although still pretty inefficient) but (we) will need vast farms to equal one nuclear plant. Wave energy? Still in its infancy.", you are making my point exactly. For the amount we would spend on further subsidizing an industry that has always needed funding from the taxpayers to be competitive (the nuclear industry) we could build and advance these other technologies to the point where decommissioning the existing nuclear plants becomes a possibility. Sure, we need nuclear right now, but ONLY as a transitional technology, NOT a permanent one.

Imagine if we redirected the $50 billon, the nuclear advocates are trying to get their hands in our pockets for in the next two years, toward really ramping up our capabilities in renewables how far up the learning & construction curve we would be?

It's not a question of whether use of nuclar technology for power generation will become as obsolete as steam powered locomotives, but when. A miniscule number of greedy companies and individuals are threatening the lifestyles, livlihoods, & lives of billions of world citizens, and this is un-acceptable inappropriate behavior.

That's a poweful photograph. All those people representing a broad array of belief systems. All of them agreeing on the necessity of not using an unsafe energy source.

I wonder how many physicists and nuclear engineers secretly agree with them?
I wonder if the younger generations will see this as anything other than a bunch of aging hippies whispering, "Peace, love and understanding," with their dying breaths.

We do not want nuclear weapons. Ban the goddamned things! (Sadly, the Americans have scuppered all the relevant agreements). But we might have to consider nuclear power as part of an energy mix. Some environmental extremists want to return humanity to the Stone Age but it ain't gonna happen. Modern societies need energy, lots of it. Nuclear power needs to be part of that. Coal? Terribly polluting. Oil? Just as bad. Wind power? Sure, but it is not very efficient at this point in time and it creates visual blights and kills birds. Dams? Generally disastrous in the long run. Solar power? Getting better (although still pretty inefficient) but will need vast farms to equal one nuclear plant. Wave energy? Still in its infancy. So don't get taken in by paid alternate energy lobbyist pitching their pet approach. While I am sure these pop stars are sincere, our approach to energy sufficiency needs to be more than just idealistic.

PS ... You know Obama favors nuclear power, don't you? Hillary too.

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair07042007.html
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/09/399/

One little question points up the problem of nuclear waste storage. How do you mark it such that people 5000 years from now know not to dig it up? That's as old as the Pyramids. So, the same question another way would be if the Pyramids had been an old nuclear waste dump, what sort of markings could the ancient Egyptians have put on the Pyramids to keep the grave robbers out? Could they have even known we'd find the Rosetta Stone and be able to read their writing?

Thousands and tens of thousands of years is a very long time. A chain link fence and a sign that will rust away in 20 years isn't the answer.

Even though there are no new nuclear plants in my state, we are still paying stranded costs, about 20 billion worth. These costs are never considered in the cost of actual energy production and you never see this on your bill. Also not included is waste management because for the last 40 years no one has actually put into practice ANY long term storage, which I might add is thousands of years. Remember that when Jackson Brown asked that the atomic poison should be taken away, it was being dumped in the ocean in corrosive containers.

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The nuclear industry has always lied when we were opposing nuclear power in Perth they sent people from Windscale to lie and deny now the truth about Windscale is emerging and the carbon cost of making the waste safe try googling these matters.
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The renaissance is little more than an extremely well funded SPIN campaign by Burson Marsteller and Hill and Knowlton PR firms among others on behalf of the nuclear industry.

The enrichment of uranium for reactors releases a far greater heat trapper and ozone destroyer than Co2 ( even though it is powered by two 1000 MW coal fired generators) - cfc -114.

Nuclear energy is no wiser an energy source now than it was 30 years ago and without the subsidies from the public ie Feds it would not be a viable option.

The trouble with the renaissance in real terms as expressed in Power engineering Magazine Sept. 07 issue ...
issues of supply chain limitations --- ie there used to be many US ASME N-rated suppliers and now there are few... thus big parts of new reactors will have to be purchased from overseas- expensive.
(Uranium too according to Matthew Wald of the New York Times makes nuclear power today not a domestic energy source as the uranium must be imported.)

- How does anyone propose realistically of disposing of the radioactive waste? ( and reprocessing is not a viable option according to the French- unless irradiating other items is preferable to high level waste...not to mention the risks of proliferation)
There is a shortage of trained nuclear workers ... to accommodate the needs of the renaissance .
(The 02 MIT White paper ... Deutch and Moniz- etc... stated the need for a new reactor every two weeks from now til 2050.... no way is the renaissance offering this - thus the "renaissance" is a last gasp approach to keep alive the dying industry.)
public policy
public support ...
Kudos to the MUSE artists re-uniting to stand up for what they and many others believe.

Hmmm... nuclear power. Let's see. Nuclear weapons, proliferation... but power plants aren't weapons, and countries that want nuclear weapons build the special facilities they need to get them. Many countries have nuclear power but not weapons. Okay, then there's global warming. For India, China, and other growing economies, its basically a choice between nuclear and coal. Well, then there's safety, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. But maybe people have learned something, and maybe technology is better now. France has a good record. But then there's waste disposal, hard problem. Well, we can bury the stuff in dry, stable geological formations... will that be good enough? What about costs? Gee, this is tough.

Oh, thank heavens for Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt and Graham Nash weighing in. Now I know that No Nukes is still groovy, and I don't have to think any more. Just pass the joint around, granny, and Hey, man, take all your atomic poison power away!

Call me cynical but, the message of no new nukes can hardy have any impact without the message of free sex.

gellero

I personally am fond of the freedom of speech even when I don't agree with the view presented.

It would be a very dangerous society if speech were prequalified by technical competence, wealth status or agreement with an officially approved position.

Want to stop a new generation of nuclear power plants? Just repeal the Price Anderson act.

Based on a GAO estimate of the damage of a major event at a nuclear power plant, each $10,000 of private investment would be liable for $1,300,000 in damages if Congress didn't insure nukes. This is why Wall Street is not lining up behind this so-called revival, and neither sould we.

Let's see.... socialize the development and liability, privatize the profits. Not bad if you own a nuclear power plant...... STUPID if you're a taxpayer.

If investors really want the profits, let them accept the risks.

NIHILISTS!! What make Jackson Brown et all experts at anything, let alone spokesmen for the people. Millionaire musicians hardly have the right to speak about something that will not effect their standard of living at all.

Thanks Jackson, Bonnie, Graham et al. It's truly frightening that you have to do this again, almost 30 years later, but we are definitely living in bizarre times.

as one of founders of AMUSE in Raleigh in 79 thanks again to these folks, however w/o violent overthrow of the bush mess we are in serious trouble, seems only Mr Kucinich could be a solution
ask Hilary bitch about Mena and her husband and Bush Sr with cocaine trafficking
and why Barry Seal was given up by CIA
maybe we sabotaged plants, Shearon Harris then, it can be done again

andersdl,

It is true that, while nuclear power does not emit CO2 in actual operation, it does produce CO2 during mining, processing and construction. This is also true of the renewable darlings, solar and wind. Over the lifetime of the various plants, nuclear power emits less CO2 per kilowatt-hour than PV solar and slightly more than wind. All three are vastly superior to coal which is the primary alternative to nuclear.

Johno,

Nuclear plants do carry liability insurance. It is, like any liability insurance, capped. Beyond the cap, under Price-Anderson, there is a pool of the nuclear operators funding. Only if damage goes beyond the pool, does the government get financially involved.

The worst commercial power accident in the US was TMI-2. The cleanup from that accident went beyond the utility's insurance and the nuclear operator pool was tapped to fund the costs beyond insurance and private funding by the utility. No government funds were used in the cleanup.

It's called privatize the prophets and socialize the costs. These plants can't even get liability insurance on the open market, that should tell us something. Corporate welfare at it's finest.

In addition to the loan guarantees, the 2005 enabling legislation included paying nuclear power producers the difference between their cost of producing the power and the market value of that power. In other words, if they can prove (legitimately or by cooking their books) that they spent more producing the power than they could sell it for, the taxpayers pay them the difference. An ultimate corporate welfare scam !

The nuke industry has recently been successful in gaining elected officials' and the public's support for new plants by alleging that unlike fossil fuels, nuclear doesn't produce greenhouse gases. Mining, processing, transporting and disposing of uranium, however, create lots of greenhouse gas. As the easy uranium mines play out, mining will create even more greenhouse gas, not to mention that Bushco has eased environmental and safety rules for the mining industry. The vapor that nuke plants exude create greenhouse gas.

The opposition has emphasized the safety aspects of nuke plants but has not articulated the greenhouse gas issues.

My conservative "friends" tell me that renewable power should only be persued when it is cheap enough for the market to make it viable. But here we have government loan guarantees that would pay off any failed investment, hence there is no risk, hence no normal market forces at work. Once again we are being spanked by the "invisible hand" that is not so invisible, just ignored.

Wait a minute, I didn't see Dick Cheney in that picture, he's against nukes, isn't he?

I'm constantly amazed at how many younger people are jumping on the bandwagon in favor of nukes. Maybe somebody needs to recruit some currently popular bands to get behind the message that nuclear waste is not only deadly, but deadly forever.

Dick Cheney conducted energy summits in secret. A Republican Congress in 2005 passed enabling legislation, signed by the Republican President, to put American taxpayers on the hook for both nuclear power loan guarantees and nuclear power accident guarantees.
Can anyone imagine that a Democratic Congress seated with a Democratic President might be doing something else?