"... Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) is trying desperately to force taxpayers to underwrite $50 billion and more in loans to build still more of these radioactive bulls-eyes."

Wasn't it Pete Domenici who told the world that he was retiring because he has dementia? And he is bringing this to floor after the "9/11 Commission found that Al Quaeda at one point considered crashing two planes into two nuclear facilities as part of its original plan"?

How many co-sponsors does this bill have?

Gosh. Building more nuclear reactors. Building more highways and McMansions. Giving tax credits for Hummers. Refusing to use alternative energy or even raise CAFE standards.
It's almost as if they don't believe their own propaganda-you know, about the oil backed terrorists out to get us.
Could it be they know something we don't?

It should be enough make every American doubt the official government conspiracy theory about the 19 oil-backed terrorists overcoming the biggest military in the planet's history and causing the laws of physics to be suspended for a day.

So, Harvey Wasserman is back again with his ideologically-motivated fear-peddling campaign. As usual, Wasserman is a sloppy "activist journalist" who doesn't even pretend to objectively weigh facts but simply assembles lists of attack points, justified by his ironclad ideological conviction that nuclear power is evil and must be stopped.

This time Harvey scrapes the bottom of the barrel with the Palo Verde pipe bomb that almost certainly wasn't. What big scary news does Harvey have about the incident? The "entire three-reactor complex was shut" over this nonincident. Good point, Harvey! But hey, wouldn't it have been even better if the reactors hadn't been shut down, and then you could angrily charge lax safety!

Then there's the "global internet debate... over whether a jet could penetrate a reactor containment dome." Yes, there sure is a lot of babble here in cyberspace. But if one looks, one can also find the reports of careful engineering studies and, Guess what, the overwhelming consensus is that current standards for containment ensure that a direct hit by an airliner would not cause a breach. There is some debate about whether some existing domes would always withstand the action of a jet engine shaft impacting directly, so if a suicide hijacker were skillful enough to aim to one side so that an engine would hit the dome head-on, he might succeed in breaching the containment, Inshallah. Whether that would cause a huge radiation release or just scare a lot of people would be less certain. I'm not sure this is at the top of UBL's to-do list, if in fact he does still have the cash available.

More to the point, the old domes that maybe just might be vulnerable to aircraft attack are not the new ones that Harvey is objecting to loan guarantees for. The new ones would be plently strong enough.

Whether an attack on the externals could cause a meltdown is a more complicated question, but new systems would be designed to make this impossible.

Terrorists could certainly kill lots of people with nuclear weapons if they could get the needed materials, or quite easily with anthrax. So I do not find the terror of terrorism such a compelling argument in favor of more more coal coal.

Mark Abram's faith-based analysis.

Mark Abram, you sure shook a lot of trees here, hoping we wouldn't see the forest.

Anyone who can't understand that every nuclear power plant is a terrorist target -- posing a grave threat to our lives and the American economy -- should consider commenting on another topic instead, hopefully one on which they're well informed.

AdeleTheCzech

Right on target... And that terrorist threat is amplified dramatically when you take into consideration all the nuclear materials that have to be shipped around by truck and train to keep the reactors going.

Given that we have many valid energy choices, there is no reason to select the one--nuclear--that presents risks during every phase of the fuel cycle: mining, transport, use, and disposal.

Adele, no one can deny that terrorists might consider targeting nuclear power plants. The question is, how vulnerable and how attractive are they as targets? Mr. Wasserman has assembled a bunch of hyped-up attack points for arguing that the plants represent an extraordinary vulnerability, a set of "pre-deployed "dirty bombs" for terrorists." His reporting, as usual, is unbalanced and unconsidered. I think a more honest assessment leads to the conclusion that nuclear power plants are not especially vulnerable or likely targets for terrorism.

As I pointed out, if you really want to kill lots of people, an anthrax attack would probably be much easier. Chemical storage and transport also presents lots of opportunities for terrorists. If they want to demonstrate their power, they will probably want a nuclear weapon, not an attack on a power plant that would most likely fail to kill many people.

The fact is that the US has not suffered a major terrorist attack since 9/11. There must be a reason for that. I don't think a massive attack inside the US would serve al Qaeda's interests at the moment, otherwise they'd have tried something. If and when they do try it, there are better options for them than targeting a nuclear power plant.

Harvey Wasserman is trying to play the same terror fear card that the Bush gang has been playing since 9/11. It's just as dishonest when he does it.

The nuclear power booster club is missing the point (and clearly they don't care, because the factuality of the statements seem to be irrelevant to them, as they unabashedly admit). To get a sense of the range of vulnerabilities to plant security, just Google "nuclear power security breaches" and enjoy the wonderful range of ways that security breaks down on a regular basis, from computer worms penetrating plant system firewalls to routine breaching of control rooms by unauthorized individuals to failures of the perimeter security to NRC security drills that discovered that even minimal security measures were not in effect at many plants.

Even though the NRC itself admitted after 9/11 that none of the plants in existence were designed to withstand a heavy aircraft impact ("The NRC concedes that facilities could not withstand a jet crash. Preparedness for ground attacks has also been questioned" L.A.Times, 22 SEP 01-- http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0922-02.htm), virtually nothing has been done to strengthen containment on existing plants. So what, we wait around for another 15 years until the next generation of plants is built with stronger containment?

It's pretty much impossible to argue with the ideologues who cast off every piece of evidence that conflicts with their cheery notions of a nuclear future. They lurk around every discussion of nuclear power like ghouls at a radioactive dinner party, casting aspersions at anyone not willing to heartily devour the toxic, tainted meal.

They like nuclear power since it's centralized, top-down administered, always overides any local/democratic decision-making body, run by the m.i.c. that also has its fingers in 2 of the major television networks, strictly a backroom powerbroker's form of energy, etc.

Solar/wind/geothermal are threats, since they can be decentralized and democratized.

Wind farms!

Bill,

Solar/wind/geothermal are threats to authoritarians. That is, they can be decentralized, democratized, locally-owned, even privately owned, etc.

Nuclear is an environmental and ethical blasphemy. 90+% of the progressive movement agrees, each for his/her own reasons.

But by decentralized, I mean it both geographically and administratively. Solar/wind/geothermal doesn't require a federal (even international) body of oversight, connection to the M.I.C, etc.

Bill:

If you're a stickler for accuracy, you'd know that small geothermal units are being used in individual homes and that costs are coming down dramatically as mass production is applied to the chiller components (The Citizen Powered Energy Handbook, Greg Paul, Chelsea Green Publishing). And thanks to nanotechnology, solar power can now be produced at a cost competitive with grid power (http://www.cnbc.com/id/21477285). You're also misinformed if you think the only place solar can be deployed is in California or Arizona. There are cost-effective systems in place all over New England, including in Vermont and Maine. You may need to supplement the system at times in the winter, but smart people around here have learned how to combine renewable energy sources for genuine energy independence. It's a lot less expensive than building a few trillion dollars of new nuclear plants at taxpayer expense and then watching the cost of uranium ore rise, more than doubling recently (http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/28/business/uranium.php).

Nuclear power has never been able to stand on its own feet economically, as numerous studies from the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists have demonstrated. It requires that taxpayers pick up the brunt of the construction costs and pay the enormous costs if a major accident does occur (other than the miniscule coverage defined by the Price-Anderson Act). Wall Street and the insurance industry won't touch nukes--they know they stink economically.

The argument that the pro-nukers just keep repeating ad nauseam is that we have to have nuclear power--there is no other way. Other countries have already begun working out other ways. Sweden is taking all of their 10 reactors offline, but now they are struggling to figure out what to do with 9,000 tons of spent fuel over the next 100,000 years (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4597589.stm).

Yes, people tend to get emotional when someone wants to build a gigantic monolith just down the street without having worked out rudimentary issues like what to do with the spent fuel, what happens to the reactor after it serves its 30 or 40 year life span, what happens when global warming kicks in further and the cooling water sources are not adequate (in France, they just shut the reactors down during the killer heat wave), and what precautions have been taken to protect the public from terrorist threats. If you're up on your facts, you would know that there is enough radioactivity contained in a typical nuclear plant to contaminate an area the size of a state and make it uninhabitable for generations. The typical response there is: "Well, that is so unlikely to not even be worth consideration." If you point to the numerous close calls in the nuclear power industry over the years (Brown's Ferry, Three Mile Island, Fermi, and others), the response is: "Oh, well that just proves that the safety systems all work as advertised." It's like the man who jumped off the top of a 20-story building and half way down looked around and said, "Well, so far, so good." The first major accident stateside (and there will be a major accident with enough plants operating over an extended period of time--by the industry's own probability statistics) will pretty much shut down operation of every plant around.

By any measure of the facts, nuclear power is uneconomical, unsustainable, and unnecessary. You've got to do some pretty heavy twisting of reality to prove otherwise. But, that's what the pro-nuke crowd is best at.

Also, check your facts, Bill. The Vermont Yankee plant supplies 35 percent of the state's power requirements (http://publicservice.vermont.gov/electric/vermont-yankee/vermont-yankee.html) and is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2012. I live in Vermont, just returned from the Renewable Energy Vermont conference, and the overwhelming consensus is that renewables energy sources are the way to go.

Bill:
Get your facts straight.
According to the Vermont Department of Public Service, Vermont Yankee supplies 35 percent of the state's energy requirements. It is scheduled to be decomissioned in 2012. I live in Vermont and recently attended the Renewable Energy Vermont conference in Burlington. The overwhelming consensus of the conference attendees (backed by strong growth in all the renewable energy sectors) is that community-scale power generation is the way to go (wind turbines in pastureland, methane plants in diary farms, co-generation as part of light manufacturing, solar everyplace you can tap the sun). There are a few die-hards still arguing that we have to have nukes, but it's a small minority in a very progressive state.
It's easy to make points when you just pull your facts and statistics out of the sky. Not so easy when you have to support them.

The terrorists are all in Washington, determined to scare you about stuff that's not going to happen so you won't worry about stuff that's absolutely certain to happen in our celebrated "free" market, like the next nuclear accident and catastrophic climate change.

For your reading pleasure, from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)

Combating Nuclear Terrorism: Federal Efforts to Respond to Nuclear and Radiological Threats and to Protect Key Emergency Response Facilities Could Be Strengthened (11/15/2007)

URL: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08285t.pdf

Billy, you and David and anyone else can argue FOR nuclear power until dooms day. The fact remains, nuclear power and the resulting deadly, long life wastes are not not, nor will they ever be safe, terrorist attacks or not.

Clean and effecient geo-thermal is readily available, it would be less expensive than nuclear or coal in the long run and combined with safe and clean solar, tidal and wind power, we could shut down every nuclear and coal fired plant in this country within five to ten years if a massive program to have clean energy was initiated now. You know that is the truth and so do any who have your intellect.

Hi Ghoul. I did not just mention wind power. I believe geo-thermal would be a far better source of clean power and does not depend upon the wind blowing.

I also believe we should use that and solar/wind and tidal power. There is far enough wind and tidal power along our coast lines 24/7, to provide far more of the energy required for the entire United states.

You argue with what is transpiring now with clean energy development. __ I said, __ a MASSIVE effort. There is none such presently.

For some exmples, when we entered WW-2, the Alcon highway in Alaska was completed in a few months. The Big Inch, the forty inch oil pipe line from Texas to northern New Jersey, was completed in less than a year. That was absolutly incredible. In Vietnam, we built the airport and sea port at Cameron Bay and were operating there in 60 days, it was fully operatinal in about six months, one of the largest Air Force bases and ports in the world.

If our government, our people, wish to implement and have a project completed in a hurry, we've proven it can be accomplished in a brief period of time.

I suggested five to ten whole years, and if we wanted to do it, we could. And we could do it with less than one forth the money we have wasted in Iraq. Think of the jobs it would create also and we'd help to clean up our atmosphere in a major way with those coal fired plants shut down.

Regards, The Ghoul keeper

Billy the Ghoul, Hi, how ya doin?

MASSIVE, means MASSIVE. The new goal for having automobiles reach a 35 mile per gallon figure on average is 20 years. TWENTY YEARS!!__ Hell, in twenty years, we won't be here, the scientists now give us just 'ten years max' to reverse the damage we are doing to our atmosphere. In ten years, my ten year old grandkids will be out tearing up my car, and or, inviting me to their stupid weddings.

MASSIVE steps need to be taken NOW to stop using coal for power plant fuel and uranium for nuclear power. Sure the bean counters say fifty years, they are speaking in terms of normal procedures. I'm talking about a war mode, a war we better start fighting if your grandkids have any chance of all at decent life or any life possibly. Stop counting beans for a day or so and take a look at the future and what it brings or what future we allow. Think MASSIVE, the Alcon highway, the Berlin Airlift, The Big Inch, 'D' day. The Manhatten Project, Dolly Parton's boobs.

Regards, MASSIVE Reality

You are correct about the politial will.

There has to be somethng in it for them.

So we've
got Christmas
and ChristMASSIVE
?

Unfortunantly, we don't have the CHRISTMASSIVE effort to have clean energy, nor do I see it ever happening. Therefore we will continue to pollute the Earth and we'll soon be very, very, sorry about it. Most of us will be in rest homes or dead before the end result of our folly finally proves how stupid we were. So we should leave a nice letter for our grandkids, and tell them we are very sorry. __ Indeed, we are.

Regards, Kem

But if the christ-o-holics (I'm referring to the (non)fun-DAMN-entalists)

just knew of the CHRISTMASSIVE spirit, things might be different,

just like it was when I was a kid collecting dimes and quarters for UNICEF

I got cha

Every time some really good questions or comments arise about the dangers of nuclear power on a thread such s this one, Billy leaves. I think he may be embarrassed that he works for the nuclear industry. Good and honest people would be and he is obviously a swell guy. ___ Stupid though.

500 years! Then as long as we continue to operate nuclear power plants, will the 500 years ever come to an end? __ How long have we had nuclear energy? __ How many serious accidents, or very close to disasterous ones have we had in that time frame? __ Why won't insurance companies insure nuclear power plants? __ Does anyone believe there won't be another Three Mile Island accident, or a much worse one? __ You are right, we don't agree on this issue.

You didn't mention the numerous accidents and spills at nuclear storage sites. Guess I've been reading the wrong reports. Of course I don't pay attentino to those published by nuclear power activists and or their employees. Yeah, the insurance is capped alright. If there is a meltdown or serious accident at a plant, few if any will ever get a penny for their lost land, relatives and homes.

KEM

They often "forget" to mention the transportation risks (both fuel in and wastes out), which extend over a considerable duration each trip. Have you seen pix of the train modules they use?

Yes I have. Of course I agrre with Billy that those casks are almost indestructable. __ Almost.__ However, over time there has never, ever, been a single thing that was man made, that didn't experience a failure. Perhaps the very best and oft given example is, "the Titanic was unsinkable".

Humans have had man made disasters since the first recorded history. The destruction of Texas City, Texas, the Titanic, the collapse of bridges and dams, the Youngstown Pennslyvania flood, the failure of the levys in New Orleans, to name a very few.

Every time, the experts, the engineers, the politicians usually say, "This was totally unexpected", and indeed it was. We have lived through those disasters, buried the dead and cleaned up the mess and often learned from the experience.

When we are talking about nuclear power disasters, it is a totally different ball game. When we do finally have one, a real disaster, not an accident. We will say, this was totally unexpected, but it shouldn't be unexpected at all. We were very close to having a disaster at Three Mile Island, in spite of words spoken by some pundants, Chernoble was a disaster with a huge area of once fertile soil ruined, sterile.

When we have a real atomic power plant or storage site disaster, that may kill millions and leaves a huge area of land un-usable for centuries, then we will have learned from our mistake, but that will be a man made disater we won't just clean up and go on with our lives. It will be a true disaster. It will happen someday, somewhere.