If another nuke plant is built, the state it's built in should be MADE to care for it's waste fuel in that state.

jstevens said: "If a nuclear power plant or a storage site were to leak, it would contaminate a small, isolated area"

Ahem... that's not true at all. Look at the map of the Chernobyl dead-zone and you'll see that it's not all that small and isolated. http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html

In fact, radiation from the Chernobyl incident spread around the globe. Hardly Isolated.

Like slavery was abolished so shouldn't the nuclear enterprise be abolished. We are all being held hostage by the nuclear barons.

Great info ~PDF~ thank you for posting that link.

If you only have two minutes; please take that time to research a little about coal and it's effects!!!

From the study: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

"..radioactive species released by coal combustion are accumulating in the environment along with minerals such as mercury, arsenic, silicon, calcium, chlorine, and lead, sodium, as well as metals such as aluminum, iron, lead, magnesium, titanium, boron, chromium, and others that are continually dispersed in millions of tons of coal combustion by-products. The potential benefits and threats of these released materials will someday be of such significance that they should not now be ignored."

Coal is NOT the answer, long term OR short term!

I think I'm going to start calling both of them "McBama". The only significant difference I see in the two candidates is that they are physical opposites. Their policies appear identical, especially in regard to anything that benefits Big Oil and the military-industrial complex.

Someone above wanted reasons why not to use Nuclear Power. Here are some:

Chernobyl
3 Mile Island
Handford Nuclear Reservation
Washington Public Power Supply System (or Whoops!) municipal bond failures past
Longevity of Nuclear Wastes and our inability to solve this

Need I say more?

The current banking crisis and how it is being handled (saving the skins of the bankers who made bad decisions at the expense of the taxpayer) points to how any future crisis will be handled. The Price-Anderson Act insures that. Huge disaster - we get stuck with the bill. Do we trust any US Government of the future to do otherwise? Remember - some of these will be owned by such corporations as Enron. The will do a "Heckuva Job".

Americans are driving much less and conserving gasoline, forced by rising prices. I suspect they will respond when similarly forced by higher electricity prices. I am okay with this - as they won't respond by any other method! Helping this are items now available such as compact fluorescents, etc. Collectively conservation - even if it is painfully market driven - can be a much more effective device than politically challenged methods such as drilling in the tundra or siting a nuke not in my back yard. The candidates would do well to embrace some real free market mechanisms rather than the corporate welfare state that currently exists. It is time to stop bailing out huge corporations by giving them everything that they want. And it is time that Americans start paying for the true costs of resources, rather than adopting a "too cheap to meter" attitude about oil, gas, raw materials, labor, transportation, food, etc. as if it is some divine right.

The fundamental problem about our current high prices has nothing to do with the true costs of these items. It has more to do with the devaluing of our dollar by printing way too much of it. There is nothing backing it, like gold or silver. We are following in the paths of the Weimar Republic and Zimbabwe. Building more nukes is not the answer.

"Mildly and soft the western breeze

just kissed the lake, just stirred the trees."

~Scott~ ___ The Lady Of The Lake.

Don Quixote de La Mancha

A CEO of a major oil company.

Hmmm...100 more nuclear power stations...that would be 100 more targets for the MIMIC (Military Industrial Media Infotainment Complex) to appropriate funds to guard from terrorist attack and significant increases in tax appropriations.

And of course 100 more attractive targets for the terrorists to plot with.

Who will attack a windmill?

In the zero point energy field, one cubic centimeter can provide enough energy to power the entire world for one day. People have built viable machines and people are now again building viable machines that will provide free, non-polluting energy for all people. There are a few thousand of these machines that have been built over the past one hundred years since the time of Nicola Tesla. Unfortunately, they have been locked away and kept from the public. The Orion Project is a non-profit organization that is now working hard to bring this technology to the world. Check out

http://www.theorionproject.org/en/

Hi Kem Patrick. 100% approval for what you just wrote. Clean, safe energy has been available for decades, but we have just token amounts. Why? Why?

Of course, we know the answer. Exxon Mobile and Peabody Energy rule the world.
We only get what they want us to have.

Hi~JSTEVENS~ Ya know, 90% was my estimate, anyone can figure their own. As to what would replace nuclear if all the nuclear power plants were shut down? Either coal, oil, gas, or (clean reneuable alternatives.)

What bugs me is, we can have the clean re-nuable alternatives within ten years if we choose to do so and shut down all of the coal jobbers first and then the nukers.

Whenever someone says it won't work, or we cannot afford it, or we only have two or three percent from wind or solar now, I want to see someone tickle their ass with a feather until they scream out they'll cease their bullshit.

The reason we only have two or three percent now is because we are not developing and funding it. Re-nuables are viable, affordable and the technology is well proven for geo-thermal, wind, solar, tidal and wave generated electrical power.

A 2006 MIT report for just ONE example states we can have geo-thermal plants that would develop all of the power we need for the next 50,000 years.

Kem Patrick. I think you're being too generous to Amy with 90% approval.

I don't think the always mentioned points of terrorist threat and nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea are relevant to nuclear power for electricity generation.

The technology exists for nuclear weapons and nuclear power. There is simply nothing to be done about it. I am currently reading a book called the Making of the Atomic Bomb. (just to learn more about the history and the Physics) The point is any country with some money can eventually make weapons. It was really tough in the early 1900's when we didn't know about neutrons or uranium, but it is all too simple now.

Even if we shut down all of our nuclear power plants, it would have absolutely no effect on Iran, India, Pakistan North Korea, etc. Except that they would all have a good laugh and enjoy the reduction in uranium prices.

The whole world would have to agree to cease making weapons and making energy for Amy's criticisms to have any validity, and that just isn't going to happen.

Anyway, if it did, France would lose 70% of its power, the US would lose 20%, and so on for other countries. Guess what would fill in the gap.

Hopefully everyone can get to these journals:

http://scitation.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_55/iss_4/38_1.shtml

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;315/5813/781

Why must innovation always be equated with how much profit can be made? All the money in the world isn't going to help if we can't drink the water, eat the food or breathe the air.

I read the article and read all of the comments. Amy is 90% correct and the pro-nukers are 20% correct. ____ Amy wins.

~Fanny 666~ Check out nuclear accidents on the net and you'll see just how deadly dangerous nuclear leftovers are.

We humans have not been able to SAFELY store nuclear waste for just (60 years) and for any to believe it can be safely stored for a hundred, or a thousand, or a million years, are not being rational.

In addition, any who believe we could afford to rocket the poison off to the sun, are drinking or snorting something a lot stronger than kool-aid.

The technology to produce our required electrical power by the use of clean "renuable" alternatives is well proven. The problem is the powers who be, the oil barons and those who own or control the mineral rights for coal and uranium, don't have those rights for sumbeams, wind, ocean tides and geo-thermal.

Any who say those alternatives cannot provide us with all of the power we'd ever need, are either horribley mis-informed, or do not wish to seek the truth, or are lying with cause.

With a massive effort and funding far less than that we provide nuclear energy, we could clean up our act, that is, ___(our atmosphere).___ If we don't clean it up, our kids and their kids are gonna suffer for it.

The truth is nuclear power is dangerous, and the potential for a massive failure at any nuclear plant which could steralize an area the size of Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersy combined is always possible.

Hollow point July 18th, 2008 6:59 am

They are on their way to Texas.

Why aren't the French having all the problems that people are talking about?

Billy
One thing up here in Canada I see are trucks on the hiway with huge blades for wind turbines. It is 3 or 4 trucks a week now and that is just the ones I see.

Billy
I would like to see all elected people be forced to list all the companies who give them money. Then you would see why they are supporting dirty industries. Change is happening and I hope in my kids lives they see coal and nuke plants a thing of the passed. As for reduction well I am turning off my computer more and more as I find CD and other sites are nothing but a big wheel us mice run around and around day after day going over the same stories.

Here is a question for those that oppose nuclear power: If the US were somehow able to reduce its electrical consumption by 25% in the next year, what electrical power generation would you shut down?

Coal provides.....50%
Nat gas provides..20%
Nuclear provides..20%
Hydro provides.... 6%
Wind provides..... 3%
Other provides.... 1%

rtdrury,

Electrical demand will be driven up by population growth and the electrification of transportation.

Bill

They haven't even substantiated their claimed demand growth yet. Why should demand for electric power grow? Are Americans going to buy second, third and fourth vacation homes and leave the central air running while vacant? The claim is kaka. We don't need more electric power. We need less!

mimiccscscsc
... put down the internet. take your stinking Larouche bookmarks and put them in your wastebasket so you can recycle your valuable hard drive space before it's too late.

hey mimic.. what does a crack dealer love the most? To get you hooked. For example:

gas = crystal meth, customers are coming back to you for more every five minutes.

nuclear = cocaine, customers run up a bill and you collect at the end of the month, and only one guy in town get's to sell it. Also known to burn holes in peoples heads.

natural gas = morphine drip, getting cleaner, but it's still gonna run out some day. Also- might be challenging to take the apparatus with you.

wind = aspirin. pretty harmless pain killer. take two and call me in the morning.

solar = essential vitamins. get it from the source. better yet- grow it in your own back yard. After you do that- network with your neighbors. Start you own neighborhood power plant (that needs almost 0 maintenance). Cut out the middle man to your energy needs, Chairman Crunk.

Oh but wait... you don't believe that fossil fuel combustion puts haze in the sky which traps heat. Ok dude. Hope you don't own beachfront property in Hurricane Alley.

So we trust the "consensus" of climate scientists who give us the Global Warming CO2 hoax, but not the Big Oil scientists who say it is a hoax.

Yet we can trust the Big Oil scientists who give us the peak oil hoax, but not other scientists like Thomas Gold who say otherwise.

And the solution to the Global Warming and Peak Oil myths, as well as the ground water shortage is nuclear power, yet we can not believe the scientists/engineers who say nuclear power is safe, since the Big Oil scientists and their environmental scientist allies of the same ilk as Climate Science consensus say it is unsafe.

And besides, since we accept the Banking myth that only private bankers can create money to loan out, nuclear power is too expensive to build up, since Big Banking which is interlocked with Big Oil won't provide the financing, since among other things, Nuclear is bad for Big Oil. [that's actually a myth too, since those who own Big Oil have already locked up the uranium resources, so while the rest of the world is converting to Nuclear, and Big Banking will finance this, we will get left behind, since our living standards need to be reduced to make way for One World Government]

It is clear that the followers of the neo-malthusian religion are very faithful to their belief that man is the root of all evil and must reduce it's population and living standards (ie consumption). Fine, I believe in freedom of religion, just keep your dirty green paws off out of my pockets, since I am not buying into your religion. Remember, we have freedom of religion, and freedom FROM religion. I am all for a cleaner planet, yet unilaterally capping carbon emissions while Asia turns the skies black is pointless to all but those who will profit from it.

For those who have an open mind, and just as important, a functioning mind that is not degraded by drugs, chemicals and brainwashing by the corporate media - which BTW has infiltrated many internet blogs with their donations, then you might find the following links helpful in your search for truth on nuclear. Religions have no need for truth, so the Malthusian faithful need not bother.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2007/3405_nuclear_myths.html

http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2007/2007_20-29/2007-21/pdf/39-45_21_nuclear.pdf

Good work, Amy. Nuke power is complete and utter stupidity. It is the ultimate radioactive boondoggle, and we will never solve global warming as long as money is devoted to it. It's 50 years of proven failure. Long since time to move on to something that actually works!

The latest argument against nuclear energy, and I notice it appears first in this article is about the expense. Thank you, Exxon Mobile for this propaganda. You, of course know, that we could have electric cars and the electricity could come from a nuclear power plant, thus, bypassing forever the need for oil.

The expense is irrelevant considering the exorbitant price of global warming, and just what is the price of a new, habitable planet?

The (anti-nuke) environmentalists are Exxon's unknowing partners in crime because they mistakenly believe that we have the luxury of worrying about radioactive waste, and far-fetched scenarios such as terrorists blowing up nuclear reactors. (The twin towers, didn't have containment domes.)

By the way, nuclear power plants will never blow up Hiroshima fashion, even without all of the safety features because a weapon is manufactured much differently (and purposefully).

All of these articles have to throw in that we should spend the money on renewables instead of nuclear power. Well sure. But why not say we should spend the money on renewables instead of on fossil fuels?

Fossil fuels are destroying the world right before our very eyes. Cars, coal and gas plants spew toxins directly into the atmosphere and water supply. But the most vile thing they do is pour billions of tons of CO-2 into the atmosphere every year. Food shortages, violent weather, floods, droughts, massive species extinctions, deadly heat waves The world's biggest problems--not caused by nuclear power, but by fossil fuels.

If a nuclear power plant or a storage site were to leak, it would contaminate a small, isolated area. Fossil fuels ruin the whole planet. Radiation exists everywhere naturally. It needs to be dealt with carefully, but it is not all that scary. Marie Curie wallowed in it, and eventually died from it, but it took a long time and she had massive exposure.

It is very important to PRIORITIZE. Worry about fossil fuels first.

Environmentalists really need to stop being the biggest impediment to halting global warming.

RALPH: Thank you for taking me riding on the wings of your passionate, poetic imagination.

SPARTICUS: I'm glad you brought up the time factor, and sought to illustrate what this expanse of time would mean. Let our forum picture this: thousands of years from now, IF mankind survives intact, some team has come up with a new technology that allows them to dig deep... and they find these mysterious containers. Surely so well wrapped (like King Tut's own tomb!) they must contain something of great value?

Look at the difficulties modern archaeologists have in deciphering ancient languages. Can we presume OURS will remain established to WARN persons of the future what's in those time bomb crates?

FANNY 666: If you really want the answer to your question, check out the archives on THIS site. The discussion of the pros (if there are any) and cons to nuclear power have been bounced around by some scientific and intelligent minds prior to today's posting.

In addition, with pharmaceutical run-off in our water supply, with New Orleans left to marinade in its own doo doo, we are not dealing with persons of conscience at the regulatory wheels of "free" enterprise. The earlier site on the US failure to ban land mines is about one thing only: retaining profits. It's the same with this discussion. A few insiders make a lot of $, like Enron or the ponzi real estate/loan scheme, make off with their booty and EVERYONE else picks up the tab; except with the case of nuclear energy the tab involves a genetic legacy that is costly beyond dollars.

shakker,

For better or worse, the federal government has the responsibility for used nuclear fuel. The utilities pay a fee to the government to handle the disposal. There are $10's of billions in the fund that has already been paid in. The federal government has badly mismanaged its responsibility for used fuel.

bbr,

I believe most of the 'waste' going to Russia from France is tails from the enrichment process and used uranium from fuel reprocessing. The Russians evidently have a very cost effective enrichment process and can wring more enriched uranium out of the tails and used uranium.

With the possible exception of the DUPIC process, I think reprocessing is best left until we have fast reactors. (The DUPIC process is a dry process and is best used with CANDU type reactors. CANDU reactors have a superior neutron economy and can use reuse otherwise exhausted PWR fuel.)

Bill

  In the city I grew up in, St. Paul, in the heart of the city there was a seven way intersection called "seven corners." There were accidents there but never the be all and end all accident where you had the most aggressive speeding drunk driver in the biggest vehicle coming from all sides into one horrendous city shaking crash. It just wasn't in the destiny for St. Paul and that intersection to have such a massive accident.

Fast forward to 2008 and the world seems ready for the mother of all crashes with crazy aggressive drunken energy coming from all seven directions on a collision course towards the obliteration of our beloved home/planet. There's war and the politicians and profiters that accompany this dreaded plague spewing hate and tainted $$ wherever they go. There's the whisper of depression in the air of america as it's economy has been wiped and hyper stimulated so many times that it can't answer the bell for the 15th round. Even with drugs like crystal-meth for the working class and new Iphones for the managers and slashed rate-cuts that makes the $ bleed into emptiness. Now the bleeding is seeping out and contaminating other countries as the world shudders under the heavy burden of the beast of capitalism.

Global warming hovers like a vulture over the earth waiting to reclaim the land from the prodigal upstart technological man, with all his wasteful and exploitative bad habits. We have cut, drained, dug, burned, poisoned and entombed our own nest to the point of premature burial. The earth cry's out with violent weather, floods, forest fires, drought, crop failure, disease and we top off this black magic feast with our own tempest of nuclear annihilation as a diabolical Korvorkian desert. Oh, the sweet smell of death in the morning as we try and checkmate our own gods.

If mankind had any sense upon the first witness of this mushroom monster back in 1945 we would have turned in our technological toys and retreated to those dimly lit caves with their shadowy figures flickering magically on the walls and retooled our whole "unplanned" agenda for the future. Every aspect of this atomic monster is a faustian nightmare, from the initial pollution of the ore tailings, to the various stages of processing, until we birth a menagerie of monsters so freaky that even a healthy Steve Irwin wouldn't touch one with a mile long pole. Now we have the super secret atomic power, the mind bending nuclear weapons that would make the devil blush, the depleted uranium that would send a midnight vampire squiring home to his coffin and shut the lid and of course the scatological refuse with a half life of 10,000 years, which if enough is produced provides no room for life at all.

Why don't we all nominate ourselves for the Nobel peace prize and stop this nonsense immediately. Let the doves of peace fly to a thousand neighborhoods and fornicate with any lover who opens his soul. Lets open our arms and embrace a polar bear just because it took nature a million years to make one and his purpose must be more then just to sell cold beer. Lets change religions for one day every month and remember that god has thousand first names and a billion last names…. you do the math. Lets find bush/chaney guilty of every crime know to man…. and let them go if they'll kiss a gay albino in San Francisco at midnight on January 20, 2009 on national television.

 

Tokamak fusion made it to 102%?! Wow. That's at least 2% better than corn based ethanol and it doesn't pollute the Gulf of Mexico.

Billy: I just read a discouraging report card on the French and British recycling, but lost the link. Both plants are in violation of the Precautionary Principle and really don't recycle very much. And the French are shlepping most of their waste off to Siberia. If the French can use the lessons learned at Superphenix and La Hague, however, they will be way out front on safe, clean, and sustainable waste burning breeders.

Anybody read the Pickens Plan yet?

The 'PROOF' of lack of viability of nuclear power is the fact that NOBODY will invest in it without the taxpayer assuming the liability and the waste disposal. Even with the massive subsidy already laying on the table right now in the USA all the new nuclear plants are on the drawing board to stay.

Considering the financial wizardry of Bu$h the inferior's administration and the mindless drivel coming from the Federal Reserve the ability to borrow unlimited sums to build the dumbest way to boil water yet devised seems unlikely. The government of the USA with their phony inflation and unemployment data has not prepared the people for the inflation and absurd interest rates to come.

The need for a new version of the New Deal grows by the day because of the refusal to do anything positive to improve our energy, financial, diplomatic, military, environmental and social situation in the world. An example of the kind of cluelessness that exists in the Senate, a supposedly intelligent Elizabeth Dole proposing Jesse Helms name be connected with AIDS care and research. Stupid bastards like Jesse Helms who couldn't separate contagious disease prevention from personal sexual preference are very responsible for AIDS getting into the blood supply and spreading to the general population. Proper education and disease prevention would have reduced BOTH risky sexual behavior and AIDS.

Craigdp,

Almost all nuclear reactors create fissile material while they are in operation. A breeder reactor, by definition, merely makes MORE fissile material than it burns.

France, England and Japan recycle their used nuclear fuel to obtain and burn the created fissile material. The fissile material obtained through reprocessing is plutonium but it is not suitable for weaponry (it has too much of the Pu-240 isotope in it).

Weapons grade material is not made in fast or breeder reactors. Plutonium for weapons use is made in either heavy water or graphite moderated reactors. (The US and England used graphite; North Korea, Israel and India used heavy water.)

Highly enriched uranium can also be used for weaponry. This does not require a reactor but merely an isotopic separation facility. That is one of the reasons why the Bush administration has their panties in a bunch about Iran. Isotopic enrichment is your classic dual use technology.

IMHO conservation and nuclear power are the two most important tools available to avoid incinerating the earth with global warming.

Amy Goodman is usually pretty much on target but she is misguided in following Lovins. If you read his stuff carefully (and the details of his writing are very obtuse) he basically is calling for burning more natural gas. He is ok on his some of his conservation ideas but his power generation schemes are mostly burning natural gas in small facilities rather than big ones. RMI has a lot of snake oil.

Bill

Nuclear energy is just as useless and insanely dangerous as perpetuating the fossil fuel fiasco/scam. Apparently, we have had the knowledge of many virtual zero point energy systems for a hundred years, but powerful, greedy people have kept it from the public. Nicola Tesla was just one of hundreds of inventors who have known about zero point energy. Now, finally it's becoming clear. We don't have to kill others or ourselves or destroy the environment. Living with a truly free, sustainable, and essentially infinite form of energy is everyone's birthright! Check out the Orion Project:

http://www.theorionproject.org/en/

Nuclear consumes more water than even coal. Also, the good, the bad, and the ugly about nuclear that I was just given a link to:

Breeder Reactors Info
http://www.lcusd.net/lchs/mewoldsen/Period5/BreederReactors.ppt

And don't worry, as soon as demand goes up, nuclear will go poof and lose its status as abundant and don't expect breeder reactors to cover for it. And I'm not even talking about the even sharper decline in supply as the fossil fuels needed to build, operate, and maintain those nuclear facilities and waste are near depletion. I recall someone said that every nuclear plant had better have some hemp grown all around it to absorb the nuclear wastes that would inevitably seep back into the Earth's surface. I guess mankind ain't done raping mother earth is it? At least solar and wind energy and perhaps reasonable biofuels such as algae and hemp wouldn't rape mother earth. It looks like this planet is gonna be in for a rougher ride than expected. Sigh ...

P.S.: Since nuclear is no more renewable than oil, it will be very easy to privatize and price-gouge consumers whether they're filling up their electric cars or getting their electricity at home from these utility companies using nuclear for electricity. And like the oil companies, Big Nuclear can and probably will create artificial energy crises and dictate when to reprocess spent fuel and when to keep it on hold.

craigdp,

Your arguments are full of holes.

#1: True, the nuclear industry does not "create" more radioactivity - it just rips it out of the Earth and spreads it around where it can poison us. Native lands are stolen, miners and downwinders die, and at every stage of transport, operation, and disposal, we are all subject to pointless risk.

#2: Brilliant! Launch radioactive waste into the sky! And you assure us that while rockets used to be "famously unreliable" and blow up all the time, "that's no longer the case". Golly, thanks for the assurance. Brilliant!

#3: Fusion. Well, there is a huge fusion reaction taking place 150 million kilometers from Earth - we call it the Sun, and it is pouring out vast amounts of free energy for us to use. Unlike your fusion dream, we don't need a massive new R&D investment to see if we can make solar possible; it is here today. Researchers are constantly improving our ability to harvest and store solar energy, including wind.

If we do learn to control "small" fusion reactions, igniting tiny suns here on Earth to produce energy would not pose the same kinds of radioactivity and meltdown risks as nuclear fission does, but releasing all the heat that nuclear fusion produces might have unintended consequences for the delicately balanced living system that we are part of.

Dear Amy,

We had lunch together in April 2007. I asked you to please follow up on your 2004 interview with Mordechai Vanunu, since your 2004 interview with him was used as major testimony against him in his freedom of speech trial which began January 2006.

You made notes in your Blackberry. You acted interested.

But you didn't bother to call Vanunu until July 2007; AFTER he was sentenced to 6 months in jail for speaking to foreign media in 2004, upon his release from 18 years in an Israeli jail for telling the truth that Israel was already nuclear in 1985.

Vanunu wouldn't talk with you because as he told me, "The media hasn't helped me."

But, blowing in the wind are citizen journalists who have been.

WAWA Blog July 15, 2008: How Vanunu Harms Israel: BAD PR!
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=967&Itemid=202

Craigdp: Seems as though the Polywell fusion reactor design is more promising than the Tokamak reactors... check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

Amy: Sorry to say, but you're way off-base on this one, here are a few paragraphs from my blog (http://theheraclitanfire.blogspot.com/)

It seems to be an article of faith in the leftie community that nuclear=bad. We need to stop engaging in knee-jerk responses to this. Yes, older nuclear designs were primitive and overly complex, some were even inherently dangerous, Chernobyl is the poster child for that. Yes, there is a problem with disposing of nuclear waste - but not an insoluble one. Yes, fission reactors are really only a way-station on the road to fusion. All stipulated. But. Let's look at nuclear power with our critical thinking caps on...

Nuclear Myth #1: All those nuclear power plants are creating more and more radioactivity all the time.

No, Johnny, only a very few nuclear reactors actually create new fissile material - fast breeder reactors, and even then they create the plutonium from uranium as it transforms to lead (this transforming takes a very, very long time). Mostly what reactors do is just transfer radioactivity from one place to another (see Nuclear Myth # 2 for more on this) Bad point here, fast breeder reactors are what you want to build when you want to make weapons-grade radioactives. Extended point: there is radioactive material all over the planet with a high concentration in Africa (remember the Niger Yellowcake?). There is even some speculation that high radioactivity levels in Africa are responsible for mutations that led to the development of Homo Sapiens.

Nuclear Myth # 2: That nasty nuclear waste will just sit around forever making everything glow in the dark.

Well, yes and no... if you pick a remote place that is geologically stable (say Yucca Mountain) and sequester the waste in sealed glass containers and then store them several thousand feet underground in salt formations, you will get the glow in the dark scenario: 2,000 feet underground, but if you think critically about it there is a handy solution - take a deep breath here, assumptions are about to be challenged: go out into the middle of the ocean and build a floating launch facility (oddly enough there already is just such a launch facility already operational), put your nuclear waste in a rocket and shoot it into the Sun. The Sun will know what to do with it. Yes, we've actually been sending nuclear materials into space for years. No, it's not inherently more dangerous than burying it in salt mines. Yes, rockets used to be famously unreliable and would blow up at the drop of a hat. No, that's no longer the case... did I mention that the launch takes place in the middle of the ocean?

Nuclear Myth # 3: All nuclear plants are unsafe.

They used to be exactly that, especially idiot designs like the open graphite reactors the USSR dotted all over the landscape. The fact is that many countries have relied on nuclear power for a substantial portion of their energy needs for decades (see France). They have developed new, simpler, inherently safe-by-design nuclear reactors, Pebble Bed reactors for instance. We in the US get about 20 percent of our energy from nuclear reactors. They're here, they're staying, they're getting safer all the time - get over it.

Nonetheless, there is a salient point here: fission is inherently dangerous by virtue of the fact that you have to gather relatively large amounts of radioactive material together in order to make it work at all.

So what's the solution? Glad you asked: fusion. This holy grail of energy production has been pursued by every capable agency on the planet for over fifty years. Why doesn't it work? Actually it does, the latest Tokamak reactor produces about 102% energy output from energy input - not very impressive. What is even more unimpressive (more unimpressive?) is the paucity of R+D spending on fusion research. In the decade of the '90s the total R+D investment by all the IEA members (the US, EU and Japan) totaled US $8.9 billion - total - for, essentially, all the countries of the world - combined - for ten years. Plainly we're not serious yet about energy independence, when we are, we'll know it because we'll be putting in about $100 billion per year into R+D and pilot production and ramping up to bringing fusion online to the grid.

Why should you be happy about this? Here's the interesting thing about fusion: if it breaks, it turns off; if you make a mistake, it turns off; if the bad guys get in and blow something up, it turns off. No muss, no fuss, no lingering evil cloud, no China Syndrome, no cancer down the line - no radioactivity.

It. Just. Turns. Off.

Did I mention that Exxon made US $40 Billion in profits... this year?

"The president is absolutely right in identifying the spread of nuclear weapons as the gravest threat to our security..."

That would be after himself, of course.

"I'd like to find a well reasoned, scientific argument against nuclear power."

I am not a scientist, so can't provide the empirical treatise that you seem to want. I am able to say with some certainty however, that you can look closely at some of the practices of the government and those who employ nuclear technologies to find strong cases against buckling under the pressure from the pro nuclear coalition.

You absolutely do not need a scientist to point to the fact that without a carefully planned and insured system of waste management, including transportation, safe containment, storage maintenance and security, there exists a well reasoned and logical argument against nuclear power that has many historical references from which to draw.

The fact is that all industries that use nuclear technologies do so without accepting responsibility for the way radioactive waste has an absolute and long-lasting affect on humans and our ecology. The US Government has waged a decades long program of fighting those who insist that effective treatment of nuclear waste be addressed in a way that befits us all.

I have been supportive of one group's efforts for over two decades... with little to show for it. The irresponsibility that lies at the foundation of nuclear use is irrefutable. Radioactive waste that pollutes wide areas through groundwater, has now reached the banks of the Columbia River. That reality is a direct consequence of the government's resistance to any funding, underfunding, mismanagement of funds and diversion of funds for non-related projects.

Just a brief history: http://www.hoanw.org/more/index.cfm?Fuseaction=more_47323&section=more_47323

Nuclear is not just a lie... it is the BIGGEST lie of them all.

Nuclear power is a bad idea due to its' main danger, radiation. After the plant has been decommissioned, it needs to be sealed off for at least 10,000 years. Can anyone name a human construction that has survived intact for that length of time? The most thorny problem is what to do with the waste though. Dump sites are harder to find than an honest politician and the half life of atomic radiation, 500,000 years. Considering the sort of changes that can occur over that length of time, to expect a consistent authority to maintain a dump site is simply not realistic. Add in the prohibitive cost and nukes are a truly bad idea.

whatfools: You speak of the paint on collectors from MIT... that's not quite accurate. They are doing two things... One is they have come up with a way of increasing the efficiency of solar concentrators by a factor of 4x by concentrating the light using various dyes. The second thing is, by using a similar technology, they're able to 'paint' windows (glass or plastic) which captures light and channels the energy to the windowframes where the solar collectors are.

For more information look here:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/solarcells-faq-0710.html
http://www.businessgreen.com/vnunet/news/2221475/mit-concentrates-solar-panels

Couple things:

"presidential candidates trade barbs and accuse each other of flip-flopping"

I know this is just the opening line of Amy's article, but come on, the whole term "flip-flopping" is ridiculous when applied to politicians. ALL politicians change their stance on issues when it's not politically expedient or when they feel it becomes politically necessary. ALL of them do it. Therefore, one politician accusing another of flip-flopping is a class case of Pot and Kettle.

Secondly, Amy trots out the misinformation about Iran's nuclear program, yet again. Civilian Nuclear Power != Nuclear Weapons...

I read that the great minds at MIT have a new 'paint on' solar collector. A lot of sunshine falls on the south side of any building. This looks like we can have a distributed way to feed the grid without having to resort to bombing innocent civilians with the Depleted Uranium waste products of the Nuclear Power Industry. Maybe Buffet's paint company will sell us a bucket of organic dye paint...

Just waiting for the ad agency's stooges to show up on this blog. They always do. Maybe the agency is still getting its talking points together.

I am so glad that Amy is bringing this issue up and emphasizing it both on Democracy Now and in this commentary. Expanding nuclear power is not only dangerous, it is a recipe for economic catastrophe in the long run. It is merely an attempt to squeeze more money out of tax payers and put it in the pockets of corporations for the sake of a complete boondoggle. There are 2 things to consider well with respect to this issue.

First, as Amy and Lovins have emphasized, is the extreme danger created with nuclear waste. At the very minimum, this waste must be carefully tended to for 200,000 years. Probably the real figure is in the millions. Has anyone - and I do mean anyone - ever thought about how long that is. Think about it. This means that the society responsible for taking care of this mess would have to stay stable enough to carry out this very technical and dangerous task for that long. In a small fraction of that time (2000 years since the birth of Christ) we have seen numerous empires rise and fall. Do we really think that cultures will be stable into a future so distant it is virtually unimaginable? We have already produced enough nuclear waste we will have to take care of that a failure to do so - a virtual certainty - will be devastating to life on this planet as we know it. The difficulty of this task will also be exacerbated by the fact that we are now at peak energy and will be facing an irreversible decline soon - with or without nuclear power. This means that we will increasingly have to devote a larger proportion of available remaining energy to maintaining our nuclear waste. That is energy we will desperately need to stay alive and comfortable at all.

But, secondly, there is another issue that is not being addressed in this discussion. That is the question of whether or not there is in fact a net energy gain at all with nuclear energy. To my knowledge this analysis has never been completely carried out. The point here can be illustrated with an analogy. Imagine a device that produces heat. But this device is powered by heat as the source of energy that it produces. If it takes as much heat to run the device as it creates, then there would a net 0 gain. In effect, it would not be worth doing. Another way of putting this is that there is no such thing as perpetual motion machine. In other words, every device that produces anything - including energy - requires energy inputs external to that device.

The nuclear industry used to sell nuclear power plants with the idea that they would produce energy so cheaply it wouldn't be worth metering. The myth behind this claim is based on the fact that they excluded all of the real inputs required to produce that energy. Of course, if the only costs you consider are the maintenance and operating costs of the plant during the approximately 10 years of its operating life-span, then it is indeed cheap. What they are not counting is the huge amounts of energy and materials (concrete, steel, electronics, etc.) required to build the plant, as well as the costs of processing the uranium, not even to mention the maintenance of the waste products for millions of years. Nobody knows at this point whether there is any overall net energy gain in nuclear energy. Until we know that, and it would need to be carefully demonstrated, we would be doing something as ridiculous as pulling up a bucket of water out of a well and pouring it right back down again. Do we really want to look that stupid?! Of course, we are passing on this problem to future generations, as well as to the tax payers. But it will be great profits for the nuclear industry.

"The presidential candidates are wrong on nuclear power."

Amy Goodman: Your statement is false. There are at least two candidates who oppose nuclear power: Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. Surely you know this. I trust you'll make the necessary corrections.

When Al Gore came out with his book on global warming, I said to everyone I know: Just wait, nuclear power, of which Gore was always in favor, will make it's comeback now. And Gore, who was a disappointing Dem. candidate, who received a mere 64% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters, will become the hero he has always wanted to be but couldn't. I wondered if Gore's real purpose was to soften up Americans to the nuclear idea, having remembered the standing ovation he received in Washington State back in the mid-90s, after his pro-nuclear power speech to a room full of nuclear power proponents.

Did I hear "Windfall"? Must've been the wind!

What's interesting to note is the contrast, with the 1970s when pols said the words Windfall Profits Tax re:oil on NATIONAL TV (think for a second at the kind of critical mass that meant in the 1970s when there was no cable! NATIONAL!) with today. I haven't even heard the backest backbencher say the words into the "public airwaves"

Not once. Not by a single congressperson.

This as a time when the Oil Industry has enserfed virtually every quasi-multi-cellular organism living in this country. Hmmm. Guess they got the sound system too!

I'd like to find a well reasoned, scientific argument against nuclear power.

I have a friend who is a theoretical physicist- a big Lefty, progressive type. He claims that all the stuff coming from the Left on nuclear power is scare tactics and hype. He says that there is actually a very small amount of waste created, for example, and that technology has increased pretty dramatically. After listening to him explain how it works, I noticed that anything I read in progressive journals/newsletters on nuclear power was very short on specifics.

Many environmentalists claim that the CO2 crisis is so immediate that we should switch to nuclear power now, and then switch to intermittent sources like solar and wind as energy storage technology gets better. Solar is fine for Nevada but what about Detroit?

Informative links appreciated. Insults not appreciated.

My family members's and I lived within 30 miles of nuclear power plants, other's throughout the world live with nuclear every day.

Recently, neurotoxins were found to be present.

NCF Research
http://www.ncf-net.org/NCFresearch.htm

Soft hugs & prayers,

Diana Saba
Retired Disabled Nurse
TN USA

McCain = Obama = against what we want and what's best for the country as a whole.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.