Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was just a very hot, stubborn fire in nuclear fuel. Chernobyl and a huge surrounding area is uninhabitable for an estimated three to six hundred years. The fallout from Chernobyl contaminated food and livestock around Europe and Scandinavia for a long time, and the radiation is still traceable in the earth and some living things.

We came very close to a similar or worse disaster in the Fermi Plant near Detroit. It is still sealed up.

TMI was another close call, covered up by the government and big business.

There is no way to safely store the radioactive byproducts of nuclear power. If that stuff is dug up, or exposed by a quake, hundreds or thousands of years after we are gone, the destruction will be just as bad; worse if the people then are not aware of the danger.

I am a nuclear veteran (Operation Redwing, Bikini Atoll, 1956.) There are not too many of us left that witnessed the tests, but there are a number of groups that monitor the effects through cancers, birth defects, both physical and mental, and monitoring of contamination in the environment. We are still feeling the results of those tests. I have exchanged e-mails with downwinders and with the children of downwinders who have had children with birth defects that had no previous history of such things in their families; who suffer from cancers that are peculiar to nuclear radiation.

Now we are facing the specter of Depleted Uranium, which is turning up in atmospheric filters around the world. Depleted Uranium is a nuclear byproduct of the nuclear industry. It is a low level radioactive material of extreme density. The half life of DU is 4.5 billion years. Workers in DU have to wear full protective equipment and respirators. DU ammunition is extremely hard and dense. It penetrates armor like tissue paper, vaporizing and burning, leaving dust and particles as shrapnel to be ingested or breathed. DU is not what the public thinks of as a radioactive material. It only emits alpha and beta radiation. A piece of paper will stop it. However, when it is in the lungs or elsewhere in the body, it is in direct contact with living tissue, bombarding that tissue with low level radiation for the rest of your life and beyond. That radiation can lead to cancers, genetic damage and eventual death.

Independent laboratories like Johns Hopkins have studied this and made predictions of the harm it can do. The government says, as it did with Agent Orange, “There is nothing to it, it is all in your head.” Meanwhile, people continue to sicken and die and will for generations.

Everywhere there are Nuclear plants, there is a statistical increase in cancers and various other diseases. The hundreds of million$ or billion$ being contemplated to build more of these plants should be going toward green technology. We have the ability and technology to use the only safe nuclear reactor in the solar system (it is ninety-three million miles away), it just needs to be developed further.

End this nuclear boondoggle and invest in our real future!

Sure, build 100 more nuclear power plants when many of the existing 104 don't have sufficient funds to decommission themselves. Also, many nuke plants in America have proven to be woefully unsecured. Putting this in today's context, terrorist cells could overrun any number of plants holding huge areas hostage to disaster.

Unsecured nuclear waste can be made into dirty bombs. Either way, terrorists hold the nuclear threat without having to spend a dime on the technology. Planning? Sure, it could take years to plan and execute a site take-over but terrorists take their time. It was over eight years between the WTC's first bombing and 9/11.

Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were lessons people are starting to understand. And nuclear waste was, is and likely always will be a problem. Leave it to the GOP to ignore warnings and eschew logic.

http://freesolaradvice.blogspot.com

Sure, the world's most expensive power source. What ever happened to "Drill, Drill, Drill?" I think that the entire Republican party has lost it's mind. It would be a kindness to put them out of their misery. Safer too.

Does anyone still care what Republicans say?

The only way the knuckle heads can say Nu-cler energy is cheap is when they don't count the costs. Can they spell s-t-u-p-i-d?

It must be hard to see clearly when the lobbyists are waving money in front of their eyes.

Terran

Minitrue is correct. Our troops and the Afghan and Iraqi people have all been exposed to untold amounts of DU and will suffer for generations from the happy stupid republicans and some Dems who ok'd those pointless wars.
How can those Republicans even think that nuclear plants would be safe? I believe they have lost their minds (what little they had).

I'm afraid we do have to consider the nuclear option-whether we like it or not. There is just no way renewables can have any meaningful impact on our energy consumption. Whoever mentioned "harnessing the sun" is correct - but we are not there yet and, it is the biggest nuclear reactor in our neighbourhood. I know of the problems and risks however until someone proves another way to produce enough electricity exists without burning fossil fuels, the nuclear option has to be on the table.

"is the height of irresponsibility" hay that is the federal government for you. so are 13 trillion dollar gift to the super rich and a budget deficit of more than half the budget!

If we build many more nuke plants, we will accelerate the rate at which we go through uranium, so we'd only get maybe 15 years worth of power with current technologies.

Is this the type of risk we take for 15 years worth of our already bloated, selfish, wasteful lifestyles?

Any other species has evolved past these suicidal tendencies.

The idea of continuing with nuclear power is ludicrous beyond belief, as the damage wrought from its' negative aspects is mind boggling. It makes the damage from global warming seem like a temporary blip compared to the half-life of nuclear radiation. This may be stating the obvious: mankind was and still is not mature enough to have knowledge of nuclear power and weapons.

Why do the Nuclear promoters insist on getting money from the government? If Utilities are so scared of nuclear plants,
that they will not finance it themselves, this should be
a wake up call for the rest of us..

>>
Bennett said Monday the nation needs to construct 100 new nuclear reactors by 2030 -- doubling the nation's current number of 104 plants -- if it is serious about slashing carbon emissions while still producing enough electricity to keep up with American needs.
<<

And for the cost of TEN new nuclear plants whose waste stays dangerous for 4.5 billion years, we could implement enough non-polluting solar and wind power to power the U.S. for the next hundred years while EXPORTING electricity to Mexico and Canada. I wonder if those casks are good for 4.5 billion years.

>>
"The future of energy is clean energy," said Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, Including, "building at least 100 new nuclear power plans in the next 20 to 25 years."
<<

NUCLEAR ENERGY IS NOT CLEAN !!!!

the world survived for eons without electricity...it's not necessary...after it's been gone for just a little while, you'll get used to not having it around all the time...like you don't miss tv after you've lived without it for a bit...not at all...

This was written on the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl. Perhaps it still has some value.
------------------------
Chernobyl Plus 20

Chernobyl, a disaster almost old enough to vote.
It seems a lifetime ago to the young;
Just yesterday to those of us who remember
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Operation Crossroads at Bikini.

Chernobyl was a prediction by those who knew;
By those who had seen their bones through their arms,
Bathed in Thermonuclear light in the Marshall Islands.
And by the Victims of Castle Bravo in ‘54.

Chernobyl was preceded by many close calls, many accidents.
The Fermi plant near Chicago, Three Mile Island and others,
Radiation poisoning suffered by countless “Downwinders.”
Here and abroad they cried their warnings.

Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion, not a bomb,
It was just an accident, a stubborn fire in nuclear fuel.
Yet the effects were felt, are still felt, around the world.
They will continue for many generations.

Chernobyl, a city, a region, rendered uninhabitable
For three to six centuries, longer than the Dark Ages lasted.
A legacy of cancers and mutations, not two heads or three legs,
But susceptibilities for diseases and mental retardation.

Chernobyl, subject of an article being written twenty years ago.
My young son came in with the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Wow, Dad! Weather report! For the first time in history,
Scattered showers with traces of radioactive Iodine!”

Chernobyl, a warning unheeded by those who
Never felt the heat, saw the light, feared the sickness,
But blithely want to curse the planet with more of the same.
In the sacred name of Democracy?

Chernobyl is our future, unless we reinstate the many treaties,
The world worked so hard to create, building hope out of fear.
And remove from power, those who would reawaken the nuclear dragon,
And turn it loose to devour the earth again.

Steve Osborn
26 April 2006
------------------------
And awaayyyy we go yet again.

How unsurprising that the "expert" invited by a pro-nuclear senator happens to be a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society. It is appalling, however, that he should joke about the danger of nuclear waste, wherever it happens to be situated. We have postponed and rescheduled deadlines for waste disposal for many decades, and nothing has changed, except that attacks by terrorists has become a major new factor.

The idea that nuclear power can be produced cheaply is one of the silliest parts of this entire report. Without huge subsidies, there is no company that would touch these projects. Another subsidy is the legislation that limits the liability of the utility in case of a catastrophic accident, with the government making up the difference.

Does a service/mercenary economy require more or less electrical generating capacity than a industrial/manufacturing economy?

Conservation of wasted electricity could obviate the need for almost all new central station energy facilities for the next 30 yrs, according to credible scientists and economists who've studied the matter (cf NRDC's 2009 report: The American Energy Future.)

But political conservatives like Sen. Bennett are always the arch opponents of real conservation. That's because the chief thing Bennett's political class wants to conserve is the established, concentrated, ill-gotten private wealth of ethically-mad oligarchs like himself.

In fact, US conservatives' obsessive loyalty to Mammon values has so deeply rotted their souls and corrupted their minds, they have no choice, for example, but to convince themselves that human caused global warming is objectively unreal: nothing more than a socialist deception, they insist.
No matter that virtually all of the world's Nobel Laureate scientists accept the empirically-based models for human caused planet warming, and no matter that only a tiny fraction of such scientists identify themselves as socialists (as if this latter fact should even be granted a response...)

If science gets in the way of big riches for the few, science must, according to US conservatives, yield to Mammon. And where science doesn't do so willingly, conservatives, with a perfectly straight face, will even drag the Christian God into the matter -- insanely alleging God's support for whatever the current Mammon scheme is.
This particular PR manoeuvre is a double insanity, actually.

Now that they're badly loosing their PR campaign, which favors mindless human use of global warming carbon fuels, conservatives are forced to turn to the next best elite investor gold pile: revival of central station nuclear power in the US.
No matter here, too, that their beloved private market won't issue insurance policies for nuclear plants (the socialist Price Anderson Act takes care of that problem for them without any philosophical contradiction -- the stinking hypocrites!)

As NRDC's 2009 report and other similar reports over the years have proven time and again: even modest conservation of wasted electricity in the US, achieved system-wide through labor-intensive retrofitting of low-input technologies, would within a decade produce enough surplus generating capacity to not only obviate new electricity plants (of any kind) for the foreseeable future, but also allow for the decommissioning of the US's worst-polluting, coal-fired central stations, with plenty of peak demand capacity to spare for a 30yr-long 3-4% growth rate (not that any of us should support such otherwise-standard growth...)

Conservatives like Bennett of course refuse to even consider the documented data that support these more-democratic, decentralized, spread-the-wealth conservation approaches to creating energy.
They instead insist that nuclear power plants, with their ultra-enormous bond capitalization requirements, obscenely lucrative payback maturities, plus government-guaranteed insurance for both accident liability and bond-holder risk alike, are just what our nation needs. Translation: nuke plants are the perfect investment for America's ruling class of planet-ruining ghouls.

The fact that some European nations, and Japan, have come to rely heavily on nuclear power is no resolution or absolution of this technology's ill-advisability. It only confirms that similarly ghoulish oligarchies rule elsewhere.

It should be understood too, that the electricity nuke plants produce is also at minimum about 10 times more expensive for the end-use consumers than similar megawatts produced through low-tech conservation of waste.
And all this says nothing of the environmental/security hazards such plants' daily operations and deadly waste storage problems pose for society at-large.

Some Beltway liberals aren't much better than conservatives on the nuclear energy vs. system-conservation issue, I admit.
But nothing so far equals the depravity and danger of America's newly-emboldened, radioactivity-loving conservatives.

Hmmmm----I'll bet this wack-job is a Republi-con. Anybody got the figures for how much cash this whore has taken for this trick?

The New Nuclear Revolution
Safe fission power is our future -- if regulators allow it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124580572129645069.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

Ontondo: You were wide awake at 5:44 this morning. I loved your paragraph, Conservatives like Bennett of course refuse to even consider the documented data that support these more-democratic, decentralized, spread-the-wealth conservation approaches to creating energy.
They instead insist that nuclear power plants, with their ultra-enormous bond capitalization requirements, obscenely lucrative payback maturities, plus government-guaranteed insurance for both accident liability and bond-holder risk alike, are just what our nation needs. Translation: nuke plants are the perfect investment for America's ruling class of planet-ruining ghouls."

We recently had one of the 11 national NRC meetings held right here in Estero, FL--hardly on the map and far from any nuke. The meeting was packed. Even though the thought engineers magnificently choreographed the invited public participation so as to avoid answering the hard questions, we had plenty. 14 members of our resurrected Stone Crab Alliance and I attended with our Caldicott books in hand.

Our primary public concern was with nuclear waste. We were assured it was being placed in "silicone logs" and decreasing in lethal importance at as rapid a rate as can be reasonably expected.

The local paper, the Naples Daily News, published a garbled article on the meeting and many of the knuckle-dragging local folk offered electronic comments. This was mine:

Clean energy? Some things last forever, like deadly spent fuel rods.

Nevadians don't want them in Yucca Mountain. Barnwell is full. Where do we keep them?

Each nuke in America keeps these deadly things in swimming pools on site. It was supposed to be a temporary solution, but Turkey Point in Homestead has been saving them for 37 years. They are 10 to 30 times more deadly than the reactor core.

Now FP&L has applied to build two more nukes at Turkey Point. Progress Energy has applied to build two more in Levy County, north of Tampa. And the rods pile up. What do we care when we have the government to protect us? A good investment! Costs and risks are passed on to the taxpayer and the consumer ($20 billion for each).

Everything in the environment is connected to everything else. So I worry. Hurricane Andrew, reportedly, released no radiation from Turkey Point when he hit it dead center. Then Andrew came over to Naples bringing air from all of Miami.

So what happens if "an enemy" blows up the swimming pool at Turkey Point? Even with 10 mph winds from the east, their air arrives here in 10 hours or so. Is FP&L tempting fate?

And "terrorists" are handed the opportunity. Estero's was the ninth meeting of 11. Wish you'd been there.

#2 Posted by dwyerj1 on June 17, 2009 at 12:30 a.m
____________
Depleted uranium doesn't deplete very much. Plutonium-239 only lasts 24,100 years. And Plutonium 244 only last 80 million years. Uranium is cheaper than recycling because we mine it on "Indian" reservations and leave the radioactive tailings at the site of the mines. "Indians" don't complain too much. One cupful of plutonium (PU-239, one large component of a spent nuclear fuel rod) could make a nuclear bomb capable of vaporizing New York City.

The NRC and FEMA would not be updating their emergency radiological evacuation plans if nuclear power plants didn't pose real threats to public health. It won't do much good in this unrepresentative democracy, but I urge you to write your congressperson anyway.