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Nuclear Power Nearly as Dangerous as Weapons, Critics Say
UNITED NATIONS - The quest for nuclear disarmament is likely to fail if governments and corporations continue to promote nuclear technologies as a solution to the world's energy needs, say independent experts.
"If you believe that by spreading nuclear power around the world you could stop proliferation of weapons, then you are over-optimistic. It's unlikely to happen," he said David Krieger, president of the U.S.-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. (photo by Flickr user celesteh) Their warning comes as international talks on the future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) continue here at U.N. headquarters in New York. The review meeting on the 1970 treaty is due to conclude by the end of this month.
At the meeting, many delegates from countries that do not possess nuclear weapons called for those nations who have them to take speedy actions towards disarmament. Citing the treaty, some also said it was their "inalienable" right to use peaceful nuclear technologies.
Just like the representatives of nuclear weapons states, almost none of the delegates from non-nuclear countries offered any views on the pros and cons of the use of nuclear technologies for so-called "civilian and peaceful purposes".
"I am surprised. It is unfortunate," said David Krieger, president of the U.S.-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF), who is closely watching the talks on NPT from the sidelines as he has done in the past. "So many countries seem to be pursuing nuclear energy."
Last Monday, at the opening of the review conference, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington wants to help "expand the ability of all states to utilize peaceful nuclear energy" and that it was ready to give more funds to the U.N. nuclear agency.
"We have provided 200 million dollars to support the International Atomic Energy Commission's technical cooperation fund," she told delegates. "We are the largest contributors to that effect." The U.S. will give another 50 million dollars in the next five years.
Clinton added that the initiatives would help countries develop the infrastructure for "safe and secure use of nuclear power".
On Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad offered similar views on nuclear energy: "It's clean. It's cheap."
In Krieger's opinion, both got it wrong. Nuclear energy is "neither cheap, nor safe. It is not only expensive, but also poses major risks to the health of the planet," he said.
Mining uranium for nuclear power plants produces radioactive compounds that often contaminate groundwater, air, and plant life, according to the non-profit NAPF. The group notes that the byproducts of the nuclear energy include plutonium, which remains hazardous.
A report by the environmental group Greenpeace pointed out that the use of nuclear energy is not only costly but also has the potential to cause catastrophic accidents, such as the one occurred in the Ukrainian region of Chernobyl in April 1986.
According to the 2007 Greenpeace report on Chernobyl, the nuclear incident caused over 250,000 cancers and nearly 100,000 life-threatening cancers. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimated deaths due to disaster-related cancers at 4,000 to 9,000, a number critics called far too low.
Under the non-proliferation treaty, the Vienna-based U.N. agency is tasked to promote the use of "safe and peaceful" nuclear technologies to meet growing energy needs around the world. Independent researchers say the IAEA has failed to show much progress for a variety of reasons.
"They [IAEA] are not successful in promoting nuclear power plants," Zia Mian, a noted nuclear expert at Princeton University, told IPS. He explained that many countries were reluctant to pursue nuclear energy because it is very costly.
Currently, there are 30 countries using nuclear energy. About half of the plants are based in just four countries - the U.S., Japan, France and Russia.
The four major corporations that dominate the global nuclear industry are Westinghouse and General Electric (U.S.), Hitachi (Japan), and Areva (France).
Growing concern about climate change is one of the factors behind a renewed push to expand nuclear energy, because it has near-zero carbon emissions. However, many observers believe that the role of industry lobbyists cannot be ignored.
In his 2008 World Nuclear Industry Status Report, Mycle Schneider, a French independent nuclear analyst, observes that the nuclear industry is racking up losses and that the percentage of nuclear-generated electricity in the overall global energy mix is decreasing.
"They [industry] want to make money," said Mian, reflecting on the speeches delivered by officials who are attending the month-long NPT review conference. "It is good that many countries have chosen not to pursue nuclear energy."
Krieger thinks that parties to the NPT need to be considering the "strong relationship" between nuclear proliferation and nuclear disarmament because the existence of nuclear material for "peaceful" purposes could still pose the threat of weaponization.
"If you believe that by spreading nuclear power around the world you could stop proliferation of weapons, then you are over-optimistic. It's unlikely to happen," he said.
64 Comments so far
Show All[Nuclear Power Nearly as Dangerous as Weapons, Critics Say]
A good article, but the headline is a bit misleading. The weapons that we have are known to be dangerous, but there is some recognition by the leaders of the world that using them would result in the destruction of not only their enemies, but of themselves as well.
Nuclear power is assumed to be clean, it is assumed that we can produce power safely using the reactors, it is assumed that we can store the waste from those plants safely and eventually store the plants themselves when their lifetime ends. All of those assumptions are going to hurt us. I'd say that NP is more dangerous than the weapons, as we'll never know when some disaster would befall the plants or the storage areas. The gov't can claim that they can be prepared for the environmental catastrophe, but why should we believe them? Especially after the recent disasters in the Gulf of Mexico!
why should we believe them? Especially after the recent disasters in the Gulf of Mexico!
----------------------------
There's a LOT of history with petroleum-related disaster, in part because of the extraction difficulties (the low-hanging fruit has already been harvested), in part because the point of extraction is never the point of refining which is in turn never the point of end use, so there's an endless amount of transfer and cartage, each of them a new opportunity for failure, and in part because even if everything goes perfectly, combustion itself adds to the ongoing global climate disaster.
The same is not true of reactors, hysterically-fearful claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
Petroleum and coal use have an unassailable, well-documented, non-handwaved history of deaths and destruction that repeats *every year*. Nuclear power does not.
The non-handwaved butcher's bill during the entire history of nuclear power doesn't compare with even a year of coal & oil.
'Renewable' energy sources don't suffer from the defects of coal and oil, but the technology is less-well understood than nuke tech is, and the full life-cycle cost burden is rarely mentioned (it might not even have been fully calculated yet).
[Petroleum and coal use have an unassailable, well-documented, non-handwaved history of deaths and destruction that repeats *every year*. Nuclear power does not.]
There are how many nuclear power plants in the world? And how many coal/oil/natural gas plants? The number of traditional plants dwarfs the number of nuke plants by quite a large number. As nasty as it is to say, a disaster at an oil facility isn't going to kill as many people as at a nuke plant. Nor will any damage done by the spill at any oil rig compare to the damage wrought by a 'spill' at a nuke facility. There is not any way to store the nuke waste safely for the lifespan of that waste, we just dump it next to the reactor as everyone screams don't bury that in my back forty. The disasters or accidents at the nuke plants are covered up as much as possible, we heard about chernoble only because it was impossible to cover it up.
You will never convince me that nuke power is safe, unless you can find a way to dispose of the waste safely. Not by burying it for a few thousand years, but by turning it into something that is not radioactive anymore. Until it can be proven that such a thing can be done, there is no place for nuke power on this world.
The most prosaic way to dispose of the waste is to drop it overboard into the ocean at a tectonic subduction point. It'll be quite safe, 6 miles down, til Mama takes it back into her mantle.
An alternative is the breeder reactor (Japan has one in trials now), trimmed to produce neither a surplus of new fuel nor a deficit.
[The most prosaic way to dispose of the waste is to drop it overboard into the ocean at a tectonic subduction point. It'll be quite safe, 6 miles down, til Mama takes it back into her mantle.]
I did a quick google search to see what others said about that issue. This is a quote from someone who writes at the physicsforums.com username matthyaouw
It probably wouldn't subduct. Chances are, it would just become part of the accretionary prism of sediment that fringes the island arc or mountain range. if it were buried incredibly deep in the sea floor sediment, perhaps it would enter the subduction zone and mantle, but think of the logistics of burying it so deep in sediment when under a few km of water already.
Assuming it could be buried deep enough to subduct along with the crust, it would take so long to decend into the subduction zone that in the forseeable future, it would be no more advantageous than burying it in any other deep water. Let's not forget of course earthquake hazards. Placing something in such a tectonically volatile area is tricky if you'd rather it didn't escape from its container.
Keep in mind, I'm quoting someone I don't know, on a subject I know very little about. But the rebuttal to your point seems reasonable to me. Other users on the thread pointed out that the environmentalists would go nuts, difficulties in monitoring the disposal, and other issues that would make the proposal unfeasible.
Breeder reactors still produce waste, I mean burn the fuel so that the end product is NOT at all radioactive. It can't be done now, but there isn't any reason why someone who is paid to think for a living can come up with something.
Hey Sat,
Apparently the mob has been dumping this chit in scuttled container ships for 40 years in the Mediteranian and off of Somalia. No wonder the pirates have had it with anybody who shows up on their coast poisioning their fishing grounds. No wonder the government easily agreed not to use Yucca Mountain to store waste in. It's easier to dump it all in delilict ships in the ocean:
Scroll down to the bottom for the section on illegal dumping of radioactive waste:
http://planetliberty.wikidot.com/nuclear-power-incidents
TJ
Yah, I could have mentioned that. But didn't know if that coastline has a subduction zone near it. Usually when the pro-nuke crowd talks about ocean dumping they also argue that the dumping should be done well offshore, in very deep waters. (like that would be better somehow...)
It would be better. Deeper is better.
I don't know who these people are, but they list subduction disposal as a 'green' method:
http://www.greentechmedia.com/green-light/post/a-green-method-of-nuclear-waste-disposal-1221/
as do the Center for Public Policy at Utah in a pdf:
www.cppa.utah.edu/publications/.../nuclear_waste_summary.pdf
"The subductive waste disposal method is the most viable means of disposing of radioactive
waste. Subduction refers to a process in which one tectonic plate slides beneath another while
being reabsorbed into the Earth's mantle. The subductive waste disposal method involves the
formation of a radioactive waste repository in a subducting plate where the waste will be
absorbed along with the plate and dispersed through the mantle. The most accessible site is on
the ocean floor at a point above where subducting plates meet and, once filled, the repositories would be virtually inaccessible. This method would prevent radioactive waste from mixing with the water table, provide inaccessibility to eliminated weapons material, remove radioactive waste completely from its threatening position, and be safe for marine life."
This quote comes from the Nature site
www.nature.com/nature/journal/v310/n5978/abs/310537a0.html :
"An ICSU committee on the geological disposal of high-level radioactive wastes has concluded that ... disposal in subduction trenches and ocean sediments deserves more attention."
I could go on.
The problem with the subduction disposal method is getting the waste into the rock that's actually going to go back into the earth. If you don't get the waste close enough to that layer of rock, it'll just stay on the surface and not be sucked into the planet. That's what an accretion layer is. So, your 'experts' are suggesting that humans could take a few tonnes of material, put it into strongboxes and then bury it under a few hundred meters of muck at the ocean floor and hope that it gets sucked into the earth sometime in the future...
Ok... Then there's the rate at which the land is actually subducting. How long is it going to take that barrel of waste to get to the point where it's safely buried under the mantle? A week, not a chance. A year, not likely at all. A century or two, maybe. A thousand years, well as long as the thing got buried deeply enough and actually did make it into the mantle.
That ain't relying on science, it's hoping for magic.
[I could go on.]
Don't worry, so can I. (grin)
Even if no means can be devised to get the material all the way through the clay-like muck to the plate itself (I can't think of any reason why that would be impossible), it's still well out of the way forever. It's not going to come back within any human timeframe, nor is it going to influence high-order life in any perceptible way. So what if it takes 1000 years. Or 100,000! The key take-home is that it would be effectively gone. That's science.
[So what if it takes 1000 years. Or 100,000! The key take-home is that it would be effectively gone. That's science.]
It's relying on assumptions and hoping that something happens when it can't be proven. That's not science.
And it matters because while that radioactive muck is on the sea floor, the contamination will spread from the containers to the surrounding area. There are Nuclear Powered submarines that are 'resting' on the sea bed, it would be interesting to find out what effect they are having on their environment. Of course, they're at a depth that we don't know much about to begin with, and no one's sent any probe down to have a look at them other than the military (and they're not likely to be that concerned with the local wildlife down there, nor are they that willing to tell others what they've found out).
[It's not going to come back within any human timeframe, (snip) So what if it takes 1000 years. Or 100,000!]
One thousand years ago mankind was building castles of stone and riding around on horses. One hundred thousand years ago our species was beginning to march out of Africa. I'd say we're still talking about a human timeframe...
The subs all lie in waters between 1 mile and 4 miles deep. We don't know of any effect from them that's distinguishable from the everyday noise of living, and it really isn't fair to handwave a hypothesised one (not that you did that -yet :-)
As far as the timeframe goes, I think we must be talking at crossed purposes. What I meant was that, once the material is sunk into the muck, it doesn't matter how long it takes for Mama to snarf it back into her mantle. It's trapped in the muck and would have no effect on us. It's not going to come crawling back up into human territory like the Creature From The Black Lagoon. Nor are there any ocean-bed volcanos to pop it up into the air and sprinkle it on us. And the creatures that live at that depth *need* to live at that depth, so they're not going to enter any food chain we're part of, either.
I pointed out the sub problem as we don't know what effect dumping waste would have on the deep sea, it would be a good thing to have a look at, heck, it might even have positive effects on the environment down there. I doubt it but...
We certainly are talking at crossed purposes, my point, and the point of the dude I quoted, was that there is no guarantee that the waste would ever be taken back to 'Mama to snarf'. It might just ride over the surface of the subduction zone and never get taken below the planet's mantle.
There are ocean bed volcanoes, we don't know where all of them are. Nor will we know where some of them are until they erupt. That's not a good thing to be so blase about I think. I do hope you've heard that the creatures of the ocean do eat each other? It's one of the things that causes 'red tides' that poison shellfish on the coasts. There are things called Whales, they dive deep to feed on things called Squid. What do you think the Squid are eating at a depth of 1-4 miles?
The only people who worry about radioactive 'creatures from the black lagoon' are sci-fi buffs who didn't learn anything in science class. It's not the 'freakish Hollywood mutations' that worry me, it's the cancers that are caused by leaks of radioactivity.
I should take a break, I'm getting snarky...
Well, if snark is bubbling up then perhaps we should indeed leave the issue. For now. :-)
Yah, I stumbled onto a creationist on another thread. I fear my contempt for that idiot is leaking into my posts on this one. That's not fair to you, or me.
dup deleted
All currently built commercial nuclear power plants produce plutonium. Plutonium makes atomic bombs easier to build. OK, the workers die off more quickly, but if you're a tinhorn dictator you can deal with that.
All currently built commercial nuclear power plants require uranium enrichment technology. The same technology can produce bomb-grade uranium.
The two kinds of relatively clean nuclear energy are flying saucer propulsion systems and fusion reactors. Either one could be commercially available any day now, except the space aliens aren't talking (thank goodness!) and the second choice isn't any closer.
All this theoretical discussion is irrelevant.
Having worked in the electrical power generation business for 30 years, designing, constructing and operating power plants, I have observed that human error occurs in the design, construction and operation of all types of power plants...coal, gas, hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear.
The competence level and proclivity for error are the same irrespective of the type of power plant being designed, constructed or operated. The only difference between nuclear and the other types of power plants are the potential consquences of human error with nuclear are much greater.
The disaster potential of human error has been greatly exacerbated during the past 30 years of Americans buying into the self regulating market mentality. Our electeds in DC have refined the art of token regulation while ceding ever more control to corporations...combine that with nuclear and you have disaster waiting to happen.
Hey professor, like I wrote above, I knew you'd be a good textbook writer. Lots of facts, but here's the real meaning:
A tinhorn dictator who wants weapons-grade Plutonium isotopes simply has to change the fuel rods in his commercial reactor every 90 days or sooner. source: wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-240
So your "assured to be a dud" statement contradicts Wikipedia.
Dangerous? No shit, Sherlock.
I was one of the many now mostly dead Atomic Farmgirls who grew up--if they made it that far--in the shadow of the Hanford Project, which deliberately released several THOUSAND times more radioactive particles into the air than Chernobyl--and did so DELIBERATELY from the mid forties to the mid-fifties.
I was born tghe year the reactor went up, 1944. My high school class, up in 2 years for its 50th reunion, won't have a very big turnout.
The point of the article is quite correct. The problem is that the US obsessive campaign against Iran's energy programme and the necessity of Iran to not bow down to it makes it impossible to discuss these important general issues.
Tell this to that hack Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Capitalist) who is an nuclear industry shill that gets paid to promote shoddy science.
I saw him on Colbert Report last night. He looks exactly like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. It can't be a coincidence. He's morphing into cartoon world.
Here's a thorough response to Brand's B.S.:
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-13-stewart-brands-nuclear-enthusiasm-falls-short-on-facts-and-logic
It goes against common sense to have a power source that leaves radioactive waste behind.
End of story.
There are alternatives but the military industrial complex can't make enough money from them so we just put our pedals to the metal and drive on towards that looming cliff.
As much as I agree with your statements, I can't help but escape myself. Since I am someone of conscience, I have to ask myself how I contribute to the demand for all kinds of dangerous energy and what I can do to lessen my load.
The only answer I come up with is that I have to consume less and waste less.
That, or we all add our feet to the pedal as we fly off the cliff (which we may very well do anyway, but hey, shouldn't we at least go with a little dignity?).
Yep
I had high hopes for Clinton but when I realized how deep he was into nuclear energy I began to have serious doubts.
Everyone just wants to get rich and they don't care avout the consequences of the
impact that their actions have on the common good.
The final straw for me and prez Clinton was when he refused to sign the landmine
treaty and now we get the same from Prez Obama. Ouch!
"UNITED States President Barack Obama has no plans to join a global treaty banning landmines because a policy review found the US could not meet its security commitments without them, the State Department said." The Daily Telegraph
If a terrorist wanted to harm Americans it would be much easier to do it through an accident in a nuclear energy plant where no one would know that it was a suicide plot to kill Americans. This way there would be no retaliation against the terrorist or their people because everyone would think it was an accident. It is not reasonable to believe that any human would use a nuclear weapon to kill Americans when they all know that it would be mutually assured destruction for all people friend and foe. Nuclear weapons are useless except to make billions of dollars for capitalist and endanger the lives of workers. They do not deter attacks, they cannot be used, they drain our tax revenue that is needed for education, health care, housing, food security, job training,productive jobs in America..Nuclear energy is as dirty as oil except it is colorless, orderless and not detectable without a radiation detector. Evan more dangerous.
The destruction of the Food Chain in the Gulf does not raise an eyebrow with Obomber and others like the Clinton Machine.
We of the working classes have been double-crossed and sold out to the highest bidder.
Your reply has nothing to do with the article.
Really?
I'd pay attention.
There is no such thing as peaceful nuclear anything.
Violence in the nuclear industry begins when the siting of mines does violence to the people--human and other--whose lands, bodies and ways of life are contaminated. It continues with the siting of reactors near and upstream and upwind from those with less money and power and where those people are relegated after. The links between nuclear weapons and electricity in mindset, research, culture and schooling, industrial processes etc. continue through the whole process to the end--the piling up of waste in the same places--where the powerless and those without standing live.
We will have an exceedingly hard time outlawing nuclear weapons without outlawing nuclear power, and we must do both as climate catastrophe rushes in, with its likelihood of war over resources, refugees and national and ethnic, cultural and religious survival.
Efficiency, solar, wind, localization, permaculture and other transformations will be, and will need to be, sufficient to phase out nuclear reactors shortly after we stop burning coal--very very soon.
Some time ago I read what former PA governor Thornburgh (I hope I have that spelled correctly)had to say about Three Mile Island, the near-disaster in 1979 that halted plans for new nuclear reactors. It took almost two years after the accident to take a look into the room where it happened. IT WAS TOO CLOSE. The ONLY reason that a huge area of the northeastern US including DC all the way up to southern New England and east to the Atlantic is not uninhabitable now is that President Carter, formerly a nuclear sub officer, knew how to rapidly pull together key nuclear experts, get one of them on site and figure out how to stop it. My family was personally impacted because some lived and worked extremely close to TMI. I understand that cancer statistics for the area that have shown clusters have been suppressed. While I have no direct knowledge of this assertion, I can say that my uncle, in his 50s, died of cancer shortly afterward. I was also told by an engineer who has worked at several plants over the years including Calvert Cliffs in Maryland that I live in fallout distance of ten nuclear power plants including TMI, all of them having had red alerts more than a few times. Then there are the lethal spent rods stored about the plants. The industry has been promising since 1956 that they would find a way to handle this deadly nuclear waste. They still haven't figured it out. I guarantee there have been fortunes made in the meantime.
No fooling, nuclear power is dangerous, mostly because of the waste it produces.
But solar collectors are costly and hard to site, and those big windmills are astoundingly expensive to build and communities fight them, despite the cleanness of what they produce.
None of the energy we need (even with conservation) is cheap, and we are just going to have to pay somewhere.
Nuclear plants produce high levels of energy,and they are a lot better than they used to be. France uses them and has had no known disasters. Both Hanford and Chernobyl were early and defective.
I think we have to deal with them all, and continue to improve all.
Meanwhile, coal kills more people than Chernobyl did,and oil is an environmental disaster wherever it is mined.
When the long term costs of environmental damage that mushroom when extended to the health problems that creates are included, as they must be, the cost of renewable energy [solar, wind, tide] are the only sane solution to our energy needs.
Fossil fuel and nuclear are global insanity. There is no future for humanity or life on the planet if we don't start decommissioning nuclear and coal plants now!
Anyone can advocate for perfection -and many around here do- but nobody seems to have numbers to support their case.
The major problem I see is that we don't understand the technologies of renewable generation well enough yet. Which means we can't actually say with real confidence whether it's at all realistic to talk about decommissioning existing plant.
One problem that usually gets handwaved away is the fact that the wind doesn't blow, nor the sun shine, all the time that energy is needed. Which means we need energy-storage media. Do we have a working solution for that, and is the cost factored into the overall equation?
Another problem is the manufacturing cost. I don't think I've ever seen credible comparative numbers per MW of output. If you have, perhaps you could put up a pointer?
There's also climate-chaos to factor in.
There've been some collapses in the face of higher-than-expected wind speeds. What does that do to safety and cost? I recently posted an article from the island of Raasay in the inner Hebrides, where a wind turbine collapsed next to the local 18-pupil primary school. Nobody was hurt, but that was just luck.
I'm fairly sure we don't have a handle on what changes need to be made in solar-panel siting and anchoring to deal with the more turbulent weather we have to expect til we get the changes into reversal.
There've been a number of experimental tidal-power generators installed, but from whatever I can find there are problems with the environmental interface that need worked out.
Rather than starting to decommission, wouldn't it be better to use the existing capacity to reduce the need for capacity? E.g., make super-insulation, terabit ethernet, and the building of a proper, layered transportation network national priorities?
Thanks, Bill, especially for the caveat: I try to avoid data from interest groups. Somehow the data in those cases always supports the ideology of the authors >:->
The fact that thousands upon thousands of solar and wind installations have been operating for decades, and are the fastest-growing energy sector, should tell you something. Why are we arguing about the minutia of slow, polluting, expensive, running-out-of-fuel, impossible to insure nuclear power, waste, politics, etc. when it clearly (to those who are thinking and feeling clearly) has so many very difficult or unsolvable problems that it would be an absurd choice and is not the solution to any real problem we have?
Renewables are cheaper, faster, safer, cleaner, more ecological, more economical, more economically democratical, and POSSIBLE, which is more than you can say about nukes without a fascist or near-fascist government to push them through using fear, intimidation and the threat of violence. Of course there are accidents---in every field of human endeavor. A toothpaste factory can spring a leak, a windmill can fall down, a truck containing cotton balls can overturn. And probably have. This is mostly avoidable, mostly avoided, and a bit less significant than oil blowouts, coal sludge lakes flooding towns, mine explosions killing miners, nukes leaking tritium, TMI, Browns Ferry, Chernobyl, the literally thousands of near misses and examples of corruption ranging from nuke workers using candles to check for air leaks near flammable trays containing control cables, to lobbyists convincing Congress and the NRC to ignore safety risks. Why bring up a windmill falling down when these other things go on every day having cumulatively killed millions? And what’s that other thing?…oh yeah, climate cataclysm causing the global collapse of civilization and possible extinction of humans and 90% of other species on the planet… Why do some people--conservatives, conservatives in sheep’s clothing, and liberals with a hard conservative core--hate windmills with such a burning passion in the face of these other indisputable facts?
The costs of windmill construction are what they are. The costs of not windmills are far far far greater. The costs of continuing with fossil fuels and nuclear are the destruction of civilization, the poisoning of the biosphere, and tyranny and all that goes along with it, including those pesky carbon-intensive wars fascists always enjoy, and the inevitable ecological destruction that goes with tyrannical governments of all stripes (witness the toxic mess left in Russia and eastern Europe after the USSR fell, as well as what goes on in Africa under every dictator, not to mention our increasingly tyrannical and unrepresentative/ unresponsive government right here at home.)
Nuclear power has many links to nuclear weapons, including political/imaginary/symbolic, not insignificant. Imagine the current (manufactured) crisis with Iran happening if there were no nuclear reactors. Headline: “US says Iran must not be allowed to build windmills; claims they are building wind weapons under cover of peaceful use of wind.” (You can substitute “giant solar mirrors” if you want.)
Your argument appears to be based solely on ideology, which I don't find persuasive at all.
Yes, I have a completely ideological, unsupported-by-fact belief that TMI and Chernobyl and Brown's Ferry happened, that there are existing solar and wind installations, that there is a nuclear waste problem, that the last 6 months have seen serious accidents in the oil, coal and nuclear industries, that blueprints for a nuclear reactor were used upside down, that required photos of welds in a reactor were faked by the builder, that a windmill contains less toxic material than a nuclear reactor or coal or oil burner, that a recent report said that there ws a 50% chance of guaranteed government loans defaulting for new nukes, that lead times and capital costs and fuel costs are higher for nuclear than for wind and solar... You're absolutely right to ignore all those false memories of mine, implanted by... aliens? Liberals? the ELF? And good for you for responding so thoughtfully and carefully and rebutting my points one by one. I am helpless in the face of your arguments.
You make assertions using ideological language ("absurd", "Renewables are cheaper, faster, safer, cleaner, more ecological, more economical, more economically democratical, and POSSIBLE, which is more than you can say about nukes without a fascist or near-fascist government to push them through using fear, intimidation and the threat of violence" ) without any support.
It's not possible to rebut such assertions because people who think it right to use that kind of tactic aren't interested in truth. Hansen makes that point in his "Storms" book: the most effective denier that Hansen encounters brandishes his science credentials but uses the language of the courtroom and the pulpit rather than the language of science. Dishonest as hell.
And what about that nuclear plant in Vermont that is being colsed down--why is that?????
You can make perfectly safe nuclear power with thorium, and it won't even produce byproducts that can be weaponized.
Love this thread...
We should all( those of us who oppose this disgusting and dangerous energy form) start raising holy hell... I just cannot believe that people want something so dangerous SPREAD ALL OVER THE WORLD, EVEN MORE SO THAN IT IS NOW...
the more plants you have the more chance for error/accident
Love this thread...
We should all( those of us who oppose this disgusting and dangerous energy form) start raising holy hell... I just cannot believe that people want something so dangerous SPREAD ALL OVER THE WORLD, EVEN MORE SO THAN IT IS NOW...
the more plants you have the more chance for error/accident
Nuclear power is completely unsafe no matter who's running it. It's asinine to rely on a system that must acheive 100 percent perfect safety all the time.
It cannot be done. A list of the KNOWN accidents:
http://planetliberty.wikidot.com/nuclear-power-incidents
TJ
There is NO such thing as safe nuclear anything. The main, and most dangerous, problem remains: what to do with the nuclear waste, how to dispose of it safely. Other than sending it into outer space, there is no safe way of disposing it on Earth.
What goes up, may come down...
Documentary from New Zealand exploring pros and cons of nuclear power called THE NUCLEAR COMEBACK.
http://www.realeyz.tv/en/justin-pemberton-the-nuclear-comeback_cont3489.html
Video on Demand Stream (legal)