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The WaPo's "Nuclear Power Regains Support" is a Big Lie
Yet another "perfectly safe" release at Three Mile Island has irradiated yet another puff of hype about alleged "green" support for new reactors.
The two are inseparable.
In 1979, when TMI's brand new Unit Two melted, stack monitors and other critical safeguards crashed in tandem. Nobody knows how much radiation escaped, where it went or who it harmed. Cancers, leukemia, stillbirths, malformations, asthma, sterility, skin lesions and other radiation-related diseases erupted throughout central Pennsylvania. Some 2400 families sued, but never got a full public hearing in federal court.
Unit Two had operated just three months when it melted. By a 3-1 margin, three central Pennsylvania counties then voted that TMI-One, which opened in 1974, stay shut. But Ronald Reagan tore down that wall.
This week TMI's owners were forced to evacuate 150 workers when radioactive dust "unexpectedly blew out of a pipe being cut by workers." Exelon was "trying to determine exactly how and why it happened."
As always, official announcements emphasize that the public was "in no danger." That was an epic lie in 1979. This time Exelon's Ralph DeSantis said things were rapidly "back to normal."
DeSantis then said radiation could be quickly wiped off protective outfits, while "it takes two to three days for radiation to naturally leave the body of anyone who breathed it in."
This is a ghastly lie. Among other isotopes, alpha and beta emitters - especially from radioactive dust - can easily lodge in the lungs and other internal organs long enough to damage cells and cause numerous forms of cancer, often lethal.
Ditto the hype about alleged green support for new reactors. Latest is a carefully contrived piece of industry fluff from one Anthony Faiola, whose "Nuclear Power Regains Support" has just been featured atop the Washington Post. This wafer thin installment in the "former environmentalists deem nukes green" series features a Brit named Stephen Tindale who recently left Greenpeace under strained circumstances.
Greenpeace is as anti-nuke as ever. Like Patrick Moore, another former Greenpeacer now hiring out to the nuclear industry, Tindale's tenure with the organization was stormy, and his defection unsurprising to many still with the group.
But once again the turn of a single activist was a sufficient hook on which to hang a breathless feature.
Faiola cites "only muted opposition" to new reactors in the US while ignoring the inconvenient reality that none are yet licensed for construction. The thousands of No Nukes arrests in the 1970s and ‘80s came at reactor sites like Seabrook, New Hampshire and Diablo Canyon, California, where construction was already under way.
In fact, today's safe energy opposition is far beyond corresponding stages when the first reactors were just being proposed. Its decisive advantage comes from true green renewable and efficiency technologies that are four decades further along, and that have all but priced atomic energy wholly out of the marketplace. Only this media-based stab at federal handouts keeps the prospect of new reactors on life support.
Faiola crows that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission "is reviewing applications for 22 new nuclear plants from coast to coast." Unmentioned is Toshiba-Westinghouse's flagship AP-1000 design, which the NRC says can't withstand an earthquake, hurricane or tornado. Also missing are devastating safety critiques from regulators in Finland, France and Great Britain of the "standardized" reactor being pushed by France's taxpayer-financed AREVA.
Failoa does cover Al Gore's harsh assaults on the economic and proliferation problems of atomic energy. He briefly mentions the catastrophic AREVA fiasco at Finland's Olkiluoto, where construction costs have soared by at least $3 billion. That project is also more than three years behind schedule, with no firm completion date in sight.
Failoa omits the escalating Texas-sized turmoil in San Antonio, whose city council was set to sign on to the construction of a new nuke when it learned the price had jumped by $4 billion - long before the license has been granted.
The story completely skips the DC-based Nuclear Information & Resource Service, which sponsored a statement signed by more than 850 other environmental groups opposing new reactor construction as a proposed means of addressing the climate crisis.
Like this vast core of green groups, Moody's, Standard & Poor, Citibank and a powerful cohort of financial analysts see atomic power as a horrific investment that can only be described as, well, radioactive. The risks of building a new reactor, says a recent Citibank report, "are so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees."
But as sure as radiation continues to pour from Three Mile Island, the hype about "green" support for atomic power will continue to spew, while the core of the environmental movement remains staunchly anti-nuke, especially as the price of Solartopian technologies continues to plummet.
"We can meet climate goals with efficiency and renewable technologies that are cheaper and much less risky than new reactors," says Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Nuclear power, adds Anna Aurilio of Environment America, "takes us backward."
32 Comments so far
Show AllSpeaking of lies, did anyone hear about the hack job that hackers suppossedly did on the some website for climate scientist? An e-mail was found that supposedly makes a case for that climate change is a hoax... a scam or at least trumped up.
Now, tell me what possible motive would there be for this to be done, who would gain...
I can't wait to see how this plays out. This is all we need to set us back even more in our work toward saving what ever semblence of our planet we can...
Ya' know, we may not hear one more thing about this. This may have just been a stick stuck in the information wheel to clog up the wheels of progress...
I understand the stance of many environmental groups against nuclear power, but the fact is that France is the greenest country in the industrialized world and they generate about 80 percent of their power from nuclear reactors. And they have not had any problems with their nuclear reactors, also they have built recycling centers for their nuclear waste, so they dont have to store it somewhere like we do (i.e. Yucca Mountain). If the US can mimic France with their nuclear power set-up then we can become more energy efficient because other renewable energy sources are not as cost-efficient and capable of sustaining this population as they are now.
Your citation to show "France is the greenest country in the industrialized world"? True their electricity is mostly from nukes, but around 70% of their total energy is from fossil fuels. And "green" is a mushy word meaning something like "ecologically low-impact," but activities required for nuclear power generation, from mining to waste disposal, are extremely high-impact. Since France imports all its uranium, many environmental costs of their power system are simply foisted off on Niger and Canada.
Your citation to show "they have not had any problems with their nuclear reactors"? True they have suffered no catastrophic disaster like Chernobyl, but they have had incidents of release of radiation into the environment, and in 2008 their enrichment facility spilled water containing hundreds of pounds of natural uranium, a toxic heavy metal, that contaminated water for drinking, agriculture, and recreation in the surrounding area. Also their reprocessing plant dumps radioactive water into the ocean, and France simply claims exposure to this radiation is at "safe" levels.
Your citation to show "they have built recycling centers for their nuclear waste, so they dont have to store it somewhere like we do (i.e. Yucca Mountain)"? True they have a reprocessing reactor that turns some radioactive waste into nuclear fuel, but there is high-level radioactive waste at the end of the cycle and they are building a high-level radioactive waste dump - which you left the implication that they are not.
Your citation to show "renewable energy sources are not as cost-efficient and capable of sustaining this population"? Actually renewables, primarily wind and solar, were the largest source of new energy generation worldwide in 2008 including in Europe, and continuing advances in efficiency, storage, and economies of scale will only continue to drive down the cost of renewables.
You want the USA to mimic France, but even with France's dependence on uranium, Europe as a whole is moving strongly to invest in renewables, and so is China. Non-renewable energy like fossil fuels and nukes will only go up in cost as "peak oil" or "peak uranium" are reached, but the cost of renewables will only go down.
And your post completely ignores all the other major issues with nukes, such as weaponizing of uranium, environmental contamination throughout the nuke process from mining to waste, the threat of accident and the threat of terrorism, among other problems.
All in all, your post reads like talking points from pro-nuke propaganda (from the disarming opening "I understand the stance of many environmental groups against nuclear power" without actually expressing any understanding of the stance of environmental groups against nuclear power; through the string of unsupported assertions; to the disarming grammatical confusion in the closing sentence - do they send people to training camps to learn to write like this?).
All the info i cite is widely available, the specifics i cite are all available on the Wiki sites for French nuclear energy and for renewable energy.
titus23 said: "... And they have not had any problems with their nuclear reactors"
On the contrary, there has been issues.
http://bit.ly/5Uq7Ys
http://bit.ly/5gG5qP
I suggest you educate yourself before making such statements.
There's a catchphrase about engineering projects that goes
"Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick any 2"
I think we need a similar one for the how-to-preserve-life-on-Earth debate so that everyone is forced to get in touch with what's at stake globally and the limitations imposed by a finite planet. Then make all the competing factions agree a choice.
I'm not sure what the list of options should be, though.
good, fast, painless?
Tie this in with health protection. It seems that nuc industry will only build if they don't have to pay any insurance for leaks, disasters and the like.
This should give the people at AIG something with which to work out some risk management scheme with defaults.
Then even if everything does go puff, it will be like the plague back in the middle ages, when they were getting too many people, and the survivors got to start over from a lower population base.
Webwalk is right-on! It's not just the Washington Post that's lying. The government's NRC has held 15 meetings around the country to gather public comment on its plan to authorize the 22 new license applications. But the meetings are held in very out-of-the-way places with minimal informing of the public. These meetings will produce false information saying that the public supports nuclear power as green energy.
Depleted uranium doesn't deplete very much. Plutonium-239 only lasts 24,100 years. And Plutonium 244 only lasts 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.
The truth, as reported by Dr. Caldicott, is very different. Let me be specific.
In the US, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50% of global warming.
Also, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, release from leaky pipes 93% of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted yearly in the US. The production and release of CFC gas is now banned internationally by the Montreal Protocol because it is the main culprit responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global warmer, 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilizes large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages--the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste.
In summary, nuclear power produces, according to a 2004 study by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, only three times fewer greenhouse gases than modern natural-gas power stations.
Contrary to the nuclear industry's propaganda, nuclear power is therefore not green and it is certainly not clean. Nuclear reactors consistently release millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the air and water each year. These releases are unregulated because the nuclear industry considers these particular radioactive elements to be biologically inconsequential. This is not so.
These unregulated isotopes include the noble gases krypton, xenon and argon, which are fat-soluble and if inhaled by persons living near a nuclear reactor, are absorbed through the lungs, migrating to the fatty tissues of the body, including the abdominal fat pad and upper thighs, near the reproductive organs. These radioactive elements, which emit high-energy gamma radiation, can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease.
The dire subject of massive quantities of radioactive waste accruing at the 442 nuclear reactors across the world is also rarely, if ever, addressed by the nuclear industry. Each typical 1000-megawatt nuclear reactor manufactures 33 tons of thermally hot, intensely radioactive waste per year.
Because nuclear power leaves a toxic legacy to all future generations, because it produces global warming gases, because it is far more expensive than any other form of electricity generation, and because it can trigger proliferation of nuclear weapons, these topics need urgently to be discussed by less fearful Americans.
Be sure to write your congressperson.
No nukes is good nukes says our Stone Crab Alliance of South Florida.
Greatly informative. Better than article.
Many thanks for the truth.
I agree this is MUCH better than the article which was full of pretty heavy claims but with very few facts to back up those claims.
I had far more questions than answers after reading the main article's propaganda.
I am very much a liberal, but I despise propaganda in all forms.
What did medical studies report on the incidence of cancer? Is that rate higher around three-mile island than the rest of Penn? Exactly how much radiation was released in 1979? My understanding is that it actually isn't very much.
And then the use, over and over again of the word 'melt' to describe the accidents carefully orchestrated to invoke images of full chernobyl-style meltdown is, I think, actually bordering on unethical. It was unethical for GWB to always link Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden (or 911) by putting them together with no evidence and I consider it unethical to do the same with these accidents.
What is written above, though I might not agree with it all, at least contains verifiable facts and draws conclusions based upon them. Which is a damm sight better than what the schill who wrote the original article did!
Good for you dwyerj1!
Wasserman's article isn't "propaganda" simply because it doesn't include all the specifics you would have liked. What a ridiculous criticism.
Wasserman (MA, Am. Hist.) writes:
In 1979, when TMI's brand new Unit Two melted, stack monitors and other critical safeguards crashed in tandem. Nobody knows how much radiation escaped, where it went or who it harmed. Cancers, leukemia, stillbirths, malformations, asthma, sterility, skin lesions and other radiation-related diseases erupted throughout central Pennsylvania. Some 2400 families sued, but never got a full public hearing in federal court.
Unit Two had operated just three months when it melted. By a 3-1 margin, three central Pennsylvania counties then voted that TMI-One, which opened in 1974, stay shut. But Ronald Reagan tore down that wall.
This week TMI's owners were forced to evacuate 150 workers when radioactive dust "unexpectedly blew out of a pipe being cut by workers." Exelon was "trying to determine exactly how and why it happened."
As always, official announcements emphasize that the public was "in no danger." That was an epic lie in 1979.
----------------------------------
A prof (Bernard Cohen ScD, Physics faculty emeritus, UPittsburgh) writes:
Even in the Three Mile Island accident where at least two equipment failures were severely compounded by human errors, two lines of defense were still not breached--- essentially all of the radioactivity remained sealed in the thick steel reactor vessel, and that vessel was sealed inside the heavily reinforced concrete and steel lined "containment" building which was never even challenged. It was clearly not a close call on disaster to the surrounding population. The Soviet Chernobyl reactor, built on a much less safe design concept, did not have such a containment structure; if it did, that disaster would have been averted.
(his microbio from another site: "I offer the following personal information. (1990) I am a 65-year-old, long-tenured professor of physics and radiation health at the University of Pittsburgh. I have never been employed by the nuclear industry except as a very occasional consultant, and I discontinued those relationships several years ago. My job security and salary are in no way dependent on the health of the nuclear industry. I have no long-standing emotional ties to nuclear power, not having participated in its development. My professional involvement with nuclear energy began only when the 1973 oil embargo stimulated me to look into our national energy problems. I have four children and eight grandchildren; my principal concern in life is to increase the chances for them and all of our younger citizens to live healthy, prosperous lives in a peaceful world.")
-------------------------------------------
Wasserman sounds to me like he's writing propaganda: vague, overblown statements with no citations. Can you impeach Dr Cohen's analysis?
Easily. Cohen says "essentially all of the radioactivity remained sealed..." "Essentially all" has no specific meaning. Such a sentence is designed to persuade the uniformed, while simultaneously keeping them uninformed. If you dislike "vague" statements with "no citations," you should recognize that this is certainly one such statement.
Wasserman's article is brief. It nonsensical to claim that brevity equates to propaganda. Do you want to know the specifics? Start with this article by Wasserman: http://www.counterpunch.org/wasserman03242009.html
It also contains a link to a 250-page book he wrote on the subject, which is available in its entirety online.
"Essentially all" coming from a physicist, unless you can impeach the person's credibility on other grounds, does have a specific meaning, namely that the amount differs from "all" by some amount too small to make a practical difference.
When untrained non-scientists dismiss the idea of climate change because they believe the lies put out by the self-interested, we sneer at their ignorance and gullibility. So why should we accept a similarly partisan dismissal from a similarly untrained person like Wasserman?
"Essentially" has no specific meaning, no matter who uses it. Don't you think trained scientists endorse the accuracy of toothpaste commercials that promise to "help" whiten your teeth? Such vague words are chosen for a purpose: to persuade. They should always be considered a red flag.
I've already linked you to longer reports by Wasserman--including a 250-page book with extensive citations--that address the issue of the amount of radiation that escaped from Three Mile Island in great depth.
If you or Cohen care to impeach the specific information Wasserman provides in those reports, please do so.
http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/np-risk.htm
Wind blades fell in school yard
Raasay children sent home after 50ft turbine collapsed
Published: 21/11/2009
Children at an island primary were sent home after a newly-installed wind turbine next to their school collapsed, it emerged yesterday.
Parents of youngsters at the 18-pupil Raasay Primary School were asked to collect their children following the incident on November 13.
The 50ft turbine will “remain out of commission” until an investigation has been carried out.
The 6KW machine was installed at the school earlier this month, but was soon the subject of complaints due to the noise it was making.
The turbine then collapsed, landing in the school’s playground, although no one was hurt.
A Highland Council spokesman confirmed that a meeting was held between representatives from the authority and school staff yesterday.
He said an independent appraisal of the turbine would now be carried out and that the blades would be removed within the next few days.
http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1492247
And your point would be... what?
I'm sorry, I should have made the implications clear: "green" power generation is also dangerous, and the more units there are (because individually they yield little) and the less they're monitored (because skilled maintenance is expensive) the more certain something is to go fatally wrong. The kids on Raasay were lucky. Which kids won't be?
As I mentioned in a earlier post in this thread, I think we badly need to arrive at a set of clear choices similar to the ones engineers use to set expectations about projects: "Good, fast, cheap. Pick any two".
There is no magic bullet for survivability, and so we have to choose between contradictory options. Exactly how many options and what they are remains to be determined. Dubet and I started to think about them upthread, and I'm sure we'd welcome additional input.
Actually, wind and solar cost much, much less than nuclear plants to maintain, energy for energy.
Nuclear plants have severe problems for repair, problems that would prevent their construction were government not to sharply limit corporate liability.
Leaving the obvious and unresolved possibility of catastrophic accident aside for the moment, let's look at the even more dangerous issues of daily use that so seldom even get acknowledged.
This much can be described simply; understood, it would cease the production of these plants:
In light water reactors, secondary fluid must be drawn by and through primary fluid in pipes. For proper heat transfer, the pipes must be metal. The metal rusts. The fluid is dumped into whatever water source the plant uses.
Repairs are impossible to complete productively because workers entering the area exceed lifetime radiation limits in about 45 minutes, on the average, despite quasi-legal jimmying of the radiation detection badges, despite the areas having often been previously washed down by robots and the resulting effluvia released outside the plant -- while it's shut down, of course, so there's no record.
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
Friends,
I humbly request that the uninitiated
read the last 2 paragraphs a couple of
times.
This took a while to get real for me.
b
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Actually, wind and solar cost much, much less than nuclear plants to maintain, energy for energy.
-----------------------------------
Do you have a good citation for that? It seems counterintuitive. For example, turbines have moving parts that are subjected to fairly constant, high stresses, that need routine lubrication, etc. The moving parts are far off the ground and must be serviced in situ potentially in all weathers, so that high-quality maintainers would qualify for specialist + danger + hardship money, etc.
------------------------------------
In light water reactors, secondary fluid must be drawn by and through primary fluid in pipes. For proper heat transfer, the pipes must be metal. The metal rusts. The fluid is dumped into whatever water source the plant uses.
Repairs are impossible to complete productively because workers entering the area exceed lifetime radiation limits in about 45 minutes, on the average,
------------------------------------
There seems to be a couple of assumptions being made here:
1) That pipes must be made of metal that corrodes rather than, e.g., an alu alloy.
2) That repair personnel must work without protective clothing and tools.
Those assumptions don't seem realistic. Can you comment?
Nuclear plants produce electricity by producing steam which spins... turbines. Windmills spin... turbines. Both have moving parts.
Wearing protective gear does not make your radiation exposure zero. Your assumption about not wearing protective clothing is entirely unfounded.
Nuclear plants can only operate at all because of the massive insurance subsidy provided by the Federal government under Price-Anderson. No such insurance subsidy is needed or provided for wind or solar. A wind accident might kill someone. A nuke accident might kill untold numbers. A solar "accident" - what would that be?
As to pipes, carbon steel has been the best pipe material but this may be changing:
http://www.powermag.com/o_and_m/HDPE-Replaces-Carbon-Steel-in-Safety-Related-Pipe-System_2264.html
"November 1, 2009
HDPE Replaces Carbon Steel in Safety-Related Pipe System
Jimmy Zhou and Frank Schaaf
Pages: 12
Corrosion of steel water pipes in the safety-related piping systems of aging U.S. nuclear power plants is fast becoming a safety concern and a significant operational cost, not to mention an indication of potential future liability for nuclear utilities currently constructing new plants or retrofitting existing sites. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, the physical maintenance of degraded steel water pipe systems, combined with the operational costs of shutting a plant down during repairs, is already costing some nuclear utilities up to $25 million per year.
The problem is particularly sensitive when the water pipe systems in question are safety-related, such as the essential service water (ESW) systems that stand ready to cool a reactor when needed. In these systems, water-cooled secondary heat exchangers are used to maintain public safety and power generation continuity. Lost revenue from a system shutdown, which is likely when an ESW system fails, can be more than $1 million per day for a utility due to the expense of purchasing electricity on the open market to replace what was being generated by the plant.
Carbon steel pipe is the incumbent medium for transporting water to heat exchangers in ESW systems, but alternatives are being explored and, in the case of Ameren’s Callaway Nuclear Power Plant in Fulton, Mo., alternatives are now in operation.
An Alternative to Carbon Steel
AmerenUE, a subsidiary of Ameren Corp., has pioneered the use of polyethylene (PE) as a new alternative to steel pipe ESW systems at its 1,200-MW Callaway plant. Polyethylene material does not corrode, rust, rot, pit, tuberculate, or support biological growth. It also has an outstanding field performance record for more than half a century in water piping systems. Taking advantage of material science advances in bimodal polyethylene resins and a collaborative effort with a resin supplier, a pipe manufacturer, a pipe fittings manufacturer, an engineering contractor, and a primary construction contractor, AmerenUE engineers and construction teams have successfully replaced the carbon steel ESW pipe system at Callaway with a new class of bimodal high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe (Figure 2)."
Okay, so nukes are broadly analogous to hydroelectric plants in using turbines, thus have moving parts. I think there might be significant differences in construction, though, since they don't have to be installed or operate, and possibly be serviced, 50-300 feet in the air on stilts. When they need maintenance, does it involve a crane coming to dismount them? What about blade replacement? How is routine maintenance done, do you know? The only photo I could find showed a bladeless turbine being hoisted up to the top of a pylon, which implies that some poor bugger had to go up after to bolt it all together and fit the blades.
As far as my assumption about clothing being "entirely unfounded", Bardamu stated that maintainers exhaust their lifetime allotment of exposure within 45 minutes. Unless 45 minutes respresents many maintenance events, which I doubt, that rapid an exhaustion would within a few years leave nobody to do the work. How could that be true? So I have to suppose, absent a citation, that the number refers to unshielded work, or disaster recovery not maintenance, or that the number is just plain wrong.
Whew!
Thank goodness it wasn't a nuclear plant!
Now that the nation is so hopelessly in debt, the elite has decided to take actions that make it worse, like developing obscenely expensive nuclear power. Of course, they have never been against creating debt as it benefits them and hurts the lower classes.
After TMI brought the expansion of nuclear energy to a screeching halt in 1979, we did not see a switch to renewables or to clean energy of any sort. What happened is we get almost all of our energy from coal.
In our corrupt world, you don't get to pick between wind, solar and nuclear. You get to pick between coal and nuclear.
It is coal that has brought us to the brink of catastrophic climate change. It is coal that causes mountain tops to be blown off, fish polluted with mercury, our water supply polluted with arsenic and air so foul that asthma is soaring and 30,000 people die every year from coal pollution.
So maybe Patrick Moore is not merely "hiring out to the industry" but has made a reasoned choice based on his beliefs that nuclear energy is far better for the planet.
In 2008, the largest source of new energy coming on line worldwide was renewables - primarily wind and solar. So we DO have a choice, a real choice, and we are inevitably moving toward renewables as the only legitimate long-term solution.
Your false choice - COAL, or NUKES - is a FALSE CHOICE.
2% is the amount of renewable energy currently utilized in the US if you don't count hydro.
It's progress but it is not enough to shut down coal plants.
Instead of shutting down existing plants, many new ones are being built.
The economic slowdown brought the number of new plants down substantially.
You can call it a false choice, but look at the reality.
No new nuclear power plants in 30 years, so we just burned more coal.
Almost all of the world's ecological and political ills are wrought by fossil fuels.
The greatest crisis we face today is not radioactive waste it is carbon.
Air and water pollution from fossil fuels also trumps nuclear power for devastating ability--not to mention all these wars we are waging for oil.
"No new nuclear power plants in 30 years, so we just burned more coal."
Again - FALSE CHOICE.
Here's some reality for you - WE DON'T NEED ALL THIS ENERGY.
Why does US energy use keep increasing every year? Less than 5% of world human population, but around 25% of world energy use. Who do we think we are?
We can cut way back on energy use without any loss of "quality of life".
This is one of the most pernicious lies in the whole climate disruption debate: it is simply accepted that the single unalterable truth is that we need ever-increasing amounts of energy year after year, and we must adjust whatever else we think about to this unalterable truth. Bullshit.
Even without eliminating any specific uses of energy, we can slash energy use by mandating and funding conservation measures to install insulation and windows in homes. We can mandate steady improvements in auto mileage efficiency. As our free public transit blogger keeps reminding us, we can fund free public transit. Not to mention the largest single profligate waste of energy in our arsenal, literally our arsenal, the Pentagon and the US wars around the world. There are plenty of proven straightforward options to slash energy use in the United States without hurting anyone.
Why accept the LIE and promote the LIE that our wasteful profligate energy abuse is not only acceptable, but must be increased forever into the endless future?
BULLSHIT.
We do NOT need more coal plants, and we do NOT need new nukes.
Your false choice is a FALSE CHOICE.
And my point still stands that the fastest-growing energy sector is renewables, and if their current percentage of total output in the US is 2% that only emphasizes the need to increase R&D and investment and installation of new facilities and infrastructure. Direct federal investment in renewables, by mandating that federal buildings and transportation switch to renewable energy, guarantees a market for producers and allows investment in new production facilities that drives down costs and creates innovation. Etc etc etc.
Get your mind out of its box.
According to DOE, renewable energy provided 7% of energy used in the U.S. in 2007, not 2%. That compared to 8% provided by nuclear water-boilers.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/energy_in_brief/renewable_energy.cfm
I'm sure 2009 numbers will tilt heavily towards renewables.
As you note, the largest renewable energy resource remains energy conservation, and we have only begun to tap that.
If you'd like to learn actual facts about nuclear power rather than streams of propaganda, Dr. Bernard Cohen (mentioned elsewhere here in the comments) has put an excellent book online here: tinyurl.com/lehuus .
If you'd like a look at the actual data from Germany to see just how successful their government-endorsed solar buildup has been, try reading this: tinyurl.com/yh3qpjl
How about the data from Denmark's 25 years of wind power development? tinyurl.com/yf6e3uj
Or for scads of data on all sorts of energy options, including advanced nuclear power systems that make Wasserman's objections obsolete, try tinyurl.com/mmll4s
Choose reality.
Visited two of your links. One is an ad for your book, and has no information about "advanced" nuclear systems.
At the other, on wind power, I found these nonsensical nuggets:
"What happens when it’s wintertime and the wind is howling, spinning those turbines like crazy?"
And,
"The reality is that wind has been supplying less than 10% of Denmark’s wind power ..."