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Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe
With the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe having arrived, and with the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex still unfolding and radioactivity continuing to spew from those plants some people are asking: can nuclear power be made safe?
The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.
This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power and urged that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”
The basic problem: radioactivity.
“I’ll be philosophical,” testified Rickover. “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life fish or anything.” This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”
“Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible,” he said. “Every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. “And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself,” Rickover stated.
This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.
The problem is radioactivity unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the “new, improved” nuclear plants being touted by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology. All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have been and continue to be--spewed from the Fukushima plants.
Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they’re produced in a nuclear plant to when they’re taken out as hotly radioactive “nuclear waste,” they must be isolated from life for thousands for some millions of years.
In the nuclear process, mildly radioactive uranium is taken from the ground and bombarded by neutrons and that part of the uranium which can split, is “fissile,” Uranium-235, is transformed into radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: There are hundreds of these “fission products.” The human body doesn’t know the difference between these lethal twins and safe and stable elements. Also produced are alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, all radioactive.
In addition, much of the larger part of uranium, Uranium-238, which cannot split, grabs on to neutrons and turns into Plutonium-239, the most radioactive substance known.
In this atom-splitting, too, heat is produced which is used to boil water. Nuclear power plants are simply the most dangerous way to boil water ever conceived.
Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity? It has far less to do with science than with politics and economics from the aftermath of the Manhattan Project to today During the World War II Manhattan Project, scientists working at laboratories secretly set up across the U.S. built atomic weapons. By 1945, it employed 600,000 people and billions of dollars were spent. Two bombs were dropped on Japan. And, with the war’s end, the Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and more nuclear weapons were built. But what else could be done with nuclear technology to perpetuate the nuclear undertaking?
Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see their jobs end; corporations which were Manhattan Project contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse, didn’t want to see their contracts ended. As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the war over there were problems of “job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy.”
Nuclear weapons don’t lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to keep the nuclear establishment going? Schemes advanced included using nuclear devices as substitutes for dynamite to blast huge holes in the ground including stringing 125 atomic devices across the isthmus of Panama and setting them off to create the “Panatomic Canal,” utilizing radioactivity to zap food so it could seemingly be stored for years; building nuclear-powered airplanes (this didn’t go far because of the weight of the lead shielding needed to protect the pilots) and using the heat built up by the nuclear reaction to boil water to produce electricity.
All along, the nuclear scientists such as Chu now attempted to minimize, indeed deny, the lethal danger of radioactivity and, like Nuclear Pinocchios, they pushed their technology.
Nuclear power plants all 443 on the earth today should be closed and no new ones built. As Rickover declared, nuclear reactors must be outlawed.
During the Bill Clinton campaign years ago, the slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” With nuclear power plants, “It’s the radioactivity” inherent in the process and deadly.
Instead we must fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies like solar, wind (now the fastest growing energy source and cheaper than nuclear) and geothermal and all the rest which, major studies have concluded, can provide all the energy the world needs energy without lethal radioactivity, energy we can live with.
39 Comments so far
Show AllIt could be done, it should be done, but it isn't being done. There are plans (I don't know how detailed) to construct huge solar panels in both the deserts of the Western U.S. and the Sahara, but right now it's all talk. No work is commencing, no budget has been figured out, I don't even know if there are engineering blueprints (do they still use blueprints?) yet.
Is it possible to get enough solar and wind devices up and running and connected to the grid before the next nuclear "incident"? Not without public leadership of the sort our current president and others in positions of high visibility have not yet shown any inclination to provide.
People better informed than me have differing views on whether wind and solar are possible on a civilizationally large scale soon enough. Lester Brown says they are, James Howard Kunstler says they're not. I wouldn't want to give odds, but if you're drowning and there's a life preserver that might be just a bit out of reach, do you try to reach it anyway or do you just say, "Oh, well, blub blub blub G'by."
"There are plans (I don't know how detailed) to construct huge solar panels in both the deserts of the Western U.S. and the Sahara, but right now it's all talk."
It's a nice solartopian technophile's dream.
The unfortunate reality of hydrocarbon/petrochemical fueled resource extraction and processing, coupled with the fact a massive manufacturing program will strip the world of the elements required for making the solar panels is a major stumbling block. Add the fact you have to have redundant power storage (batteries) for periods when the sun isn't shining, and reliable transmission lines and distribution.
I honestly don't mean to rain on the alt.energy parade. But the reality is that even in combination, alternative energy can't meet more than a fraction of the energy demand that hydrocarbons (oil / coal / natural gas) unfortunately can.
True. I even posted a long piece a month or so ago, from stuff I learned watching TV, about what's wrong with every proposed energy solution. The conundrum is that, while none of the alternative methods can supply more than a fraction of the energy that hydrocarbons can, hydrocarbons will all to soon also be unable to supply that energy. Few of the electricity producing alternative energies provide a replacement for gasoline (ethanol from plants and vegetable oil used for diesel are the few exceptions) and there is probably not enough time to replace all the cars in the world with electric ones.
But maybe I'm getting old and foolish, but I'm still inclined to let the technophile dreamers have a shot at coming up with something. Otherwise . . .
"... but I'm still inclined to let the technophile dreamers have a shot at coming up with something. Otherwise . . ."
Otherwise, we go back to smallholdings, fiefdoms, and muscle power, with appropriate technology, few consumer goods, and a shortened lifespan
The majority of the (Third) world already/still lives like that. We in Western Technological Civilization are behind the curve on this.
There are several good authors who have done far more research than I, who all come to the same inescapable conclusion: That we can't invent our way out of this. No amount of 'magical thinking' will prevent our decline to a lower energy state. So we better get used to doing it now, instead of when the crisis arrives.
But there is some serious argument (Fukushima!... Excuse me. Sorry. It must be that 'Nuclear Flu' that's going around...) that the crisis just smashed it's way into our homes...
I'm pretty sure "we" can, and will, invent our way out of this. The world this will result in will be a form of totally controled, centralised, bureaucratic or dictatorial technocracy, where everything on the planet will be technologically controlled, or so polluted that it's beyond human use, and not a square meter will be left for nature. We can do it. We can kill everything and turn an organism into a machine and cover the earth with smoke and gears.
Happily, the resource crunch will kill off your dystopian nightmare.
Unhappily, there is 4% of the world doing it's damnedest to try and make it come true.
"We go back to smallholdings, fiefdoms, and muscle power, with appropriate technology, few consumer goods, and a shortened lifespan."
The few who survive will live this way. Seven billion people cannot transition to living this way. It's true that much of the third world lives like this, and when things start to go bad (who knows when that will be) it's kind of ironic that the remote self-feeding villagers will be better equipped to survive than those whose life support system is part of the high tech infrastructure we call "civilization." That's us.
So, despite my posting handle, I will not give up hope completely even though there's so little to base it on. I still think there must be a way out of this mess.
Alternate energy already does account for a substantial amount of the energy produced in the US. The US could have a higher standard of living than it does on something like half its energy: most of Europe already does, and Cuba is already better in some respects.
Nuclear power is impractical, even financially. No nuclear plant was every constructed in the US of A without massive government subsidy; likely none ever will be. Among the subsidies, corporations and shareholders are excused in advance from most of the potential damage caused by their practices. As another subsidy, the US Federal government contracted to deal with waste disposal and maintenance, a process that will go on for many thousands of years--hopefully. These plants are only regarded as feasible by corporations because the great majority of their costs can be externalized to taxpayers.
The reality is that reasonable energy demands could be met by alternative sources, but that these will require implementation--not huge solar panels in Texas, which would lose some 20% of their produce as it circles the grid, just as do nuclear plants, but small and moderate solar, wind, and water generation facilities distributed across the states and elsewhere.
What they will not support is GE and Westinghouse, in their current forms.
Bardamu, it will require a combination of distant centralized and in situ energy.
It will be a mix and match scenario, everywhere in the world can use Ground Pump temperature moderation, and a vast portion of the world may use solar, wind and/or tidal in situ. Of course if we have been able operate with inefficient, antiquated grids we can easily operate with efficient Smart Green Grids.
Battery exchange sations are already in use in the USA for trading depleted batteries of the Leaf and Focus for fully charged batteries.
The nay sayers tend to be a decade or two behind in knowledge of today's technology,research and organization, many of the roadblocks the nay sayers cling to are already overcome or on the verge of being dissolved.
Huge arrays and wind farms are being built every day, the military is among the most energetic builders of renewable power.
The corporations have taught the nay sayers that they have no other choice than deadly corporate monoply fossils and nukes.
WRONG!
It depends on which alternative energy technology you're considering. The potential amount of energy occurring as residual solar (CAPE in the atmosphere, warmed sea water or fresh water heated with solar thermal panels) is thousands of times the amount of chemical and nuclear energy released in current man-made devices. it is possible to convert MORE THAN 10% of it to electricity in an appropriate and relatively inexpensive tower, with an investment per MW of capacity in the order of a gas-fired electrical plant, with less than 10% of its operating cost and--NO FRACKING REQUIRED!
See http://vortexengine.ca (and read the entire home page)
Also follow link to an article in the latest issue of Mechanical Engineering Magazine.
The peak availability of this energy is during the afternoon and early evening before midnight, when it's most needed.
Furthermore, it is well distributed and amenable to underground thermal storage in the form of warm water.
Of course, the electrical power industry won't invest in it because they're in the tank with KING CONG (Coal, Oil, Nuclear, Gas).
It's up to the PEOPLE to develop this technology. Unfortunately, most would rather just attend a protest meeting or demonstration and consider that they've done all they can.
They're being badly misled.
I want them to take human life more seriously. There are 442 nuclear power plants in the world today and the majority are aging. There will be leaks, power outages, human errors, design flaws. The nuclear industry has no solutions to the radioactive waste problem. How many more life-crippling nuclear disasters will it take before the world gets rid of this outdated, dangerous and unnecessary technology?
"“I’ll be philosophical,” testified Rickover. “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life fish or anything.” This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”
“Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible,” he said. “Every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. “And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself,” Rickover stated."
I don't really like this kind of argument. It's way too superficial, maybe it can convince some people, but it's just not a good argument at all, in any way. I think he's talking about the formation of the ozone layer, but the analogy or parallel is not convincing at all. These kinds of arguments are imo what nuclear supporters like to argue with. All this says is that life doesn't really like radiation, but it doesn't explain why the risks taken aren't worth it. The main reason for that, imo, is not just that radiation is bad, but that the effects of our mistakes are basically permanent.
First, even in normal operation, the orders of magnitude differences of the time spans of energy use and pollution consequences (basically, risk/reward in terms of time: reward (energy) lasts for a few years or decades, risks of eg. storage of waste last orders of magnitude more time). Second, the effects of major accidents are basically permanent, and lead to losing valuable, very limited resources (land or water) and to a general very long term increase in health risks, and not only locally. Both points are basically about intergenerational exploitation: it will be someone else paying for our consumption and mistakes in the future, so the majority of the interested parties simply can't take part in the discussion. I mean, if it was us who both took the risks and the reward, there could be an argument for nuclear power. As it is, just the permanence of the effects of our mistakes should be a limit.
As for a clean energy economy...whatever. I don't think it's possible to change without a basic change in society and economics. Solar and wind are simply not suitable for the way the economy works now, it simply has to be a type of energy source that doesn't depend on external factors, so it's either fossil, fission or fusion. I'm looking forward to the new and probably even more extreme dangers fusion power may create if it's ever usable.
In what sense does mining oil, gas, coal, or radioactive minerals in other parts of the globe not constitute an "external factor"? What a strange argument to make after generations of external wars over just such factors!
To what are we calling the Sun and the wind external?
I will agree insofar as to say that I basic change in economics is clearly called for and that this does have something to do with the business of nuclear power. Nukes do indeed lend themselves to massive centralized organizations, largely opaque to their consumers and workers.
But I don't see that it is worth being irradiated just to be abused by large-scale state and corporate power as per the current economic model.
"In what sense does mining oil, gas, coal, or radioactive minerals in other parts of the globe not constitute an "external factor"? What a strange argument to make after generations of external wars over just such factors!"
In the sense that you can store and stockpile them and use them when needed, regardless of factors like weather. It's not a strange argument at all, maybe I used the wrong word, sorry about that, but the difference between solar and fossil/fission/fusion is pretty clear. This particular issue is not about centralisation, it's more about reliability and controllability: fossils are there when you want them, you can ramp up their use etc. Afaik this is extremely difficult with solar etc, because storing electricity is not that easy. The entire structure of the economy needs to change to take this into account imo.
I'm not arguing against anything you're saying, it's just a fact (or maybe it isn't if I'm wrong and storing electricity is cheap and easy) with a pretty important consequence imo.
Mostly a good article, but it's a shame that the author said, right in the middle of it, that "Plutonium-239 [is] the most radioactive substance known." Outrageous, untrue claims do not help the cause.
Actually, 239Pu is one of the least radioactive substances. As a rule of thumb, the longer the half-life, the less radioactive a substance is. 239Pu is more radioactive (shorter half life) than 238U, but with a half-life of 24,000 years, its radioactivity still is low enough that nuclear workers routinely hold ingots of pure plutonium in their gloved hands. That's a long way from the kind of radioactivity that lurks inside the Fukushima reactor buildings where workers were burned by brief contact with contaminated water, and where many spaces are so radioactive that they still dare not enter.
Plutonium is dangerous because of what happens when it gets inside our bodies. It is released from a reactor (or from other accidents) in the form of smoke, and just one microscopic particle of plutonium smoke, lodged in your lung, has the potential to give you lung cancer. Plutonium actually works its way inside of our cells where it emits alpha particles. The experts will tell you that an alpha particle can not penetrate even a single sheet of writing paper, and that is true, but they do not often tell you what happens when an alpha particle is released inside a living cell. It's like somebody heaving a bowling ball inside a china shop. Sometimes the cell can repair the damage, sometimes the cell dies, and every once in a while, the cell turns cancerous.
Otherwise, Mr. Grossman's article is spot-on. The experts are trying to sell us a new generation of "safe" nuclear reactors, but talking about the safety of the reactors is a joke when the amount of radioactivity in all of the "spent" fuel in the world is ten times more (and growing) than what's in the reactors themselves.
I am convinced the real argument to keep these plants running is the shear cost of dismantling them and disposing of the spent fuel. If left to the utilities these plants will run until every penny of profit is squeezed. When public pressure finally forces them to shut down they will be looking for public bailouts to cover decommissioning .
You might be onto something there. I think it's just the old story of the boy who grabbed onto the tail of a tiger; let go and you're food.
deleted ..duplicate.
Decommission reactors? That's the taxpayer's responsibility, NO? What are you going to do with all that radioactive waste now?
~~~~~
Uranium-235, is transformed into radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature:-- I wouldn't even call natural Uranium safe. Think of the miners that have died of cancer.
Thank you for this information! It's hard for me to imagine that most of us aren't at least aware enough to have realized this insanity for some time...maybe not the details, but certainly the insanity of believing nuclear energy is safe.
Perhaps, that inability to see what is clearly right before our eyes stems from that weird sense of immortality humans have. That certain knowledge that, "That will never happen to me!" cockiness that is especially powerful when we are young. Kind of like any woman, even one using contraception, believes she could never be one of those 'accidental pregnancy' statistics. Or even that pumped up, extreme-sports lover who feels 'invigorated' by an activity that would render most of us gibbering idiots with wet pants.
It might be that sense of immortality, however ungrounded, that makes us able to thrive...or even survive, at all.
However, I may not know that many more details about atom-splitting or the best available methods for boiling water than the next person, but I have not needed those details to grasp the folly of splitting said atom...AND the magnitude of the decision to keep repeating that action.
It would seem that the magnitude ranges from unimaginable to horrifyingly imaginable.
That there are 443 nuclear power plants rendering the planet, again, unfit for life...all to boil water is fascinating, in a way. To have come up with that use...that excuse to cloak the continuation of the nuclear weapons industry, for huge profits, and political/military posturing is, at the very least unbelievable. That it could have, for a while anyway...been EASILY sold as a safe, clean alternative to fossil fuel burning to us users and lovers of electricity makes me almost laugh. Now that's a bedtime story for our grandkids!
Now, with the unavoidable truths of what happens when these 'water boilers' malfunction, the emerging broader understanding of the 'manufactured' safety of nuclear energy or the fallacy of its 'peaceful' uses, the truth about what 'spent' really means...it would seem a good time to DEMAND the immediate closing of all plants. Hard for me to grasp that those in high places, even if few in number, who know and agree that we are heading down a seriously short path aren't screaming, demanding the closings themselves!
And, even if they don't have a shred of compassion for or interest in other life forms, one would think they'd be being a little more careful about protecting their own asses and living space. Face it, all that concentration of wealth and power won't assure them a safe place to spend or wield. And it wouldn't seem to be much of a future hunkered down for the next several hundred or thousands of years in those underground cities that I imagine they may have already built for themselves.
Maybe all of my years as a sci-fi fan (not the graphic, mindless blow-em-up kind), lover of a thought-provoking journeys into possibilities and speculations about who or what we may become or what we may encounter beyond our own galactic doorstep is what allows me to make jokes. Maybe I've seen it coming for longer than most and I'm old enough to not feel terribly surprised or insulted. I've happily consumed and left lights on...water running, produced heaps of waste, driven almost everywhere I go (not so much by choice anymore), and find it as incomprehensible as the next person just how I will manage without electricity at the flip of a switch and personal ground transportation. My life, simple as it may seem, would abruptly change...in ways I am not at all ready for. I would eventually adapt, though. That is what I've been doing all along, anyway...that and kicking myself, occasionally.
Of course, maybe not everyone will miss the time when the sun was good for us and water was naturally pure.
FED UP: Thank you for the thought-provoking post. I identify with much of it.
Rickovers remark abourt the earth not being inhabitable 2 BY ago because of radioactivity is patently untrue! I've never heard a single geologist even propose such a hypothesis.
The earth was teeming with an explosion of unicellular prokariotic life 2 billion years ago that formed colonial structures called stromatolites. It was not inhabitable by modern life forms becasue the atmosphere didn't have any oxygen. But, that was something that was rapidly changing at 2 BY ago, as eukarotic cyanobacteria had evolved, and through photosynthesis, were creating an oygen-rich atmosphere. This was a catastrophe for all the organisms that depended on the atmosphere NOT having oxygen.
Ther were other challenges to life forms - asteroid bombardment, then a hypothesized deep snowball-earth ice age (due to those cynobacteria taking a lot of CO2 out of the atmosphere - in conjunction with a cooler sun). And, it is true, that there was a lot more U235, in natural uranum in those days, which allowed, in rare instances, natural light-water nuclear reactors in porous uranium bearing geologic formations - but the effect on life outside the immediate area of the natural reactor was insignificant.
Don't believe everything you read. Grossman, and several other nuclear opponents give the most fanatical global-warming denialists some good competetion for scientific ignorance.
Well he didn't say radioactivity but cosmic radiation and I guess what he meant was the formation of the ozone layer. There might even be some fraction of truth in what he wrote, at least I could imagine - although/because I am no scientist - that more complex organisms couldn't have formed without the protection of the ozone layer, but whether or not this speculation is true, it's completely irrelevant to the question. This is imo the worst kind of argument to make because it's at best half-factual and not really rational, so anyone with some actual scientific knowledge (or access to Wikipedia) will be able to find faults with it and show that the author is a bit clueless about science and will be discredited totally, along with the entire point of view.
True, he mentioned only cosmic radiation.
But this is still incorrect. It is the ordinary mass of the thick atmosphere (plus additional help from the earth's magnetic field) that keep cosmic radiation and solar flare radiation at low levels at the earths surface, and the atmosphere was only thicker in the Proterozoic eon.
It is certainly, for me, not a matter of believing everything I read or hear (if much of it at all!)...it is, however, a matter of believing ones eyes and other sensory organs...our bodies, in general.
For one not to see the link between radiation, with the plethora of other man-made toxins, all swirling around us...and the abundance of 'unexplainable' cancers, ailments and malfunctions of an otherwise amazingly well-functioning biological system would seem unlikely for such superior creatures as humans.
To believe it could not get out of hand enough to kill us AND ruin the planet is naive.
It goes back to our distorted sense of immortality...and that superiority myth.
I think it's very often what's often called "laziness", accepting something as true because it's authoritative (eg. it is or it appears to be scientific) and comfortable (no need for action). There are lots of issues like this, from advertising and media violence aimed at kids to overuse of antibiotics, to GMO based agriculture, industrialised education and training etc etc. I'm not saying that all of the choices represented by these technologies are bad, but that their consequences, despite being incredibly important in the long term, are not analysed and debated in public, because it's just way more comfortable not to even want to look at these issues in detail and just accept "scientific" opinion (usually the side of an argument that's better for business, regardless of reality).
Tangent:
It's just the way engineers think: we like to create machine stuff but don't give a shit about how it's used. The amorality of science/engineering argument is always used only to escape responsibility. Average citizens are mostly excluded from this debate, and the primary mechanism of exclusion is the ideology of the engineer imo and the structure of the profession.
Engineering is reshaped just like all knowledge-based work. While lower level engineering tasks are formalised into software (so that someone with much less training can do the same work as an engineer if they couple themselves to a specific set/brand of products and the know-how that goes with it), higher level tasks, especially knowledge production is centralised into research centres where the knowledge produced becomes privately owned and not shared. On one end, you have a large pressure to deskill workers and take away all of their authority over their work; on the other, through planned innovation and IPR laws, you have a better control over the higher end of knowledge production: all of this means that individual knowledge and decision making power is reshaped so that it cannot even exist, doesn't even make sense, outside the current corporate framework. You're a practical specialist if you have knowledge of a set of particular products and technologies produced by a particular corporation. Outside this system of products and productised and product-bound knowledge, you as a specialist have no value: you cannot solve "arbitrary" problems, just ones that are posed in terms of buying and integrating of the products you know. Fewer and fewer "real engineers" are needed, and more and more workers who do work that only engineers used to be able to do.
Oh, but this is good and democratising one might say, because you don't depend on personal knowledge any more. Well, no, you depend not on personal knowledge but on knowledge "owned" by the market that you will have to pay for through your nose, and a single engineer, or even a "guild" or any professional association of engineers would have nowhere near the power over this knowledge comparable to corporations at this time.
This is one of the reason that "knowledge economies" are bullshit. The trend is the opposite to what's usually claimed: knowledge is centralised and the trend is to decrease the number of people with deep specialist knowledge and increase the number of people who are trained in the use of a particular type of (expensive labour saving) product or technology. The work of these people is inevitably worth less than of engineers they replace, and in turn they also become very easy to replace. This work is also very much open to global competition. With the centralisation of knowledge production and the destruction of even the possibility of competitive systems of knowledge production and use, the debate over science, technology, their social role and their development directions will be even more obscured.
Please help Vermont in its fight to close Vermont Yankee when its planned expiration date arrives in 2012. In a contract with Entergy, the Louisiana based corporation, it was agreed between the state and the company, that the state's permit would be required in order for the plant to extend its operation.
The legislature voted against honoring their request for extended operation; but now Entergy is suing, claiming that the Federal agency which has extended their license, is the only permit that they need, therefore, they will not close the plant as scheduled.
The plant has a history of malfunctions, and the company has been misleading about piping issues which caused radiation leaks into groundwater and into the Connecticut River. The plant is the same as the Fukushima plants, but has many times more stored nuclear fuel in it than the Japanese reactors. If the plant were to fail due to any number of causes, ranging from an unusually high rainfall event (many occurring around the world right now), or a reactivation of the fault line along the Connecticut River, then much of New England and even the Long Island Sound would be hopelessly contaminated for eons. There is nothing that can justify this sort of consequence. No profit amount is worth betting all the farm on. Join with Vermont in requiring the courts to close Yankee in 2012 per the contract with the state.
Looks like the cleanup fund had a nuclear meltdown. No wonder they want to keep this plant going.. Entergy gets to forgo making contributions..
http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/84516/
siouxrose...
You're welcome...and thanks always for your thoughts and ways of articulating them. You are one of my favorite voices here.
FED UP: Thank you very much for the lovely compliment! Although I sprinkle esoteric perspectives into a fraction of my posts, some people find this subject matter eerily threatening. It's good to know others find it of interest.
As for the "fed up" aspect, I often think of Norman Beale and how the film "Network" captured the evils of our era 30 years before they hit full throttle.
"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore! Now everyone, I want you to open up your windows, and say it with me... "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" (Indeed!)
Fox "News" would probably even approve of the Norman Beale grand finale...
Thank you Atomsk...
I appreciated your TANGENT a lot. While I spent most of my regular work years somewhere between engineer and floor-sweeper, over a thirty-year span I became more and more aware of exactly what you speak of.
Being a woman and choosing, in my younger days, to work in traditionally male-dominated fields...not because of some feminist stand, but because techie things were what I liked and was good at...was already challenge enough, but the decline in the importance given, value placed on, and jobs available for skilled technicians over the years has been pretty remarkable.
My skill sets have always been very job-specific...imparted to me by my employer...usually as on-the-job training. Also by choice, I worked mostly for small companies. While they were fraught with their own unique sets of operational/employee/management/safety/quality issues, each employee (even if highly specialized) usually had a broad knowledge of the product or process details. It was often necessary that we knew how to do each others job...there was less wiggle room if somebody was out sick or on vacation...and high-tech machines and robots that could do our jobs weren't anything more than interesting topics of conversation.
Corporations? How or why they have evolved into the lifeless, profit-driven bottom-feeders that they are is being well-debated. And becoming aware of the concentration of knowledge as well as money should raise a louder-than-usual cry of, "Foul!!", but answering those questions may seem less relevant as we begin to 'get' the answer to the more pressing question...
Can we (even if it becomes widely desired) close and decommission all of the nuclear reactors, weapons and emitters of radioactivity...then safely maintain all of the unused and 'spent' fuel storage sites...basically forever?
Of the many follies that humanity has foisted upon itself, nukes, are without a doubt, one of the worst ever (right up there with religious wars). If future generations are lucky enough to avoid the radioactive time bomb the sociopaths who foisted this technology upon this planet laid, then we will be seen with the same sort of scorn that this time does in regards to the African slave trade.
Chernobyl: distorted reality, and unanswered questions
Blogpost by Iris Cheng - April 19, 2011
Greenpeace
"We have just returned after completing an important mission in Ukraine – taking around 70 journalists from 18 countries with us to Chernobyl, nearly 25 years after the nuclear catastrophe. It was one of the largest media trips Greenpeace has organized. These seasoned journalists asked critical and insightful questions, none of them easily moved. But many of them were deeply disturbed by what they saw and heard – often by the mundane details that were mentioned matter-of-factly by the interviewees...."
Includes two incredibly sad and unforgettable videos.
This gives all the reason needed to stop nuclear power NOW.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/chernobyl-distorted-reality-and-unanswered-qu/blog/34331
Never make a mess you cannot clean up yourself.... We can have nuclear just as soon as we know how to mine, get rid of the waste and clean up a spill..
The radioactive waste will need to be confined away from all life for 250K yrs. wow can I have that Gov't contract? That's how Corps. view the issue , just another profit center to be exploited maybe even the ultimate one! These are dangerously insane humans and its they're brains that need to be isolated from the rest of us semi-sane people. Nuclear energy is a crime against the planet and I for one don't for a second believe the rest of the Cosmos doesn't know it. It's no accident our species is confined to this planet, separated from the rest of Universal civilized order . The insane usually are and they're also watched closely.
Nukes will be safe when pigs fly
Some people only learn the hard way. Others never.
My intro to nuke power was in March 1979 as a student engineer visiting a ComEd nuke plant under construction. It was the week after the release of the movie 'The China Syndrome'- which the lead project manager / 'engineer' there declared as 'Preposterous- Something like that couldn't happen in a million yrs' - as he tried to wow us w a bunch of tech terminology & stats. Less than 2 weeks later 3Mile Island melted-down. 7 yrs later most of Europe was irradiated [40% of which still has significant radioactivity] when Chernobyl blew-up- which is just a few miles north of Kiev & is on a lake that's connected to a river which flows past Kiev- emptying into the Black Sea. 25yrs later its still dangerous for people to live any-where near there & 80% of children born in Belarus since 1986 are unhealthy.
Setting nuke industry salesmen / politicians like Obama [who ironically stated a yr ago {as he OKed deep-sea drilling} that 'Major blowouts & spills don't happen any more due to current technology' - less than a month later BP flooded much of the Gulf w oil - which they now claim just magically 'disappeared' as they used toxic chems to sink it below the surface {thus we went from 'Drill Baby Drill' to 'Spill Baby Spill'] to the side- I'll focus on so-called 'green environmentalists' who are hyping [fission] nuke power as a so-called 'green' solution to climate-change- George Monbiot in particular. Monbiot in a recent debate on DemocracyNow! claimed that even in the wake of Fukushima- [fission] nuke reactors [fusion reactors- especially cold {but even hot} fusion are theoretically much safer as they significantly address the 3 main dangers of fission reactors IE: melt-down & radioactivity release {ala Chernobyl / Fukushima}, nuke weapons proliferation, & highly radioactive waste lasting eons] as the way forward- due to climate change. He then repeated the standard nuke industry line [lie] that 'No one died at 3Mile Island' but even more incredibly 'Only 50 people have been shown to have died from Chernobyl'.. He totally dissed the recent Russian study that 1,000,000 & counting have died from Chernobyl- which may sound a bit high- but even the IAEA's low ball estimates says at least 4000- which may reach 10000. And reliable info says that 60,000 - 100,000+ 'liquidators' have died since 1986 w 170,000+ disabled - EXCLUDING the General Population! Listening to 'greens' like Monbiot you'd think that exposure to CO2 [a naturally occurring gas associated w life itself], is more dangerous than exposure to highly radioactive / toxic DU, U235, Pu239{so dangerous that God in his infinite wisdom didn't even put it here on Earth- its only produced in nuclear reactors in combo w U238- & is the preferred material for thermo-nuclear weapons {Thus Obama saying he's against nuclear proliferation while hawking fission nuke power- is double-talk], Cesium, Iodine, etc!!! Plus uranium [like nearly all types of] mining is a very dirty biz, just ask indigenous folks in Niger, Australia, SW tribal areas in the US, etc- whose lands are polluted by mounds of radioactive residue from uranium mining.
Many dismiss solar & wind as too costly to integrate into the infrastructure. There's several problems w that view- first there are other forms of clean energy besides solar & wind IE: tidal, bio-gas, geothermal, highly efficient catalyst driven hydrolysis, etc. IE: A prototype of a system called Salter's Duck converted tidal power to mechanical power at up to 90% efficiency & changed that to electrical power at up 90% efficiency [total efficiency- 80%]. Even if in practice that falls to 1/2 the max [IE: 40-45% efficiency] that's on par w hi-efficiency diesel engines! But even though the prototype was tested in the 1980s- this technology has been ignored & suppressed [I wonder why]. Bio-gas [which I have some practical knowledge of] addresses 3 main issues - producing both methane [the cleanest burning hydro-carbon] & organic fertilizer [petro-chem fertilizer & pesticides are ultimately destructive, toxic & are made from oil], as well as organic waste processing. But most green energy discourse focuses only on solar & wind [usually in context of the grid] & perhaps bio-fuels. The problem w bio-fuels, as they are currently being rolled-out, is that they incentivize using food crops & fertile lands [even clear-cutting old growth rain-forests- a very counter-productive activity] to fuel affluent white folks' cars in the US & EU [allowing them to feel good about lowering their so-called 'carbon-footprint']- rather than feeding hungry folks in Africa & the so-called 3rd World. For me this is a non-starter & better approaches to bio-fuel production are needed. Returning to the costs of solar & wind vs oil, coal, gas, & ESPECIALLY Nuclear- the later are all subsidized [all nuke are plants subsidized &/or run by Gov'ts - BAR NONE]- & if you don't account for this you can't make a fair comparison. Further I remember the color TV, VCR, electronic calculator, PC, CD burner, etc were all very expensive when first marketed- but within a few yrs all of their prices fell drastically even as their performance & reliability improved. Plus most people talk in terms of complex solar-arrays & wind-farms [IE: relative to the grid & meter] BUT- the best approach for wind & solar [& even bio-gas digesters] may-be to scale down to the individual home, neighborhood, & community size- leading to greater independence from the power structure. And how about using solar water-heaters & ovens for cooking when & where feasible.
Last but not least we need greater efficiency & a less wasteful / polluting & more cooperative life-style. This includes not just more efficient / less polluting cars, but even moving away from a family of 4 - 5 owning 4 - 5 cars instead of 1 - 2; Detroit rolling-out new [only cosmetically so] model cars every yr - instead of every 5 - 10yrs or even every 10 - 20yrs; & increasing gas mileage to say +40-50mpg & up. Or urban areas incentivizing public over private transport [Note: Detroit & the Oil Corps rolled-out a plan to curtail public transport across the US back in the 1930s, 40s, 50s - especially targeting electric buses & trolleys]. And also more energy efficient homes, buildings, factories, etc. We are even going to have to look at our diet- the SAD meat-centered diet is a BAD diet- both from a personal health stand-point & from negative environmental impacts. This includes where & how food is grown, stored & transported. Finally western consumer society has incentivized being wastefully self-centered- so we're going to have to change our wasteful [in the name of convenience] mind-set & life-style.