It's unreasonable to say that nuclear is safest, when obviously it is not even safe period. In fact, I'd argue it is the most dangerous to our national security and public health. Anything that involves a proven carcinogen isn't safe. (Note: I said that your idea is unreasonable and not that you are unreasonable. Please attack ideas, not people. We're all nerds here -- there is no reason to resort to name calling.:)
I'm not going to argue with you whether coal or nuclear is more dangerous. It's arbitrary, because they both are dirty and they both are a threat to public health.
It is completely false to say that there are not radioactive emissions from nuclear plants during operation. It doesn't take an accident -- nuclear reactors routinely emit radioisotopes to the atmosphere and they are permitted to do so by law. The nuclear industry files their own paperwork on how much radiation they are emitting to the atmosphere and to the water effluent -- the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't monitor it. Just because you can't see, smell or detect it with any human senses, the pollution from nuclear power plants is still there.
The nuclear industry is also responsible for the pollution from the uranium fuel cycle. Before fuel rods are loaded into a nuclear reactor they have to be mined, milled, enriched, pelleted, and loaded into zirconium fuel rods. There are huge piles of unprotected U-238 just sitting out on the ground venting radon gas to the atmosphere. In 2002, the Paducah uranium enrichment plant in Kentucky and the Piketon uranium enrichment plant in Ohio emitted 91% of the nation's reported CFC-114 emissions, a potent greenhouse gas and an ozone depleter. As a greenhouse gas, CFC-114 is 9,800 times more potent than C02.
"Sorry to burst your bubble, but the fact remains there is no 100% safe way of generating power." Please don't be so cynical -- there are safe and clean ways to manage our energy policy. Our only options available to us aren't natural gas, coal, oil, garbage incineration and nuclear power. Half of our federal budget is spent on the military (~$935 billion/year). If half of that were spent on clean energy research tremendous technological breakthroughs would be made. A large part of the problem with solar and wind is that it isn't being mass produced. Mass production would significantly bring the costs down.
The nuclear industry has been given its chance and it has failed miserably. They promised energy that would be safe, clean, and too cheap to meter. It is perfectly logical to say that nuclear power is not safe or clean, and it happens to be one of the most expensive methods of electrical generation available. The federal subsidies should be cut from the nuclear power industry and they should be reinvested in clean energy initiatives. We're not in the cold war anymore.
"Many studies show that particulate emission from burning carbon containing fuels is a major risk for developing vascular health problems, just as much as smoking is. Vascular diseases are the leading cause of death in the Western world today." I don't doubt it and I'm certainly not arguing that coal is clean. (That would be like saying that nuclear is clean.) I'm a runner and I get sick from running where I live, because the air quality is so bad. Nuclear won't solve the problem though -- it'll give me cancer just the same as coal.
Yes, it is speculative to say that hundreds of thousands died from cancer caused by Chernobyl. I can't prove it, but you can't prove it wrong either. It would be just as speculative to say that those cancer deaths were caused by coal. We don't have the technology to track pollutants from the source to their victim. I wish we could, because then we could hold the corporate polluters responsible
Bioremediation as a decontamination method has its limitations. Plants obey the laws of physics and can't destroy matter. The radioisotopes absorbed by the plants from the contaminated environment aren't destroyed. The plants have to be harvested and treated as nuclear waste. That brings us full circle, because there is no good solution to the problem of radioactive waste.
If the plants are incinerated, then the radioisotopes are released to the atmosphere. If they are buried they contaminate the groundwater.
A problem that I often see in this debate is that the physicists don't know their biology and the biologists don't know their physics. I don't think you have a very accurate understanding the biological effects of radiation. (To be fair, my understanding of physics could be better -- and I'm working on it.:) Biology doesn't lie either and to say that only 31 people died from the Chernobyl accident is unscientific nonsense. Yes, 31 died of acute radiation exposure. Hundreds of thousands globally have also died of cancer from the radioactive fallout of the accident. Radiation is a proven carcinogen and that can't be said about many other types of pollutants.
I agree with you that radon gas is very dangerous and the nuclear proponents do like putting all of the blame on coal plants. The nuclear industry is a contributer to radon gas releases, however. Radon gas is also released from the dirty mining and processing of uranium into fuel rods. Strontium-90 is also very dangerous and it is released from the actual nuclear reactors. That's not hype--that's scientific fact.
"And that's the worst real life actual event for nuclear energy. An event that is physically impossible in American reactor design." You're right, the accident that happened at Chernobyl couldn't happen here, because our reactor design is different. However, it is possible that radioactive release on the scale of Chernobyl could happen in the United States. The engineers of the Titanic said it was unsinkable--it sunk. The engineers of nuclear reactors say that the containment buildings are unbreachable. It's arrogance to say that our nuclear reactors are free of human error.
"Once you get past the hype, you get enlightened." There was a time when I was pro-nuclear too. That was before I did my homework and cut through all of the nuclear industry's hype.
Mods: With all due respect, this thread isn't flamebait. If it were flamebait, I would be engaging in personal attacks on my opponents. I haven't personally attacked anyone that has entered into the debate. If anyone's post is flaimbait, it is Shadowlore's who has slandered me as a lunatic, scaremonger (ad hominem alert!). Please act accordingly.
You are right that Pu-240 (along with a combination of many other fission byproducts) is produced and it isn't fissionable. However, the produced Pu-239 can still be used to build nuclear weapons. Where do you think the U.S. military got the plutonium for the bomb they dropped on Nagasaki?
I do want to make one correction from my previous post. Breeder reactors can't explode like an atomic bomb, but they can go critical if the liquid sodium coolant is cut off. There would be a non-atomic explosion, which would blow the fuel apart and possibly badly contaminate the environment if the containment building were breached.
The burden of weight shouldn't be on me to come up with solutions to nuclear waste -- it should be on the nuclear industry, who has promised solutions to nuclear waste. The solution to nuclear waste shouldn't be financed with taxpayer dollars either, but it is. The best solution available right now is not making more waste. By creating more waste, the nuclear industry is only digging themselves into a deeper hole. I know you probably aren't going to like that answer, but all of the proposed solutions to nuclear waste have serious problems even with the large amount of taxpayer dollars that have gone into researching it.
That's right -- they are designing Yucca Mountain to hold 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste (Source: Congress -- search for 77,000 within the page). Yucca Mountain will likely be full to capacity by the time they open it, if it ever even opens (God forbid). Right now the project is dead, because congress didn't give it the funding they needed and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently ruled that it is illegal for the EPA to set the waste storage time period arbitrarily at 10,000 years when it needs to be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years at a minimum. I've heard that Wisconsin may be the next target for the nation's second nuclear waste dump (look out Wisconsin!).
You obviously either didn't read my post about alternative energy or didn't read it very thoroughly [read it here]. Most of your arguments on alternative energy sources are pessimistic, outdated and incorrect. Geothermal can be used in most places in the United States, because the temperature below the crust stays at a steady 55 Fahrenheit year round. You pump water through pipes into wells in the ground to cool or heat it and then circulate it back up to your house. I don't understand the heating/cooling engineering beyond that (that's my father's area of expertise), but it keeps your house toasty warm in the winter and cool in the summer. These are small geothermal systems as opposed to the large commercial ones that you are probably thinking of. I've already addressed your other remarks in my alternative energy post.
A part of the problem with alternative energy is that people have been taught by the corporate owned media to have such negative attitudes toward it. Clean energy is achievable. If you want to play into the hands of big oil, then keep believing that alternative energy isn't possible -- that's what they want you to believe.
No good solution has been found to the nuclear waste problem since the first fission reaction in 1942 and I don't expect that one will be found in my lifetime. The best solution right now is to stop making more nuclear waste.
Even though my generation has inherited a monumental mistake and problem caused by the nuclear industry, I'm no pessimist -- there's still hope. I firmly believe that our society is innovative enough to create the technologies needed to be energy independent and powered by 100% clean energy. The only thing standing in our way is corrupt and powerful corporations that would rather keep doing things the dirty, profitable way. I believe in the people, not the filthy rich, immoral corporations.
First of all, it's a fallacy that we only have a choice between nuclear and coal as methods of electrical generation. There are more options available than dirty coal and dirty nuclear. We have much better technologies available to us today than we did 100 years ago.
Appliances are much more energy efficient, which cuts down on electrical demand. Appliances could be made to be even more energy efficient, but corporate monopolies prevent it (GE wants to sell more nuclear reactors, so they make inefficient appliances -- it is a conflict of interest and because of that GE should be dissolved into smaller companies by anti-trust laws). The United States only generates 20% of our electricity from nuclear power. We could cut 20% with smart energy efficient technologies. If you haven't already please replace your light bulbs with compact florescent bulbs, which are much more efficient and last longer than old fashioned tungsten, uncool filament bulbs. If you are still using those old fashioned bulbs, you are wasting your money on heating the filament to 2,200+ Centigrade. You should be paying for light, not waste heat. Better yet replace your light bulbs with LED lights, which are just about to hit the market. They almost never burn out and they don't have mercury in them like compact florescent bulbs do.
Conserve energy by turning off the lights, drying your clothes outside on a clothesline on a nice day and turning your computer off when you aren't using it. All of those common sense, simple things will reduce the electrical demand -- it will make our air and water cleaner and it will reduce the amount of nuclear waste generated. A large percentage of electricity is wasted.
Conservation and efficiency should come first in a smart, sustainable society, but they need to be complemented with alternative energy sources. Alternative energy sources are becoming more economical and more efficient. Solar and wind are already cheaper than nuclear power if you take away all of the hidden government subsidies, medical bills from radioactive releases from nuclear plants and other hidden costs. The newer wind turbines can generate at ~30% capacity even on a day with not much wind. Solar is still a bit pricey, but I suspect that has a lot to do with BP/Amoco and other greedy oil corporations patenting and buying out solar technology companies to maintain their highly lucrative monopoly on energy.
There's also low-impact hydro, which generates electricity without damaging delicate biological ecosystems both upstream and downstream of the facility. Small scale geothermal can be used to heat and cool your house year round, which significantly decreases energy consumption. Using solar power to heat your water also saves a lot of energy and pays itself off. Landfill gas is alright, so long as pollutants are filtered out (otherwise dioxin and other hazardous pollutants are formed).
Rather than invading Iraq for their oil, President Bush should have invested the $140 billion that we've spent destroying Iraq on a historical initiative to make us energy independent by 2020. With that kind of funding, you could expect to see incredible breakthroughs in finding sustainable sources of energy that are truly clean. Restructuring our economy would mean tens to hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The economy would boom from such a program -- too bad President Bush serves and protects the wealthy and powerful energy corporations and not the vast majority.
Nuclear reactors also routinely release radioisotopes to the environment. They are permitted to do this by law. They'd like you to believe that all of the radiation is coming from coal plants, but that's simply not true. The standards are set much too high according to the amount of radiation that industry claims they release into the environment, but the nuclear industry fights tooth and nail against lowering it. Most of the released radioisotopes are radioactive noble gases, which are hard to filter out of the air because they are chemically inert. Industry
I disagree...breeder reactors would make the national security situation far worse. They're called "breeder" reactors, because they breed (create) plutonium-239 (aka weapons grade plutonium). It is common knowledge that it only takes ten to twenty pounds of plutonium to build an atomic bomb, which is why I think it is a horrible idea to use weapons grade plutonium as an energy source in MOX reactors or breeder reactors. If any of the fuel fell into the wrong hands, it could be disastrous. The best nuclear non-proliferation program is not creating more weapons grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium. The government already has a hard enough time keeping track of what it already has.
It is also questionable what would happen in a meltdown. Unlike commercial reactors, breeders have a large enough mass of plutonium to go critical -- giving off huge amounts of radiation and possibly even exploding like an atomic bomb. Some have argued that an atomic explosion can't happen from a breeder meltdown, but I sure wouldn't want to live next to one long enough to find out.
With legislation like the Price-Anderson Act in place, which limits the liability of the nuclear industry (since no insurer is brave enough to insure a nuclear power plant for fear of going bankrupt in an accident) it is almost guaranteed that the nuclear industry would just be left off the hook in either an accident or theft. The taxpayers would pay the price.
Nuclear is NOT an alternative energy source. It is a very dirty and dangerous power source. Anyone that believes that nuclear power is clean, cheap and safe has been brainwashed by the well-funded nuclear industry's public relations arm.
Radiation is a carcinogen -- it causes mutations to your DNA and the vast majority of genetic mutations are harmful. Radiation causes cancer, it causes birth defects, miscarriages and many other biological problems. Genetic damage lasts forever, because it is passed on from one generation to another. We're killing our kids with nuclear power.
There is no good solution to the problem of nuclear waste. The nuclear industry and government have promised solutions to the problem since the very beginning of the nuclear power industry. Spent fuel rods are extremely dangerous (a few minutes of unshielded exposure would mean an almost certain death) and have to be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years.
The best solution that they've come up with is tunneling into Yucca Mountain and dumping it there, despite the fact that the site does not meet the original geological requirements for safe radioactive waste disposal. Despite the fact that the site is riddled with earthquake faults and has 2 inactive volcanos within 10 miles of Yucca Mountain. I don't know about you, but I sure don't like the idea of dumping 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in an unstable geological area. Instead of searching for better solutions industry has bribed and strong-armed congress into just weakening their requirements for nuclear waste disposal.
They want to dump it at Yucca Mountain, because obviously no one wants it in their backyard and they know that the State of Nevada isn't strong enough to fight it off. Even worse yet they want to dump the nuclear waste on Western Shoshone Territory, which makes it a blatant case of environmental racism.
It's very backwards in thinking to talk about building new nuclear reactors, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission isn't even doing a good enough job of regulating nuclear plant security with the existing line of nuclear reactors. Wackenhut Corp should not be testing it's own security forces. Plant security should be tested by an independent 3rd party. There is nothing in place to protect nuclear reactors from an aircraft or marine attack. After the tragic 9/11 attacks, it was revealed by the mainstream media that Al-Qaeda had considered striking nuclear targets. What part of that doesn't the Bush Administration understand? At a time when we are all very concerned about our national security, proposing to build new nuclear reactors goes against the concept of homeland security.
Slashdot Mirror
It's unreasonable to say that nuclear is safest, when obviously it is not even safe period. In fact, I'd argue it is the most dangerous to our national security and public health. Anything that involves a proven carcinogen isn't safe. (Note: I said that your idea is unreasonable and not that you are unreasonable. Please attack ideas, not people. We're all nerds here -- there is no reason to resort to name calling. :)
I'm not going to argue with you whether coal or nuclear is more dangerous. It's arbitrary, because they both are dirty and they both are a threat to public health.
It is completely false to say that there are not radioactive emissions from nuclear plants during operation. It doesn't take an accident -- nuclear reactors routinely emit radioisotopes to the atmosphere and they are permitted to do so by law. The nuclear industry files their own paperwork on how much radiation they are emitting to the atmosphere and to the water effluent -- the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't monitor it. Just because you can't see, smell or detect it with any human senses, the pollution from nuclear power plants is still there.
The nuclear industry is also responsible for the pollution from the uranium fuel cycle. Before fuel rods are loaded into a nuclear reactor they have to be mined, milled, enriched, pelleted, and loaded into zirconium fuel rods. There are huge piles of unprotected U-238 just sitting out on the ground venting radon gas to the atmosphere. In 2002, the Paducah uranium enrichment plant in Kentucky and the Piketon uranium enrichment plant in Ohio emitted 91% of the nation's reported CFC-114 emissions, a potent greenhouse gas and an ozone depleter. As a greenhouse gas, CFC-114 is 9,800 times more potent than C02.
"Sorry to burst your bubble, but the fact remains there is no 100% safe way of generating power." Please don't be so cynical -- there are safe and clean ways to manage our energy policy. Our only options available to us aren't natural gas, coal, oil, garbage incineration and nuclear power. Half of our federal budget is spent on the military (~$935 billion/year). If half of that were spent on clean energy research tremendous technological breakthroughs would be made. A large part of the problem with solar and wind is that it isn't being mass produced. Mass production would significantly bring the costs down.
The nuclear industry has been given its chance and it has failed miserably. They promised energy that would be safe, clean, and too cheap to meter. It is perfectly logical to say that nuclear power is not safe or clean, and it happens to be one of the most expensive methods of electrical generation available. The federal subsidies should be cut from the nuclear power industry and they should be reinvested in clean energy initiatives. We're not in the cold war anymore.
"Many studies show that particulate emission from burning carbon containing fuels is a major risk for developing vascular health problems, just as much as smoking is. Vascular diseases are the leading cause of death in the Western world today." I don't doubt it and I'm certainly not arguing that coal is clean. (That would be like saying that nuclear is clean.) I'm a runner and I get sick from running where I live, because the air quality is so bad. Nuclear won't solve the problem though -- it'll give me cancer just the same as coal.
Yes, it is speculative to say that hundreds of thousands died from cancer caused by Chernobyl. I can't prove it, but you can't prove it wrong either. It would be just as speculative to say that those cancer deaths were caused by coal. We don't have the technology to track pollutants from the source to their victim. I wish we could, because then we could hold the corporate polluters responsible
Bioremediation as a decontamination method has its limitations. Plants obey the laws of physics and can't destroy matter. The radioisotopes absorbed by the plants from the contaminated environment aren't destroyed. The plants have to be harvested and treated as nuclear waste. That brings us full circle, because there is no good solution to the problem of radioactive waste.
If the plants are incinerated, then the radioisotopes are released to the atmosphere. If they are buried they contaminate the groundwater.
A problem that I often see in this debate is that the physicists don't know their biology and the biologists don't know their physics. I don't think you have a very accurate understanding the biological effects of radiation. (To be fair, my understanding of physics could be better -- and I'm working on it. :) Biology doesn't lie either and to say that only 31 people died from the Chernobyl accident is unscientific nonsense. Yes, 31 died of acute radiation exposure. Hundreds of thousands globally have also died of cancer from the radioactive fallout of the accident. Radiation is a proven carcinogen and that can't be said about many other types of pollutants.
I agree with you that radon gas is very dangerous and the nuclear proponents do like putting all of the blame on coal plants. The nuclear industry is a contributer to radon gas releases, however. Radon gas is also released from the dirty mining and processing of uranium into fuel rods. Strontium-90 is also very dangerous and it is released from the actual nuclear reactors. That's not hype--that's scientific fact.
"And that's the worst real life actual event for nuclear energy. An event that is physically impossible in American reactor design." You're right, the accident that happened at Chernobyl couldn't happen here, because our reactor design is different. However, it is possible that radioactive release on the scale of Chernobyl could happen in the United States. The engineers of the Titanic said it was unsinkable--it sunk. The engineers of nuclear reactors say that the containment buildings are unbreachable. It's arrogance to say that our nuclear reactors are free of human error.
"Once you get past the hype, you get enlightened." There was a time when I was pro-nuclear too. That was before I did my homework and cut through all of the nuclear industry's hype.
Mods: With all due respect, this thread isn't flamebait. If it were flamebait, I would be engaging in personal attacks on my opponents. I haven't personally attacked anyone that has entered into the debate. If anyone's post is flaimbait, it is Shadowlore's who has slandered me as a lunatic, scaremonger (ad hominem alert!). Please act accordingly.
You are right that Pu-240 (along with a combination of many other fission byproducts) is produced and it isn't fissionable. However, the produced Pu-239 can still be used to build nuclear weapons. Where do you think the U.S. military got the plutonium for the bomb they dropped on Nagasaki?
I do want to make one correction from my previous post. Breeder reactors can't explode like an atomic bomb, but they can go critical if the liquid sodium coolant is cut off. There would be a non-atomic explosion, which would blow the fuel apart and possibly badly contaminate the environment if the containment building were breached.
The burden of weight shouldn't be on me to come up with solutions to nuclear waste -- it should be on the nuclear industry, who has promised solutions to nuclear waste. The solution to nuclear waste shouldn't be financed with taxpayer dollars either, but it is. The best solution available right now is not making more waste. By creating more waste, the nuclear industry is only digging themselves into a deeper hole. I know you probably aren't going to like that answer, but all of the proposed solutions to nuclear waste have serious problems even with the large amount of taxpayer dollars that have gone into researching it.
That's right -- they are designing Yucca Mountain to hold 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste (Source: Congress -- search for 77,000 within the page). Yucca Mountain will likely be full to capacity by the time they open it, if it ever even opens (God forbid). Right now the project is dead, because congress didn't give it the funding they needed and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently ruled that it is illegal for the EPA to set the waste storage time period arbitrarily at 10,000 years when it needs to be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years at a minimum. I've heard that Wisconsin may be the next target for the nation's second nuclear waste dump (look out Wisconsin!).
You obviously either didn't read my post about alternative energy or didn't read it very thoroughly [read it here]. Most of your arguments on alternative energy sources are pessimistic, outdated and incorrect. Geothermal can be used in most places in the United States, because the temperature below the crust stays at a steady 55 Fahrenheit year round. You pump water through pipes into wells in the ground to cool or heat it and then circulate it back up to your house. I don't understand the heating/cooling engineering beyond that (that's my father's area of expertise), but it keeps your house toasty warm in the winter and cool in the summer. These are small geothermal systems as opposed to the large commercial ones that you are probably thinking of. I've already addressed your other remarks in my alternative energy post.
A part of the problem with alternative energy is that people have been taught by the corporate owned media to have such negative attitudes toward it. Clean energy is achievable. If you want to play into the hands of big oil, then keep believing that alternative energy isn't possible -- that's what they want you to believe.
No good solution has been found to the nuclear waste problem since the first fission reaction in 1942 and I don't expect that one will be found in my lifetime. The best solution right now is to stop making more nuclear waste.
Even though my generation has inherited a monumental mistake and problem caused by the nuclear industry, I'm no pessimist -- there's still hope. I firmly believe that our society is innovative enough to create the technologies needed to be energy independent and powered by 100% clean energy. The only thing standing in our way is corrupt and powerful corporations that would rather keep doing things the dirty, profitable way. I believe in the people, not the filthy rich, immoral corporations.
First of all, it's a fallacy that we only have a choice between nuclear and coal as methods of electrical generation. There are more options available than dirty coal and dirty nuclear. We have much better technologies available to us today than we did 100 years ago.
Appliances are much more energy efficient, which cuts down on electrical demand. Appliances could be made to be even more energy efficient, but corporate monopolies prevent it (GE wants to sell more nuclear reactors, so they make inefficient appliances -- it is a conflict of interest and because of that GE should be dissolved into smaller companies by anti-trust laws). The United States only generates 20% of our electricity from nuclear power. We could cut 20% with smart energy efficient technologies. If you haven't already please replace your light bulbs with compact florescent bulbs, which are much more efficient and last longer than old fashioned tungsten, uncool filament bulbs. If you are still using those old fashioned bulbs, you are wasting your money on heating the filament to 2,200+ Centigrade. You should be paying for light, not waste heat. Better yet replace your light bulbs with LED lights, which are just about to hit the market. They almost never burn out and they don't have mercury in them like compact florescent bulbs do.
Conserve energy by turning off the lights, drying your clothes outside on a clothesline on a nice day and turning your computer off when you aren't using it. All of those common sense, simple things will reduce the electrical demand -- it will make our air and water cleaner and it will reduce the amount of nuclear waste generated. A large percentage of electricity is wasted.
Conservation and efficiency should come first in a smart, sustainable society, but they need to be complemented with alternative energy sources. Alternative energy sources are becoming more economical and more efficient. Solar and wind are already cheaper than nuclear power if you take away all of the hidden government subsidies, medical bills from radioactive releases from nuclear plants and other hidden costs. The newer wind turbines can generate at ~30% capacity even on a day with not much wind. Solar is still a bit pricey, but I suspect that has a lot to do with BP/Amoco and other greedy oil corporations patenting and buying out solar technology companies to maintain their highly lucrative monopoly on energy.
There's also low-impact hydro, which generates electricity without damaging delicate biological ecosystems both upstream and downstream of the facility. Small scale geothermal can be used to heat and cool your house year round, which significantly decreases energy consumption. Using solar power to heat your water also saves a lot of energy and pays itself off. Landfill gas is alright, so long as pollutants are filtered out (otherwise dioxin and other hazardous pollutants are formed).
Rather than invading Iraq for their oil, President Bush should have invested the $140 billion that we've spent destroying Iraq on a historical initiative to make us energy independent by 2020. With that kind of funding, you could expect to see incredible breakthroughs in finding sustainable sources of energy that are truly clean. Restructuring our economy would mean tens to hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The economy would boom from such a program -- too bad President Bush serves and protects the wealthy and powerful energy corporations and not the vast majority.
Nuclear reactors also routinely release radioisotopes to the environment. They are permitted to do this by law. They'd like you to believe that all of the radiation is coming from coal plants, but that's simply not true. The standards are set much too high according to the amount of radiation that industry claims they release into the environment, but the nuclear industry fights tooth and nail against lowering it. Most of the released radioisotopes are radioactive noble gases, which are hard to filter out of the air because they are chemically inert. Industry
I disagree...breeder reactors would make the national security situation far worse. They're called "breeder" reactors, because they breed (create) plutonium-239 (aka weapons grade plutonium). It is common knowledge that it only takes ten to twenty pounds of plutonium to build an atomic bomb, which is why I think it is a horrible idea to use weapons grade plutonium as an energy source in MOX reactors or breeder reactors. If any of the fuel fell into the wrong hands, it could be disastrous. The best nuclear non-proliferation program is not creating more weapons grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium. The government already has a hard enough time keeping track of what it already has.
It is also questionable what would happen in a meltdown. Unlike commercial reactors, breeders have a large enough mass of plutonium to go critical -- giving off huge amounts of radiation and possibly even exploding like an atomic bomb. Some have argued that an atomic explosion can't happen from a breeder meltdown, but I sure wouldn't want to live next to one long enough to find out.
With legislation like the Price-Anderson Act in place, which limits the liability of the nuclear industry (since no insurer is brave enough to insure a nuclear power plant for fear of going bankrupt in an accident) it is almost guaranteed that the nuclear industry would just be left off the hook in either an accident or theft. The taxpayers would pay the price.
Nuclear is NOT an alternative energy source. It is a very dirty and dangerous power source. Anyone that believes that nuclear power is clean, cheap and safe has been brainwashed by the well-funded nuclear industry's public relations arm.
Radiation is a carcinogen -- it causes mutations to your DNA and the vast majority of genetic mutations are harmful. Radiation causes cancer, it causes birth defects, miscarriages and many other biological problems. Genetic damage lasts forever, because it is passed on from one generation to another. We're killing our kids with nuclear power.
There is no good solution to the problem of nuclear waste. The nuclear industry and government have promised solutions to the problem since the very beginning of the nuclear power industry. Spent fuel rods are extremely dangerous (a few minutes of unshielded exposure would mean an almost certain death) and have to be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years.
The best solution that they've come up with is tunneling into Yucca Mountain and dumping it there, despite the fact that the site does not meet the original geological requirements for safe radioactive waste disposal. Despite the fact that the site is riddled with earthquake faults and has 2 inactive volcanos within 10 miles of Yucca Mountain. I don't know about you, but I sure don't like the idea of dumping 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in an unstable geological area. Instead of searching for better solutions industry has bribed and strong-armed congress into just weakening their requirements for nuclear waste disposal.
They want to dump it at Yucca Mountain, because obviously no one wants it in their backyard and they know that the State of Nevada isn't strong enough to fight it off. Even worse yet they want to dump the nuclear waste on Western Shoshone Territory, which makes it a blatant case of environmental racism.
It's very backwards in thinking to talk about building new nuclear reactors, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission isn't even doing a good enough job of regulating nuclear plant security with the existing line of nuclear reactors. Wackenhut Corp should not be testing it's own security forces. Plant security should be tested by an independent 3rd party. There is nothing in place to protect nuclear reactors from an aircraft or marine attack. After the tragic 9/11 attacks, it was revealed by the mainstream media that Al-Qaeda had considered striking nuclear targets. What part of that doesn't the Bush Administration understand? At a time when we are all very concerned about our national security, proposing to build new nuclear reactors goes against the concept of homeland security.