Now, I know that since The Chimperor brought this issue to the fore yesterday, many of you who do not have the time or inclination to research the particulars are simply going to assume that if it's good enough for 85, then it must be a looming disaster for the country. I am here to instead remind you that even a stopped clock is right by coincidence twice a day (once a day if you're in Europe and use a 24hr clock), and that the sole fact of Dubya's support of nuclear power is not a good enough reason to oppose it. George probably supports the wearing of pants, and while I oppose some of his policies I don't think that particular policy is unreasonable (at least in my case).
The ignorance of nuclear power by many Kossacks is staggering and matched only by their hysteria. Sadly, nuclear power is perhaps the Left's most profound blind spot. There are too many people on our side who have their heads in the sand on this one. We have
got to stop with the irrationality surrounding this issue, or our prideful ignorance is going to kill us.
The willful ignorance surrounding this issue here strongly resembles fundie Republican attitudes on birth control, global warming, stem cell research, and abortion. It's informed almost entirely by anti-intellectualism, propaganda, emotion, and the utter, complete, and total inability to admit that they're wrong.
There is a fine article by the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Richard Rhodes, which examines many of the common arguments against nuclear power, and comes out, surprisingly, in favor. You've simply got to do your homework on this before you dismiss it out of hand.
One of the finest books on the entire issue was written by Bernard Cohen, who has no industry ties; if one is to have any informed opinion at all on the issue, you have to read it.
Nuclear is the only source of energy which can put us in good shape right now and there are more than enough nuclear materials on Earth to provide power for our needs for centuries.
With nuclear, you can kill at least four very ugly birds with one stone: weapons proliferation, high-level waste disposal, greenhouse emissions, and fresh water shortages.
- Proliferation because modern breeder reactors can use the material from old weapons for fuel and make this material useless as a nuclear explosive. Literally swords into plowshares.
- Waste disposal because we can use breeder reactors to burn down much of the waste we are storing today, using it for power and making the waste far less radioactive and dangerous.
- Greenhouse emissions, because, well, an operating nuclear plant has essentially NONE.
- The coming "fresh water crisis" can be averted by utilizing clean nuclear power to desalinate water from the oceans. No invasion of our Canadian friends will be required.
And no, a nuclear power plant cannot explode like an atomic bomb. You'd be amazed how many people believe that it can. Not one person died as a result of the Three Mile Island accident.
There's absolutely no comparison possible between the reactors and regulatory environment we have in the U.S. and the sloppy reactor and procedures which caused the hydrogen gas explosion at Chernobyl. Such an accident is literally impossible here. Sorry, Janeane Garofalo. I heard your ignorant statement on AAR last night in which you linked all nuclear power with Chernobyl and had to call you out on it. For one who has passionately pleaded for improvements to education, it surprises me that you need to educate yourself on this critical issue.
If you worry about the mining of uranium and its release of toxicity into the environment, think about all the radon gas and other radioactive particulates released when you mine billions of tons of coal. It's a hell of a lot more toxicity and radioactivity, because of the simple fact that you have to mine so much more of it than you do uranium. 32,000 people die as a result of coal burning each year. We can stop that right now with technology that has been safe and mature for more than 40 years.
France and Japan have got the right idea on this, folks.
And before you go off on the waste storage "problem," keep in mind that a nuke plant (under super-strict regulations) puts far less radioactive waste into the environment than your average coal plant. Yep, you read that right:
Among sources for electric power generation, coal is the worst environmental offender. Recent studies at the Harvard School of Public Health indicate that particulates from coal burning are responsible for about 15,000 premature deaths annually in the U.S. alone. [Wilson and Spengler (1996), p. 212.] To generate about a quarter of world primary energy, coal burning liberates a burden of toxic wastes too immense to bury in secure repositories. Such waste is either dispersed directly into the air or solidified and dumped or even mixed into construction materials. Besides noxious particulates, sulfur and nitrogen oxides (components of acid rain and smog), arsenic, mercury, cadmium, selenium, lead, boron, chromium, copper, fluorine, molybdenum, nickel, vanadium, zinc [Swaine (1990).], carbon monoxide and dioxide and other greenhouse gases, coal-fired power plants are also the major world source of radioactive releases to the environment. Uranium and thorium, mildly radioactive elements ubiquitous in the crust of the earth, are both released when coal is burned. Radioactive radon gas, a decay product of crustal uranium normally confined underground, is also released when coal is mined. A 1,000 megawatt-electric (MWe) coal-fired power plant releases into the environment about one hundred times as much radioactivity as a comparable nuclear plant.
New reactor designs, like Canada's CANDU reactor, and the pebble-bed reactor (which literally cannot melt down) are making it awfully hard to rationalize any other form of mass power generation as a replacement for petroleum.
A terrorist attack on a nuclear plant would result in very little bang for the terrorist buck. First off, in the wake of 9/11, no hijacked airplane in north america is going to get anywhere near its target before it is shot down by fighters, either Canadian CF-18s, or U.S. F-15s.
And even if they managed to get to the target, as a terrorist operation, this has no chance of doing any significant damage to a reactor vessel.
Any terrorist who would try such a thing will have bought into a lot of ignorant hype about the vulnerability of these plants. If they did a little research, and saw the Sandia Labs test of an F-4 Phantom accelerated to 500mph on a rocket sled and slammed into a test concrete containment building wall, they would conclude that they were wasting their time in a very big way. While this wall was mounted on air bearings and was moved several feet, all this did was put a small divot into the test wall, with no penetration.
And this does not even consider the 8-inch thick steel wall of the reactor vessel itself, inside the concrete building.
The most they could hope for is to damage the turbine complex on site, which would not release any radiation, but would knock the plant out of commission for several months at the least.
As for the objections to nuclear power by those who have run out of reasonable scientific grounds, on the sole grounds that it will "allow us to go on using as much as we want and go on being as wasteful as we want," well, that's a philosophical objection that seems based on sacrifice for sacrifice's sake, and starts to get onto the grounds of loopy, pointless religious debates. Such an argument would still be raised by these stoics if we found a way to generate power from such inexhaustible sources such as Limbaugh's hot air or O'reilly's vibrator.
Even the Green party guru and Climatologist James Lovelock has come out in favor of responsible nuclear power generation:
Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen. If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger, which is global warming, we may die even sooner, as did more than 20,000 unfortunates from overheating in Europe last summer.
I find it sad and ironic that the UK, which leads the world in the quality of its Earth and climate scientists, rejects their warnings and advice, and prefers to listen to the Greens. But I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.
Even if they were right about its dangers, and they are not, its worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear - the one safe, available, energy source - now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.
Honestly, read up on it, embrace it, and rejoice! Nuclear can save our asses in so many ways. It can give us a cleaner atmosphere, give us nearly limitless fresh water, reduce the risk of a nuclear 9/11, and make it possible for all of us to keep using our cars, so long as they're electric, which is fine by me.