Reasons why Nuclear energy is BAD for America
- 1. It's NOT clean or good for the environment. The mining and refining process for nuclear fuel is extremely dirty and required HUGE amounts of fossil which negates the claim that it has no CO2 emissions. The reactors and buildings themselves are also built with tons of fossil fuel consuming equipment.http://http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3039
- 2. There's no way to properly dispose of the nuclear waste. Nuclear waste never goes away. We cannot build adequate storehouses or waste sites that will keep the waste from getting into our air and water systems. Plus it is extremely costly to build these worthless sites and even more costly to safely deliver and handle the toxic waste. http://http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/08/08/stang/
- Nuclear power plants are extremely vulnerable to terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
- Current nuclear power plants are rapidly becoming outdated and prone to malfunctions
- Nuclear power plants have dozens of "close calls" every yearhttp://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/electric/nucfront.html
- Nuclear power is extremely expensive and is nearly completely tax funded ans subsidized because no investors will invest in it because it is too much of a risk. Tax payer money also insures plants in case there were ever to be an accident. http://http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0509-22.htm
- If there ever were an accident, thousands of people would die, many more thousands would become deathly ill and acres and acres of land would become inhabitable and worthless for farming.
- The world is running low on nuclear fuel, and this has caused prices to skyrockt for the elements needed to create it.
- Nuclear waste is vulnerable to theft and could be used for terrorist weapons
- Nuclear power is the main contributor in the world today for nuclear proliferation. Every rouge nation (except Isreal) obtained its atomic weapons from waste that was produced from their own nuclear power plants. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/26/5448/
9 comments:
Why don't you check some of this stuff out before you type out whatever you hear from the neighborhood crank?
1. Nuclear is the cleanest energy source there is: the pollution effects are so low they've never been detected. It ranks among renewables for life-cycle CO2 emissions [ P.J. Meier, Life-Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Systems and Applications for Climate Change Policy Analysis, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2002 http://merllc.com/ab4.htm ]
2. Nuclear wastes are much smaller in quantity than coal wastes and thus are much safer. Spent fuel is being reprocessed, and more countries are setting up to do it, including the US. Reprocessing the wastes separates out the valuable uranium and transuranic actinides to use as fuel. The remaining wastes are only 3% of what was there before and lose their toxicity in much less time. [ CRS Report for Congress http://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf] Many geologic places, such as caves or abandoned mines, could store those wastes safely. Besides that, proven technology exists to irradiate the wastes into other, shorter-lived materials. [http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-2/text/radside1.html ] To deal with the wastes this way doesn't require any technological breakthroughs, just a political decision. The cost of handling the waste is already included in the rates.
3. Not only are nuclear facilities safe from terrorist attacks, they aren't attractive targets. For the same effort, terrorists can do much more damage using other targets. Why do you suppose Bin Ladin targeted office buildings instead of power plants?
4. You must have made this one up. Nuclear plants are constantly updated and are operating better than ever before.
5. This one's just fiction. Even the accident at Three-Mile Island didn't harm anyone, and there haven't been any incidents that came close to causing harm anywhere in the country since.
6. Nuclear is the cheapest energy source, except coal and hydro. If coal had to meet reasonable air-quality standards, nuclear would be cheaper. [ http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html, http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/ElecCostSUM.pdf ]
7. The only reactors that could have such disastrous consequences would be in the former Soviet Union; those were unsafely built and unsafely operated. They didn't have the most rudimentary safety provisions, not even containment structures. All the other reactors in the world have a perfect safety record, with no deaths and no injuries. There is no other energy source with such a record, not even windmills.
8. At current usage, the world's known uranium reserves producible at less than US$60 per pound of U3O8 will last 85 years. Geologic data show that the supply is over 600 years. At higher prices, the supply is even greater. With advanced fuel cycles, the proven reserves would last over 2500 years. ]http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2006/uranium_resources.html ]
9. Spent fuel is unattractive to terrorists for several reasons. One is that it's monitored in shipping and it's highly likely that the thieves would be caught and the terrorist plot would be exposed. Another is that it has to be heavily shielded so it would take a huge explosion to spread the waste. Another is that the radioactive material is easy to detect; people who are contaminated can be decontaminated quickly and cleanup crews can clean up the contaminated area. Of all the things we have to concern ourselves with, dirty bombs don't rank very high.
10. This is not the case, as explained by Hans Blix, a former Director of the IAEA, the United Nations agency responsible for preventing proliferation http://www.dnva.no/c26889/nyheter/vis.html?tid=27367:
QUOTE:
A phasing out of nuclear power in some or all states would not lead to the scrapping of a single nuclear bomb.
States can have nuclear weapons without nuclear power though it is not common today. Israel is a case in point. It has no nuclear power but is assessed to have some 200 nuclear warheads. For a long time China had only the weapons. Indeed, most nuclear weapons states, including the US, had weapons before they had power.
ENDQUOTE
Despite that, people have a concern that nuclear fuel could be diverted and used to make a bomb by someone who shouldn't have one. This concern overlooks the fact that, even assuming someone could defeat the security measures for protecting the material and somehow ship it to his own facility, the material has to be treated with chemical separation and isotope separation and enrichment. This is a major industrial operation. In every case where it has been done, it required a nation's best minds and vast capital resources. And there still remains the problem of learning how to make a bomb go off. If a nation decides to make a bomb and is willing to make the investment, it can make it from natural uranium; stealing fuel is not a requirement.
In my other comment, I neglected to point out why nuclear energy is necessary.
Consider what nuclear gets us:
(1) An electricity source that doesn’t depend on wind or sunlight or the limited amount of energy storage available, and emits virtually no greenhouse gases. It could reduce CO2 emissions by 40%.
(2) An energy-efficient way to produce hydrogen, which could be used directly in automobiles and trucks or added to biofuels to make their production higher by a factor of three. Presently, transportation accounts for about 33% of CO2 emissions; all of that could be eliminated through conservation, electrification, and alternate fuels.
(3) A huge reduction in air pollution, lowered trade deficits, and freedom from Middle-East involvements.
The simple truth is that we won't shut down all the homes and businesses when there isn't enough wind and sunlight to power them. We won't make people stay home in their cold, dark houses. If nuclear energy isn't developed in a major way, the world will keep burning fossil fuels. Within fifty years nearly all the world's people will live in severe hardship and the natural environment will have completely disappeared.
Here is a really good interview with Helen Caldicott. She's extremely well respected and perhaps the nation's most knowledgeable authority on the dangers of Nuclear power. Check it out! http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/05/03/dicum-caldicott/
Movie stars and rock-and-roll musicians think she's a knowledgeable authority. Scientists and environmentalists, not a bit. For a more knowledgeable expert, consult James Lovelock or Bernard Cohen
How are we going to get us our own chernobyl with mutated zombies to fight if we don't get more of these built?
Sorry, Phil. Those reactors won't ever be built again. To understand why they were built at all you'd have to understand how the Soviet system worked. I'm not qualified to explain it, but if you read some Solzhenitsyn you'll get the idea.
The reactors were built on the cheap, so cheap that safety was never a consideration. For example, the core's reactivity rose when it got hotter, the opposite of every other power reactor in the world. The shutdown rods had graphite in the bottoms, which raised the reaction rate instead of lowering it when the rods were inserted. The insertion time was over 20 seconds. The plant didn't even have a containment structure. The reactor didn't have a functioning emergency cooling system when untrained workers performed a dangerous test which would not be allowed in any other country.
The results of the accident were disastrous, with widespread health effects and probably thousands of deaths. What it did do, though, was show that the lurid predictions of nuclear opponents were baseless. The disaster was the same scale as disasters the world is used to year after year, nothing like the radioactive apocalypse they projected.
A better indicator of nuclear safety is the TMI accident: a serious accident that resulted in a core meltdown but didn't cause harm to anyone. It validated the defense-in-depth design used in all Western reactors.
But it gets better. The new generation of reactors being built are even safer. If you're interested, google pebble-bed modular reactors.
The good just doesn't out-weight the bad when it comes to nuclear power. That's why NO one has invested in nuclear power in the U.S. in over 20 years. If nuclear reactors are so safe and reliable, then why won't Wall Street even THINK about investing in them? Instead the greedy in the nuclear industry lobby and beg the government to foot the bill for worthless research. Nuclear energy is bad for America because even if ONE goes bad, there goes billions of dollars and thousands of lives. By saying that "It'll never happen, I swear! Trust me! Please! Come on just give me some money we need it!" is stupid. Of course tons of scientists are PAID to say that nuclear power is getting safer, they work for the nuclear industry, what do you expect? The industry keeps assaulting us with propaganda yet WALL STREET remains silent. It's no secret. If it were what they claim (which it is not) then WALL STREET would be all about it.
The reason for the hiatus in nuclear construction resulted from several causes, the most important of which were unending litigation from overpaid lawyers, low natural-gas prices, and a shift from manufacturing to importation of consumer goods. It was reinforced by a government policy that allowed coal-burning utilities to poison the air to such an extent that thousands of Americans die every month from air pollution [source], specifically for the purpose of keeping fossil-fired electricity cheap.
Now that the absurdity of this policy is apparent, investors on Wall Street and everywhere in the world are turning to nuclear energy as the obvious and proven solution to global warming. You'd know this if you broadened your information sources.
Just saw this story and thought it was interesting and relevant
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/12/nuclear_qa
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