Architecture 2030 did a great analysis of nuclear power
http://architecture2030.org/hot_topics/nuclear-energy-fact-check
In the media, 20% keeps coming up, but that is only electrical generation. It is 8.6% of our overall energy use, and most of the plants are ancient at this point. The industry without subsidies and liability waivers from the federal government could not compete with renewables. It also has the added burden of spent fuel disposal and contaminated site clean up. Stewart Brand makes it all sound easy, but Japan is looking to tell us otherwise.
Tony C. Saladino - 13 years ago
This is another terrible situation that proves that nuclear energy production is not safe. It would have been nice if folks would have listened to public outcry thirty years ago. I feel ashamed for all of humanity. We cannot fathom 60 million years of "safe" storage and we certainly can't fathom the full weight of the 35 million people's lives that have already been snuffed out because of our fascination with producing power from splitting atoms. Historians will eventually see this time period as the fulcrum on which our species teetered, on the brink of self-anihilation. Nuclear issues have been with us since the fifties, but our memories are short. I lived eighty miles Northeast of Three Mile Island when they had their large releases of radioactive material. It was blanketing the cars in the parking lot at our school for over two weeks before anything was said on the news. Just as tiny snippets have leaked out of Japan, I'm sure the facts of the matter are far worse than anyone has been told.
Private corporations, who have profited mightily from research and development grants from our government, seem to be quite cavalier about their behavior when it comes to public health, contamination issues and long term safety of those of us who have no say in the politics of energy. The privately owned company that "runs" the crippled reactors and storage pool in Japan is keeping the government out of the decision-making loop as well. We have many proven technologies that could serve our needs if we only implemented smaller and more diversified production facilities. We have seen an ever more centralized power grid with ever larger facilities and nuclear generating stations epitomize that approach. Just as industrial agriculture has pushed at the limits of ecological sustainability, so too has our approach to energy production.
The New Resource Wars will be fought between the haves and the have nots. As long as the government is backing one side or the other, they cannot help but win in the short term. What concerns anyone who has learned about nuclear issues, or in fact fossil fuel consumption as well is the long term. Not to stray too far off topic, but the use of coal for energy production has terrible costs also. It has been estimated that health effects of fly ash alone are equivalent to adding 250,000 smokers per year to our population, this on top of the environmental damage caused by mercury, black lung and acid mine drainage. The thing that protects the nuclear industry from scrutiny is the utter lack of knowledge that the general public has regarding how mining, milling, refining, concentrating and reprocessing of the raw material is done. Anyone I have taken the time to educate about these processes understands that nuclear energy is not clean, it is not environmentally benign and it certainly is not carbon neutral!
I truly hope that this tragedy wakes us up to the real and present dangers that exist in and around nuclear energy production. I have been watching the air mass that was over Northern Japan when the first reports came out of people being exposed to more radiation each hour than they would normally be exposed to in an entire year. That air mass is coming ashore in Northern California and Southern Oregon today, March seventeenth. The NRC claims that they will have increased numbers of monitoring stations capable of detecting elevated radioactivity levels along the West Coast by week's end. Considering the fact that the best time to take iodine pills is from 48 hours before exposure to elevated radioactivity and eight hours after, if the detection isn't going to happen for two more days, and the word is not gotten out for perhaps a couple days this coming weekend, then how will we protect ourselves against the damage that we know radiation causes? As we have seen after TMI, Katrina and the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, large corporations and governmental agencies are incapable of action.
Architecture 2030 did a great analysis of nuclear power
http://architecture2030.org/hot_topics/nuclear-energy-fact-check
In the media, 20% keeps coming up, but that is only electrical generation. It is 8.6% of our overall energy use, and most of the plants are ancient at this point. The industry without subsidies and liability waivers from the federal government could not compete with renewables. It also has the added burden of spent fuel disposal and contaminated site clean up. Stewart Brand makes it all sound easy, but Japan is looking to tell us otherwise.
This is another terrible situation that proves that nuclear energy production is not safe. It would have been nice if folks would have listened to public outcry thirty years ago. I feel ashamed for all of humanity. We cannot fathom 60 million years of "safe" storage and we certainly can't fathom the full weight of the 35 million people's lives that have already been snuffed out because of our fascination with producing power from splitting atoms. Historians will eventually see this time period as the fulcrum on which our species teetered, on the brink of self-anihilation. Nuclear issues have been with us since the fifties, but our memories are short. I lived eighty miles Northeast of Three Mile Island when they had their large releases of radioactive material. It was blanketing the cars in the parking lot at our school for over two weeks before anything was said on the news. Just as tiny snippets have leaked out of Japan, I'm sure the facts of the matter are far worse than anyone has been told.
Private corporations, who have profited mightily from research and development grants from our government, seem to be quite cavalier about their behavior when it comes to public health, contamination issues and long term safety of those of us who have no say in the politics of energy. The privately owned company that "runs" the crippled reactors and storage pool in Japan is keeping the government out of the decision-making loop as well. We have many proven technologies that could serve our needs if we only implemented smaller and more diversified production facilities. We have seen an ever more centralized power grid with ever larger facilities and nuclear generating stations epitomize that approach. Just as industrial agriculture has pushed at the limits of ecological sustainability, so too has our approach to energy production.
The New Resource Wars will be fought between the haves and the have nots. As long as the government is backing one side or the other, they cannot help but win in the short term. What concerns anyone who has learned about nuclear issues, or in fact fossil fuel consumption as well is the long term. Not to stray too far off topic, but the use of coal for energy production has terrible costs also. It has been estimated that health effects of fly ash alone are equivalent to adding 250,000 smokers per year to our population, this on top of the environmental damage caused by mercury, black lung and acid mine drainage. The thing that protects the nuclear industry from scrutiny is the utter lack of knowledge that the general public has regarding how mining, milling, refining, concentrating and reprocessing of the raw material is done. Anyone I have taken the time to educate about these processes understands that nuclear energy is not clean, it is not environmentally benign and it certainly is not carbon neutral!
I truly hope that this tragedy wakes us up to the real and present dangers that exist in and around nuclear energy production. I have been watching the air mass that was over Northern Japan when the first reports came out of people being exposed to more radiation each hour than they would normally be exposed to in an entire year. That air mass is coming ashore in Northern California and Southern Oregon today, March seventeenth. The NRC claims that they will have increased numbers of monitoring stations capable of detecting elevated radioactivity levels along the West Coast by week's end. Considering the fact that the best time to take iodine pills is from 48 hours before exposure to elevated radioactivity and eight hours after, if the detection isn't going to happen for two more days, and the word is not gotten out for perhaps a couple days this coming weekend, then how will we protect ourselves against the damage that we know radiation causes? As we have seen after TMI, Katrina and the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, large corporations and governmental agencies are incapable of action.