Lies from the World Nuclear Association
The World Nuclear Association has a sweet little pro-nuke energy page that has this tidbit:
"The 27 tonnes or so of spent fuel taken each year from a 1000 MWe nuclear reactor is highly radioactive and gives off a lot of heat. Some is reprocessed so that 97% of the 27 tonnes is recycled. The remaining 3%, about 700 kg, is high-level radioactive waste which is potentially hazardous and needs to be isolated from the environment for a very long time. However, the small quantity makes the task readily manageable. Even where the spent fuel is not reprocessed, the yearly amount of 27 tonnes is modest compared with the quantities of waste from a similar sized coal-fired power station. Its isolation in both storage and transport is easily achieved."If it's so "readily manageable" then why are we fighting over where to store the stuff in the U.S.? And, sure, it's less waste. However, this business of isolation during storage and transport being easily achieved is completely false. We don't know where to put it. There is a lot of it. And, once we figure out where to store it, we still aren't sure how to get it there safely. And you know why? There is no safe place to put it and there is no safe way to transport it. Because nuclear energy is not safe.
posted by Sara Ch. at 9:06 AM
3 Comments:
We're fighting over where to store spent nuclear fuel because Jimmy Carter decided not to reprocess it.
Dear Sara,
The reason we have a nuclear waste problem in this country is because of people like you and your ideological and intellectual sibling; President Jimmy Carter. Not only do we not have only 1540 pounds of nuclear waste to dispose of per fuel rod change, we don’t have only 57,000 pounds to recycle but actually we end up (because of you and Jimmy) with 91,520 per refueling. We have 60 times (that is 6000 percent) the amount of nuclear waste per Kilowatt Hour produced than our friends in England, France, and Japan. Thanks Sara, you’re a trooper!
What I find most disturbing is your view of a low energy society. I assume that is your goal because the dangers of nuclear power pale by comparison to fighting for oil or burning coal. I have lived in, worked in, and visited low energy societies for the past 50 years and they are all dirty, squalid, unhealthy, uneducated, and generally uncomfortable. Your utopian vision of clean, healthy, educated people walking or riding bicycles among beautiful manicured lawns with flowers and gardens to open air concerts, etc. is a vision of a high energy society, not as you suggest a low energy one. I would suggest you read Jared Diamond’s, Guns, Germs, and Steel. He is correct that in the beginning, the success of society was proportional to the number of crops and animals able to be domesticated, but since the industrial revolution, the success of a society has been proportional to its ability to deliver high per capita energy usage. I am constrained by the amount of energy I can purchase in a society with the lowest cost energy (where I live). You on the other hand, believing in the pleasures of living a low energy existence, have all the choices in the world, from Eastern Europe to Yugoslavia, South Africa, or Guatemala. Every place with lower energy usage than the US has been awful in proportion to the decrease in energy. The lowest energy option would be it you would turn off your computer, your lights, and your heat and go live in a cave and breathe healthy, organic, naturally occurring radon gas. Don’t worry about getting lung cancer; in low energy living, exposure, malnutrition, and disease will kill you long before the effects of radiation.
Fred
The people posting in this blog are definately Republican propagandists. If you were sitting in a bath filled with their dirty bath water and you dropped a pellet
of radiant material in the opposite end ,, would you be in danger!, Republicans cry out! "NO!".
Yea right! and George Bush is the most admired President in history too! lol NEED I SAY MORE? ;-)
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