Nuclear power will save the world, UN scientists claim

[Naturalized-Texan]

Nuclear power will save the world, UN scientists claim (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=451658&in_page_id=1965)

Leading scientists are today expected to back a major expansion of nuclear power as a way of saving the world from global warming.

Of course, switching all fossil-fueled power plants to nuclear power plants will have no measurable effect on global warming because the current warming is completely natural. However, nuclear power will reduce pollution and will reduce the cost of electricity.

[DoctorDoom]

But ... but ... an accident would leave Earth uninhabitable for the next 78.42 gazillion years, and there's no way to dispose of the newkewlar wastes that will be dangerously radioactive for eternity, and we ecowackos can't support it because we'd have nothing to bitch about and ...

Here's what the elitist bastards "think", from three decades ago -- nothing has changed:

"It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we might do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that don't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to each other."
-- Amory Lovins, Mother Earth News, 11-12/77

"In fact, giving society cheap abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
-- Paul Erlich, Not Man Apart (Friends of The Earth), Vol 5, No. 18, Sept 1975

[oldcoastie]

And, where oh where should all of that radioactive waste be deposited?

[Rhino]

Yucca Mountain.

[Naturalized-Texan]

And, where oh where should all of that radioactive waste be deposited?
We should also reprocess it like the French and British do (http://www.uic.com.au/wast.htm).

[DeclinetoState]

Lloyd Marbet (http://www.marbet.org/) won't be happy about that UN report:


May 21, 2006

Dear friends and fellow activists,

A great deal of media attention was paid to the implosion of the Trojan Cooling Tower, as Portland General Electric continued to erase the evidence of what they have long perpetrated in our midst. I hope that the media will continue to examine the economic and environmental costs of the nuclear fuel cycle along with our desperate need for a sane energy policy, massively committed to conservation and renewable energy resources, laying the foundation for a sustainable economy.

We should also never forget that when the Cooling Tower came down all of the nuclear waste produced at Trojan remains on site, still with no place to go. The reactor vessel and the steam generators, hurriedly removed, remain buried in the ground at Hanford, hopefully guarded from biological intrusion for thousands of years. The hidden costs of radiation exposure to workers and the public remain painful stories of suffering most likely never to be told; and the price of this legacy continues to be paid in our electricity rates and by those who will come after us, reaping little benefit from a technology that is yet to held fully accountable.

I suppose by now its no secret that I didn't support the cooling tower at Trojan coming down. It should have been left as a monument to the failure of this technology and the arrogance of those who promoted it. It should have become a living testament to what has been best described by Amory Lovins:

When the history of the nuclear controversy comes to be written, those who killed nuclear technology will be seen to have been its most avid promoters, who systematically mistook hopes for facts, advocacy for analysis, expertise for infallibility, engineering for politics, public relations for truth, and the people for fools.

Yet, like so many aspects of nuclear power, there is much we cannot undo, so I propose that an alternate memorial should be constructed at Trojan consisting of a replica of the nuclear plant with the names of all those who stood in opposition, suffering defeat after defeat, only to persevere and ultimately be proven right when Portland General Electric finally threw in the towel and permanently closed this nuclear plant down.
Margaret Mead once said:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has.

At Trojan this phenomena of a small group of thoughtful committed citizens was experienced many times over. It was all the people being hauled off to jail in all of the occupations that took place over the years. It was all the people who testified at legislative and licensing hearings. It was the lawyers who litigated against PGE. It was all the people who gathered signatures and signed petitions year and year. It was all the people who freely gave of their talents and resources. It was quite simply all the people who cared. As I approach the end of my life, the greatest honor I have had was to stand with you in a common struggle dictated from the heart by reverence for life and concern for those who would come after us.

I don't know whether the Trojan story will ever be told, but I do know that everything we stood for needs to be reaffirmed in the face of what we now confront in the war in Iraq, in a foreign policy based on pre‑emptive war with the use of nuclear weapons, in a revived public relations effort to build so called redesigned nuclear plants in response to global warming, and in an economic ideology that continues to assert its destructive control over life by promoting growth for the sake of growth and earning a profit at any cost. Rather than coming to terms with ourselves, confronting the way in which we destructively consume the planet and condemn future generations to the externalities of our blindness and deceit, we are instead being asked to embrace one technological fix after another.

So, as the cooling tower came down in this symbolic display of accomplishment, let us now rededicate ourselves to that greatness of spirit which honors the well being of our children's children's children's children and which preserves the sacredness of the life support systems that sustain and care for all sentient beings, providing us with an endless opportunity to exercise stewardship, compassion and love in everything that we might do and in all that we might become.

Thank you!
Lloyd K. Marbet

[DesertFox]

Shoot the spent fuel into the sun, where it can fuse into something else and put out more heat to warm our globe and my Central American wife can quit griping about it being so gosh darn cold all the time.

[Rhino]

Lloyd Marbet (http://www.marbet.org/) won't be happy about that UN report:Good. Idiots are like that. The dummy actually thinks he had something to do with the closure of that plant. What a maroon!

[DoctorDoom]

A great deal of media attention was paid to the implosion of the Trojan Cooling Tower ...All I need to know about Lloyd Marbet, I learned from that clause. He is as colossally ignorant of nuclear power as all of his fellow anti-newkewlar assholes.

The cooling towers are the no-nukes buttheads' favorite image, but they never note that fossil-fueled plants also have cooling towers. All they indicate is that there is no readily available natural source of cooling water. In the UK, the nukes can be identified by the LACK of towers, since they use river water for cooling.

The towers are totally isolated from the nuclear equipment. On a cool day, those billowing clouds above the towers are 100% NON-radioactive dihydrogen monoxide (that's water, for you folks in Rio Linda). It's steam. The imagery is about as rational as decrying the dangers of gas-fired home heating and using radiators to symbolize it.

Hopefully, morons like Marbet will have less and less impact as the reality of our energy situation sinks in and science replaces fear-mongering.

[DeclinetoState]

Actually, Marbet hoped that the tower would be left standing as a monument to the pro-nukes' supposed ignorance and his own assumed wisdom. I only wish they would have brought the tower down with him in it.

[DesertFox]

Marbet needs to suck the south end of a north-pointing bull.

[buckeyepete]

I have never seen a Nuk-Sub sailor glow in the dark after spending months underwater. Surface ships also.

[DoctorDoom]

Marbet needs to suck the south end of a north-pointing bull.This one?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v349/DocDoom777/BB%20Pix/BS1.jpg

[CzechPrince]

France runs virtually on nothing but Nuclear power. I can safely say that is the only thing we should mimic them on.

[DoctorDoom]

France derives 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.

France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity, and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this.

France has been very active in developing nuclear technology, and reactor technology is a major export.Nuclear Power in France (http://www.uic.com.au/nip28.htm)

http://www.eoearth.org/media/draft/b/b1/Franceelec.gif

Energy profile of France (http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_profile_of_France)

At least they did THAT right.

[DeclinetoState]

The only people that couldn't do nuclear power right were the Soviets. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if Marbet idolized them.

Even our worst nuke disaster, Three Mile Island, resulted in no serious injuries or deaths.

[Naturalized-Texan]

Even our worst nuke disaster, Three Mile Island, resulted in no serious injuries or deaths.
And only negligible amounts of radiation were released - about as much increased radiation as one would experience by traveling from Houston (near sea level) to Denver (one mile above sea level).

[DoctorDoom]

Actually, there were no injuries, except possibly in traffic accidents involving panicky, misinformed residents and no-nukes kooks going there to protest.

Re Chernobyl, the RBMK-1000 (Reaktor Bolshoi Moshchnosty Kanalny) reactors used there are inherently unstable (output increases with coolant loss due to the positive void coefficient of graphite-core reactors), and they could not be built in any western nation. That aside, the event was due to human stupidity rather than design flaws.

[DeclinetoState]

Chernobyl was an example of the failure of Soviet technology, which . . .
Clowns like Marbet probably nonetheless idealize

Resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later, when people began to realize the government wasn't very good about telling the truth or able to keep them safe (unless you prefer to credit President Reagan's "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech)

[Jag Wife]

In the Charlotte, NC region, we have 2 nuke plants within a couple of hours of each other, and we have some of the cheapest electricity in the country. And yes, they test the sirens regularly.