Nuclear Energy = Fool's Gold

There are many arguments in favor of nuclear energy.  None of them holds up to scrutiny. 

"It's carbon neutral."  This is the closest to a true statement but it isn't true.  Tons of oil and coal will be burnt in the extraction, refinement, and transportation of nuclear fuel.  Compared with your average fossil fuel burning power plant it isn't much but I don't think I'm splitting hairs by pointing out that nuclear energy is not carbon neutral.

"It's cheap."  Someone please point to a nuclear plant that hasn't over-run projected costs by billions of dollars or has actually lowered anyone's electric bill.  I'll wait.

"It's safe." or "Technology and design has improved to such a degree that a failure is impossible."  To that I'd like start by saying, "See BP."  All technology has a chance of failure.  This chance is almost always much greater than those designing and building the technology think it is.  The safest cars' accelerator pedals stick, skyscrapers designed to withstand an airplane collision collapse after a collision and an intense fire, deep water drilling rigs claiming to have no chance of an accident explode and kill the Gulf of Mexico, two space shuttles fall to the earth in flames.  Anything made by humans will fail eventually.  And as recent events have shown us when a "low possibility" event occurs in a very complex situation, the result is usually a catastrophe many times greater than any "plausible" worst case scenario accepted before the event. 

The very idea that we believe we can store radioactive waste for over 100,000 years while it decays to a safe state is astonishing.  The same people that built Three Mile Island or Chernobyl are going to build the chambers where we house the waste from nuclear reactors.  We can't even get short term storage right, apparently.  Tritium has been leaking from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant for some time and it will probably end up in the drinking water of New York.  We can't keep very good track of the deadliest poison known to man, plutonium, which has a half life of 24,000 years.  As far as humanity is concerned the life span of plutonium or any other slowly decaying radioactive material is infinite.  We will not be here 100,000 years from now.  Some other form of us or some other creature will have taken our place long before the poison ceases to be deadly.  Cultures and societies will rise and fall violently and to think we can guard this horrendous danger against those future persons is laughable.  An oil spill, no matter how immense, is finite.  For the human race, the radioactive material we are making today will last beyond forever.

Gulf Coast Oil Spill and Our Old Friends Halliburton

See this full set of pictures here.

When obtaining the license to build this enormous oil well that reached over a mile down into the water to drill, baby drill, BP said the chances of an explosion or catastrophic accident was next to zero.  Aren't these same people making the same claims about nuclear power plants?

Oh, and a little tidbit about this that brings a nostalgic image of the evil Dick Cheney to the mind's eye:  Haliburton was the company that did the cementing, a process of injecting cement to line the well cap and the walls of the well to contain the highly explosive gases.  Haliburton's cementing is also implicated as the cause of the gigantic Timor oil well blowout last year.


cross posted to the mopod blog

Wow! Obama to Call For Nuke Free World!

Obama to call for nuclear-free world

PRAGUE (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will call for the elimination of all nuclear weapons across the globe, in remarks on Sunday he hopes will lend credibility to his message in atomic disputes with Iran and North Korea.

Visiting Prague during an eight-day visit to Europe, Obama plans to deliver what his aides have billed as a major speech on weapons proliferation.

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Nuclear Energy: Safe, Clean, Cheap ...?

I have three problems with nuclear energy:

1. Waste. This will be incredibly deadly for a period of time longer than the human race's existence. The very idea of burying our nuclear waste and thereby keeping it safe from the curiosity of future humans... or other future life form... or geology... is ludicrous.

2. Safety. Nuclear power plants are designed by, engineered by, built by, regulated by, and operated by humans. Therefore the possiblity of failure is possible at all levels. As Chernobyl proved, failure can be deadly or worse and for a very long time.

3. Expense. Even if we don't include the increasing cost and danger of stored waste (which is monstrous and exponentially increasing with time), even if we don't do that, nuclear power is phenomenally expensive. Add the incredible amount of energy used and environmental destruction wreaked just to create the fuel with the incredible expense of creating this incredibly complex machine and the unmeasurable expense of accidents and waste leaks and it equals "more expensive than is affordable."

It all boils down to not liking it. Burning coal is very bad in the short term, but at our present useage we will run out of coal long before our nuclear fuel will no longer be deadly. For that matter we will probably run out of all combustible materials on this planet before our nuclear waste is no longer toxic.

We must find a way to use the massive forces around us that we can tap as wind, hydro, and tide. We also must constrain the human population as we're pressing the planet to its limits right now, imagine it in 500 years! Everything boils down to too many humans and too small a planet for all of them.

Pirates die strangely after taking Iranian ship

Pirates die strangely after taking Iranian ship

A tense standoff has developed in waters off Somalia over an Iranian merchant ship laden with a mysterious cargo that was hijacked by pirates.

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died...

My first thought was radiation poisoning. Then I started wondering how many deadly cargoes like this are sailing in our world's oceans right this moment. Then I curled up in a ball in a corner and started rocking back and forth, humming "Pop Goes the Weasel" with my eyes clamped shut.

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