In 1983, Barack Obama, a senior at Columbia University described his visions of a "nuclear free world" in an article titled "Breaking the War Mentality" in the university newsmagazine, Sundial. He described discussions of "first- versus second-strike capabilities'' that "suit the military-industrial interests'' with their "billion-dollar erector sets,'' and called for the abolition of the global arsenals of tens of thousands of deadly warheads.
As a candidate he acknowledged that he was worried for the safety of his children who lived in Illinois because it has the highest concentration of nuclear reactors in the US - and opposed further nuclear subsidies. "I am not a nuclear proponent," he said:
Few people are so clear about their philosophical approach to life in the nuclear age, but President Obama was clearly a man with the correct instincts when it came to radiation, nuclear weapons and health.
However, not only in his State of the Union address did he strongly endorse the false concept of "safe, clean" nuclear power as one of the solutions to global warming - "But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives," he said. "That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country" - but he has just announced that he will spend $7.4 billion dollars in the next five years for the "security and maintenance" of the current enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons. So what has gone wrong?
I must admit that I have been worried since he appointed Steven Chu from Los Alamos Labs as his Secretary of Energy and John Holdren as science advisor because they are both enthusiastic endorsers of nuclear power. I had hoped that this president would be a true leader who would take advice from all sides but make decisions using his own instincts and innate wisdom. Clearly this has not happened either in the case of nuclear power or in his noble vision to seek a nuclear weapons-free world.
The never-ending persistence of the nuclear warriors who inhabit the Pentagon and nuclear weapons labs have prevailed yet again to influence this idealistic young president on whom many of us had placed our hopes for planetary survival. This wonderful vision can only be fulfilled if the great United States of America takes responsibility for initiating and leading the global nuclear arms race by reversing its ceaseless quest for global nuclear security and superiority. The steps are as follows
There is no way to separate the production of nuclear electricity from the production of nuclear weapons. Nuclear power is the prodigal son of the weapons industry.
What then to do about global warming, an encroaching horror which is about to radically alter our lives and to threaten the existence of many millions of species?
Despite the Obama administration's push for nuclear power it, in fact, will never be the magic bullet which alleviates global warming because:
It's little wonder that after his speech, more than 3,000 advocates of safe, clean energy wrote to President Obama in less than 48 hours rejecting his call for more nuclear power. "President Obama needs to remember what Candidate Obama promised: no more taxpayer subsidies for nuclear power," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS). Mariotte also noted that the nuclear subsidies being promoted by Obama amount to the largest corporate bailout of them all.
For an idealistic student at Columbia who became a visionary, Nobel Prize-winning President, this is not the sort of change we expected, or indeed thought you meant.
Indeed, President Obama is forgetting the true cost of nuclear power to communities and nations, as these experts remind us in this video on nuclear energy's dangerous impact on health:
Small amounts of ordinary water will be a major fuel in the future.
The article about BlackLight Power (labeled Hydrinos) at www.american-reporter.com/ is a good place to start.
The story is really about fractional Hydrogen. We are also developing this almost unknown, new source of energy.
Our goal is a fuel for hybrid vehicles. A gallon of water is expected to power your car 1,000 miles.
See the article about the Love Affair with Autos at www.aesopinstitute.org
It mentions other revolutionary technologies that promise to replace fossil fuels faster than nuclear plants.
Two independent laboratory validations of fractional Hydrogen have taken place.
National labs can reproduce the experiments and rapidly increase acceptance of this hard to believe new source of energy.
Hybrid cars and trucks, running on water, along with other revolutionary technologies, once they are thoroughly validated, can become power plants when suitably parked.
No wires necessary.
The vehicles might pay their way be selling electricity to the local utility.
Who will not want such a car or truck?
A 24/7 development program will accomplish several goals, one of which is to effectively end any desire for nuclear power plants.
It is the systemic risks that escapes you careful nuke planners:
Reactors are 10's of thousands of times more radioactive than a nbomb, and with much more long lived biological damaging isotopes.
It's the WORST case you have to consider, then you have to assume you missed something worse, so you double it. at least.
A terrorist deliberate destruction of a reactor in a populated city, using large quantities of conventional explosives to completely destroy the core and and spread if around the city. (I not telling terrorist anything they haven't already thought of.)
That would kill most of the people in the city, render the city radioactive for a long time, and I seriously doubt that city would be inhabited for at least a hundred years.
"A Princeton University scientist calculated that the energy in the bubble was enough to set off an explosion equal to three tons of TNT. Such a force could rip the top of the reactor dome right off, flooding the containment with radioactive debris. There were also fears that the hydrogen would escape to the containment and explode there. One engineer calculated that a hydrogen explosion three times the force of Wednesday's blast might break the four-foot- thick walls of the containment, releasing radioactive material into the air. "
It has been clear this pres is not moving in the right direction to address environment.
The first indication, July to continue to subsidize logging in the Tongass..http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/16/obama-administration-appr_n_235311.html
Since then there have been many disappointments with this administration. I was hoping/praying he was the real deal.
You love the death death danger, the armed guards, and private police force, ...
Lithuania was forced to close their nuclear power plant as part of a condiation to join the EU not because they wanted to or any desire to move to non-nuclear power. They did not want to lose their nuclear power as that ties them to Russian natural gas and oil. It was a loss of 80% of their power. Lowered the standard of living for every Lithuanian the minute the reactor shut down.
The wind and solar markets in the EU survive because taxes on nuclear indirectly support the direct cash subsidies paid out to wind and solar generators by pumping millions in revenue into the various government's budgets.
So how is the EU moving away from nuclear? I must have missed something.
You know this.
"The Green Jobs for Main Street Investment act"
spend a trillion on green upgrade for all appropriate gov building.
put in a small business incentive.
rooftop pv solar in the best ares is 3 cents per kwh, the cheapest electricity the end user can invest in.
Remove all subsides, loans and insurance from Fossil and Nukes.
If they aren't competitive without gov help after 50 and 100 years, they never will be.
99% of the nuke waste CANNOT be burned in other reactors, and burning it actually creates MORE curies and waste, but of a shorter lifetime.
Nuke's mess is going to cost us quadrillion's of dollars over a million years.
4 times longer than Homo Sapient, Modern Humans, have existed.
see my profile for proof and links.
Your 99% statement leaves a lot out. It's true that the fission products, which make up most of the radioactive part of spent fuel can't be burned in a reactor, nor would you want to. You can separate the fission products, use some for industrial purposes and the rest can be put in the ground. In about 300 years the fission products will be radioactively cooler than the ore from which the Uranium was extracted. The Plutonium isn't being burned because doing so would require re-licensing of reactors which is both money and time consuming processes. Upon relicensing the Pu can be mixed with U to form MOX or mixed oxide fuel. Currently we don't have any operational reactors that can handle the remaining actinides, but there are designs for advanced fueled reactors that could. I've worked with the people at Idaho Labs doing the work. You are correct that the specific activity would be increased since most of the weight of once-through spent fuel is U-238, which has a low specific activity so separating the U/Pu from the fission products and burning the Pu would increase the "hotness." This isn't bad, because it drastically reduces the time that the stuff is hazardous and reduces the total volume. If you use the Pu to breed more fuel, eventually you reach a steady state where you burn-create at the same rate.
My point remains: the huge volume of waste you cannot burn is still deadly for 100,000 years, as long as modern humans have existed.
100's of time longer than any human civilization.
We have no technology even in theory that could burn all the deadly steels, liquids etcc
And I am not speaking of the fast breeders or any type of MOF plants that merely complicate the nuclear fuel cycle from these plants.
I am talking about the thorium-salt reactors that never made it off the shelf at Oak Ridge because the militarists demanded the weapons-producing uranium fueled reactors.
Time to close that book, as Dr. Caldicott says.
But I remain open at this point for a major fork in the nuclear path, with weapons-proliferating, plutonium-producing, uranium-fueled poison in the rear view mirror, and the potential for the much safer and manageable thorium-fueled energy-producing reactor favored by Dr. Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge.
I'm not saying I am in f avor of this type of nuclear plant.
Just that I am open to it, in replacing the current bomb-makers.
Weapon-material-producing uranium reactors existed long before uranium *power* reactors, and no nuclear weapon-possessing country ever seems to have used the latter to make explosive. The difference is akin to that between guns and car motors.
I think most people who claim to respect Caldicott do not actually respect her; they just find her helpful in protecting their oil and gas income.
(Since these commodities subsidize government, a common attempted deception is to pretend the oil money link is an oil *company* link, something that apparently is intrinsically absurd to imagine anyone the left of Jesse Helms having. Of course it isn't really absurd, and anyway much of the money is disbursed by government, not companies, so it's important to distinguish oil and gas *interests* from companies. Caldicott lobbies for the deaths of children in a way that is helpful to the interests, not just the companies.)
(How fire can be domesticated : http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/ )
First, it is disingenous to say that nuclear power plants are "factories" for nuclear weapons. While they do produce plutonium, the quantity and composition is not ideal for a weapon. It is akin to saying an iron factory is a weapons manufacturer because iron oxide plus aluminum is a thermite incendiary device.
Second, wind doesn't always blow and sun doesn't always shine. Conservation will only make a dent in our energy usage. In order to continue our standard of living we must maintain or increase our energy usage per person.
Third, a meltdown (in the US) won't kill anyone outside of the containment dome, unless you use shady statistics. Furthermore, the containment dome provides protection against nearly all terrorist attacks.
Finally, an abandonment of nuclear everything by the US will not convince other countries to do the same. The scare tactics presented by Ms. Caldicott are beyond ridiculous and factually-challenged.
"There is no way to separate the production of nuclear electricity from the production of nuclear weapons." Japan has done it rather well, I would say. As have the Germans.
The power/weapons link is a lie, in the same sense that a treatise "Transport/Crime: Breaking the Thermodynamic Link" would be a lie if it promised that banning cars would keep guns out of criminals' hands or reduce the number of guns so held.
It would keep from them one *kind* of gun, the converted V6 that has been made able to throw one of its pistons, but not eliminate the much easier illegal access to guns that usually is taken in preference to the modified-V6 route.
This link from MIT is about Thorium nuclear reactors, which Senate Leader Harry Reid supports.
Thorium reactors offer no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, create no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles. Thorium fuel can be modified to be used in current nuclear reactors
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/19758
http://strategicthought-charles77.blogspot.com/2010/02/lets-get-to-work-on-real-green-energy.html
What she does not provide is how many windmills and solar collection facilities will need to be installed in the same timeframe if we were to take nuclear completely off the table. Wind mills are rated at 20-30% of their nameplate capacity which means they are good for about 500kW each at best. That means we need (let me do the quick math here based on her 2,000 one GW reactor number) oh, about 4 million wind mills around the globe (and that would be on the extreme low side). That would be 4,000,000 wind mills.
The amount of raw material (some of which has to come from the Chinese who have their own environmental issues) would be immense as would the transporation of each single windmill due to pole and blade lengths making them challenging to transport.
Nor does Dr. Caldicott discuss the billions that are required to upgrade our transmission system to handle a significant penetration of wind and solar into the power generation market.
This argument has been discussed by many and has been proven to be a huge logistical issue for both the renewables energy generation side as well as the nuclear generation side. So to use this argument against nuclear power is incorrect on many levels.
Guardian June 11, 2009
Republicans seek federal financing for 100 new reactors despite huge capital costs and unsolved problems of storing waste
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/11/us-nuclear-industry-plans-new-reactors
To those iwho believe Nuclear power is oh so safe and good for the environment..hey....move to Rocky Flats....