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Next, ask We The People what We want. No one seems to be asking the People's Will.
Example: "As an American Citizen, do you want the continuation of nuclear power in the United States Of America? (or your state?)
Nuclear Energy will not go away. The Obama Administration wants it, they, unlike what they did with the Oil Spill declared a moratorium on drilling, are not even calling for a moratorium on building more plants and shutting down the ones that are noted as the most dangerous like the one here in New York, Indian Point rated as #1 in danger.
My understand about thorium is that one ounce of thorium is as bad as one ounce of Uranium and its rubbish. Both will hurt you! Pehaps more study is needed to be done on free hydrogen from the atmosphere. Science today just may have some answers to be true to nature but its the money thing, and "God forbid if we had free and clean energy and energy that works with nature not against it.
the US govt. seemingly has a nuclear policy of turning a blind-eye disaster-wise while branding nuclear the "green" investment of choice instead of seeing the costly *accident-in-waiting* it is.
We're close but not there yet! My hope was that this might be the moment when people would start to "get it" until I talked with my son. He is a very tech savvy computer guru at a national architectural firm and will be getting his Nissan Leaf in a few weeks. His view is that it is a necessary evil and that new plant designs that are supposedly "walk away safe" will solve the problem of melt-downs. When I asked him about spent fuel he said, "reprocess it." |SIGH|
Do I think America will move away from nuclear power now?
Not as long as there is a dollar to be made by the Washington crooks and their cronies. Greed has no feelings or empathy. It really doesn't matter much at this point because in all honesty, I don't think they plan to build any here in the first place, it's all just a big distraction to give the people something else to argue about while they sell off the rest of America and turn out the lights. Why would we even need any more nuclear plants to run things here? Soon, America won't be manufacturing bubble gum here. Oh yeah, my bad, I forgot about all of the Wal-Mart stores, I suppose we could use a couple of nuclear power plants to run those. . . or how in the world are we going to sell all of the crap made in China?
Again I will ask - how many Americans have died from direct exposure to Radiation coming from Nuclear reactors in America in the last year - last 10 years - last 20 years? Anybody?
Here is a rough count of those who died from Guns or Highway deaths: 1 year Gun deaths 10,000! 1 Year Vehicle deaths - 40,000! These are approximate numbers and may be more. So one year 50,000 deaths - 5 years 250,000 - 10 years 500,000 - 20 years 1,000,000 deaths! Where are the numbers for nuclear deaths here in America?
I don't want to downplay this. But it appears that this looks like the fear factor is based on the scale of the problem: we can scare the bejesus out of people by stating that nuclear energy will kill them horribly, yet when we mention that 40,000 people actually died on our highways last year, these very same people shrug their shoulders, get in their car or truck, and head on down the highway with nary a thought to the consequences!
In the case of guns the fear engendered causes the very same people to make a run on their local gun shops to buy more guns thus increasing their own chances, or loved one, of dying from one!
People, we need to get a grip on the problem here: guns and vehicles kill more people, at an even greater rate than any nuclear accident we or anyone will ever experience! Yet we ignore the real Killers and demonize what is infinitesimally smaller based on a scale than the real killer – guns and automobiles!
If we are going to give this much vehement discussion and denunciation on what is many orders of magnitude SMALLER in the potential of killing people, than we should be giving that MUCH MORE discussion and vehement denunciation to what ACTUALLY does KILL a lot of people – guns and automobiles!
Death is death – does not matter how it occurred. What does matter is what are WE, as a people, going to do to decrease that number. We certainly are not going to solve it by ignoring the problem. As to nuclear energy - we must face the challenge and try to fix the problem, not run away from it in fear. One good way would be to create a cleaner technology that would ultimately make nuclear energy so expensive that we would never have to use it again. That is only one of maybe thousands more!
As Ed Shulze stated on his show tonight: don't the repugs know that this is COMMUNISM! This is exactly what the communists did in Russia. Don't the "Pee Party" folks know that they will also be part of this middle class killing onslaught? That they will also lose their jobs? That they will also be affected by all this middle class killing legislation? If they don't then they all need to get their brains scanned!
But the repugs have another agenda - destroy the middle class - eliminate the minimum wage - cheap labor - privatize everything - tax breaks for the rich - from which they will get from, or try to get, from the poor.
This is scorched earth tactics and it will most fortunately come right back and bite them all right in the !ss!!
I'm sooo tired of corporate American influencing government! We get what we allow.
Curious about current radiation levels in the US?
This web site has been in operation for a while now...well before the Japan tragedy. They show a map of the US with locations that show the current radiation levels, as monitored by volunteers who have Geiger Counters connected to their computers and constantly update...usually every minute the screen is refreshed. Normal radiation background levels fluxuate anywhere from 5 to 60 CPM and the radiation alert is set at 130 CPM. Right now, at 1345 hours PST, the radiation level in the SF Bay area is at 16 CPM and the highest is near Denver at about 56 CPM. And these numbers, like I said, fluxuate minute by minute that reflects the constant fluxuation levels of background radiation. If these numbers start to shift higher and go over 130 then we should probably worry a bit. Stay indoors with windows and doors closed for a few days (or weeks?).
They have maps of Japan,Alaska and Hawaii but no data points because, although they do have volunteers in some of those areas...they are not responding to requests for input. In Japan, the monitoring site is just north of Tokyo.
The web site is: http://www.radiationnetwork.com/
How many $ are spent subsidizing Nuclear power! How much of the dept. of energy budget is spent to to make nuclear power seem affordable when it is not. If you hired people to make solar hot water heaters and wind powered generators and gave them to utilities for free it would be cheaper than nuclear power.
Renee I absolutely agree with you with this statement below!!!!
I'm thinking, ummmm...no...and if given the choice, I'd rather try my luck and *risk* running out of energy options as a preferable "necessary evil" instead of risking a global disaster — or even a local melt-down...*heavy-sigh*
Nuclear power is dirty from beginning to end. The mining of uranium kills people. The fracking for uranium kills people and pollutes the ancient aqifers that furnish all water for the desert. The refining of uranium takes more electricity than it produces, and the waste lasts forever. While Thorium may be more abundant than uranium and easier to handle [not producing plutonium is a good thing] the toxicity of its extraction and the process of making it boil water looks dicey to me. I haven't investigated it so, if you have the specs, that would be nice.] Most of the new alternative power sources depend on rare earths and much energy to refine. The corn ethanol scam is a blind alley that we should get out of asap. But the new nukes that are proposed right now are still the same old same old and badly designed and put together by the same cheap designers and manufacturers. It is my opinion that we haven't had more grand disasters only because we are lucky, and because the constant minor disasters are only fleetingly covered, if at all. The other thing about nuclear disasters, as I have seen noted, is that a nuclear disaster lasts forever. The thousands of acres of desecrated once rich farmland in the Ukraine that are forever too radioactive to use, is one of the legacies of Chernobyl. Japan has precious few acres to spare to eternal poison of radioactivity that is spewing out from at least 3 meltdowns and maybe more. It doesn't take too many disasters the likes of which we have already had, to kill the world.
exactly correct Russ
renee My thoughts exactly
Thom We should phase out nuclear power / Phase in wind-solar-clean energy but GOP will not pay for anything Unless its another profitable war or more billionaire tax cuts as Reagan Bush & GOP congress each gave. I Never thought I'd see the day the GOP became this devious greedy and heartless. No more GOP for me 1981 Reaganomics Bush 1 -2 2008 crash TARP - fat cat policies with lots of push by Goldman Fed boys..Greenspan -Rubin, Paulson,Bernacki They taught me a hard lesson.
Back in the early time of the 60' s The Native Americans protested the digging up of Uranium.
They New ! Uranium to the Native Amercans were the planet glands if you will. Uranium in its natural state in the ground took millions of years to decay solid rock and other materials to create a surface and atmosphere for organic life to become possible. We live off that decay if you will, but Taken from the ground will only speed up the process.
I think wisdom is wasted on the foolish. Too many Americans are concerned they may not be able to micro wave pop corn or turn on there flat screen. Modern people are tragedy based learners. They
are motivated by disaster rather than motivated by precaution. I am not advocating backward thinking by any means. I embrace technology when balanced with smart planning for the future. That future
consists of reasonable consumption and impact on environment but my own actions indicate I don't practice what I preach. Part of that is circumstance and part of it is my own decision in my consumption of resources. I can cut back and do in some cases. The problem is until we as citizens American and of the planet start to seriously consider and demand reform in the way we consume and live our lives directed toward comfort we will always be hypocrites.
Corporations in the nuclear industry will always justify their worth as a result of demand for their service.
One disaster to the next. Nuclear plants are targets.
They are targets for terrorists , earth quakes and solar flares alike. Mankind can survive without nukes, it remains questionable as to whether we can survive with them. Fish in the Pacific agree that the less the better and the sooner the better.
Thanks for posting this information. I look forward to getting more educated about the subject. Really. I am not being sarcastic.
Re: Cutting National Weather Service funding...
One wonders who inserted that cut into the latest budget proposal.
Cutting funding for the Nation Weather Service seems to be a pet project by several politicians. I think it was Rick Santorum that proposed it first. It seems that the Weather Channel was a big contributor to his campaign coffers and wanted the NWS out of the picture so that the Weather Channel's profits could grow. Of course Santorum framed it an unnecessary expense function that the Federal government should not be involved in.
delster said:
"Solar is really as adventurous as I am when it comes to nuclear fission."
Actually, solar energy comes about as a byproduct of nuclear fusion. We've been trying to create a stable, self-sustaining fusion reaction since the '70s (at least). The benefits are, in my humble opinion, horribly outweighed by the same downsides of fission: it results in highly radioactive waste. (In this case, it's the enclosure, the magnetic field windings, etc., that comprise the fusion reactor.) Having that fusion taking place 93 million miles away is, I think, a real good idea. It means we don't have to figure out how to store the radioactive pieces of that fusion reactor that have to be replaced periodically.
It's a pity we allowed the nuclear energy industry -- and others (oil, coal) -- convince everyone that solar was not going to work. Sure, it was very inefficient and wouldn't have worked back in the '70s when Jimmy Carter proposed moving away from fossil fuels. But... if we had spent the money back then on the basic research that has resulted in the solar cells that are in use today. Imagine how much /more/ efficient they could have been /today/.
I am and have been opposed to the use of nuclear energy for ANYTHING ever since reading the science behind it 50 years ago in high school. It does not matter if the radiation poisoning gets to us here in central Wisconsin -- this is OUR world, and our children's and grandchildren's world. We need to clean it up -- all of it -- for us and for them. Not to overuse cliches, but "No man lives on an island," and "Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." If our brothers and sisters in Japan and the West Coast of the U.S. are adversely affected, then so are we all!
..
Even if all the world's nuclear power plants were to be turned off and the decommissioning process started tomorrow, the human race will be dealing with the consequences of our having used nuclear power until, probably, the end of the human race's existence on this planet.
And it's not just the old fuel rods that form the waste. The reactor vessles and the structures that house the reactors themselves are radioactive and will need to be disposed of somehow. It's not like you can just implode those sites and scoop up the debris in a front loader and haul it away to the landfill. Even ignoring the waste fule rods there's enough contaminated material for each reactor site to be declared a Superfund site.