Re: Nuclear Power - the only answer.


Robert Peffers wrote:
> Yeah! But the strange thing is the way the same peple who go all weak at the
> knees at the very mention of radioactivity can read all the real stories
> that pop into the news on a daily basis of the real deaths caused by more
> conventional fuels, the mine explosions, the exploding homes, the dam
> bursts, the oil fires and so on and never turn a hair.

All of those stories are awful. None of them will hold a candle to the
senselessness of one nuclear missile fired in anger. Try and imagine
what would happen if Iran fired a nuke at Israel or Pakistan at India.
If 21st century nuclear power becomes accepted at home then we accept
the inevitability of other countries doing the same but with 20th
century technology and 20th century military goals.

We also say "yes" to huge piles of nuclear waste that will have to be
administered for millenia by people who have, in the past, seen fit to
utterly poison the Irish Sea and vast tracts of land within the UK.

You can point at how 'clean" nuclear power is because it's not
poisoning the air. You choose not to see its potential for poisoning
the land. You say you can store it safely but that has not been the
case so far. At least not in the UK. The costs will be astronomical to
build these plants too. It will take many years and billion of pounds.
We need something now.

Think of something else.

> How about the stark fact that the very word fuel indicates that it is a
> potential source of power means exactly the same for the stored potential of
> water uphill as it does for the scoop of Uranium.
> By that I mean there is a standard way of indicating how much potential work
> it can do. The stone cold fact is that no matter what the fuel that quantity
> of work is exactly the same and is just as potentially dangerous. Simply put
> a given amount of power in a given quantity of fuel can do just the same
> work and can kill just as much.

This is the "the world is a dangerous place" argument. It's been tried.
I don't think the goal is to accept the dangers that exist and add to
them. I think a nice idea would be to make the world safer as well as
cleaner. Your argument is a baby with the bathwater one.


Septic

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Nuclear Power: Unsafe, Uneconomical, Unsustainable
    ... "A critical point about the practicability of nuclear power to provide ... The quality of uranium ore varies inversely with their ... rock and shale that will provide the fresh fuel for a one gigawatt ... Fresh fuel for one reactor contains about 10 curies of radioactivity ...
    (sci.energy)
  • Re: Where Science Went Wrong (hilarious web site)
    ... public that there is no risk to the climate from increased CO2 levels. ... spent forty years *lying* about nuclear power so why the heck should ... If you waved a magic wand and instantaneously replaced every single fossil fuel power plant with a nuclear plant of equivalent capacity, you'd cut greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 20%. ... You put back into the air exactly what you take out of the air. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.written)
  • Re: TIME Magazine & CNN News story - "The Clean Energy Scam"
    ... food riots in so many countries now that it is hard to keep track. ... Nuclear power is the only major solution to global warming ... Using nuclear power we can make synthetic gasoline and jet fuel ... Nuclear power plants efficiently output at least 93 ...
    (alt.politics)
  • Re: Hey Mr. Hyde!
    ... fuel cells have been around for a very long time. ... "It is simply a problem of finding a safe way to transport the ... the dangers are far, far too great...let's Hope no terrorist ever ... And he's gotta be fast ...
    (alt.lang.asm)