In all the annals of spin, few statements are as misleading as Vice President Cheney's that the nuclear industry operates "efficiently, safely, and with no discharge of greenhouse gases or emissions," or President Bush's claim America's 103 nuclear plants operate "without producing a single pound of air pollution or greenhouse gases."
Even as the White House refuses to concede global warmining is really happening, it touts nuclear power as the answer to it as if it were an arm of the Nuclear Energy Institute(NEI), the industry's trade group. NEI's advertisements declare, "Kids today are part of the most energy-intensive generation in history. They demand lots of electricity. And they deserve clean air."
In reality, not only are vast amounts of fossil fuels burned to mine and refine the uranium for nuclear power reactors, polluting the atmosphere, but those plants are allowed "to emit hundreds of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year," Dr. Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear authority, points out in her book "Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer"(The New Press).
What's more, the thousands of tons of solid radioactive waste accumulating in the cooling pools next to those plants contain "extremely toxic elements that will inevitably pollute the environment and human food chains, a legacy that will lead to epidemics of cancer, leukemia, and genetic disease in populations living near nuclear power plants or radioactive waste facilities for many generations to come," she writes. Countless Americans are already dead or dying as a result of those nuclear plants and that story is not being effectively told.
To begin with, over half of the nation's dwindling uranium deposits lie under Navajo and Pueblo tribal land, and at least one in five tribal members recruited to mine the ore were exposed to radioactive gas radon 220 and "have died and are continuing to die of lung cancer," Caldicott writes. "Thousands of Navajos are still affected by uranium-induced cancers," she adds.
As for uranium tailings discarded in the extraction process, 265-million tons of it have been left to pile up in, and pollute, the Southwest, even though they contain radioactive thorium. At the same time, uranium 238, also known as "depleted uranium,"(DU) a discarded nuclear plant biproduct, "is lying around in thousands of leaking, disintegrating barrels" at the enrichment facilites in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Ky., where ground water is now too polluted to drink, Caldicott writes.
Fuel rods at every nuclear plant leak radioactive gases or are routinely vented into the atmosphere by plant operators. "Although the nuclear industry claims it is 'emission' free, in fact it is collectively releasing millions of curies annually," the author notes.
Speaking of safety, since the Three Mile Island(TMI) plant meltdown on March 28, 1979, some 2,000 Harrisburg area residents settled sickness claims with operators' General Public Utilities Corp. and Metropolitan Edison Co., the owners of TMI.
Area residents' symptoms included nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from the nose, a metallic taste in the mouth, hair loss, and red skin rash, typical of acute radiation sickness when people are exposed to whole-body doses of radiation around 100 rads, said Caldicott, who arrived on the scene a week after the meltdown.
David Lochbaum, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, believes nuclear plant safety standards are lacking and predicted another nuclear catastrophe in the near future, stating, "It's not if but when." Not only are such plants unsafe but the spent fuel is often hauled long distances through cities to waste storage facilities where it will have to be guarded for an estimated 240,000 years.
"The magnitude of the radiation generated in a nuclear power plant is almost beyond belief," Caldicott writes. "The original uranium fuel that is subject to the fission process becomes 1 billion times more radiactive in the reactor core. A thousand megawatt nuclear power plant contains as much long-lived radiation as that produced by the explosion of 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs."
Each year, operators must remove a third of the radioactive fuel rods from their reactors as they have become contaminated with fission products. The rods are so hot they must be stored for 30 to 60 years in a heavily shielded building continuously cooled by air or water lest they burst into flame, and afterwards packed into a container.
"Construction of these highly specialized containers uses as much energy as construction of the original reactor itself, which is 80 gigajoules per metric ton," Caldicott points out.
What's a big construction project, though, when you don't have to pay for it? In the 2005 Energy Bill, Congress allocated $13-billion in subsidies to the nuclear power industry. Between 1948 and 1998, the U.S. government subsidized the industry with $70-billion of taxpayer monies for research and development, corporate Socialism pure and simple.
Sherwood Ross has worked as a publicist for Chicago; as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and workplace columnist for Reuters. He has also been a media consultant to colleges, law schools, labor unions, and to the editors of more than 100 national magazines. A civil rights activist, he was News Director for the National Urban League, a talk show host at WOL Radio, Washington, D.C., and holds an award for "best spot news coverage" for Chicago radio stations for civil rights reporting. He is the author "Gruening of Alaska,"(Best Books)and several plays about Japan during World War II, including "Baron Jiro," and "Yamamoto's Decision," read at the National Press Club, where he is a member. His favorite quotations are from the Sermon on The Mount.
I very much endorse Sherwood Ross's article "Nuclear Power Not Clean, Green or Safe" (2007-01-08). It is surprising that anyone should be considering building new nuclear power plants in the US when there is a simple mature technology available that can deliver huge amounts of clean energy without any of the headaches of nuclear power.
I refer to 'concentrating solar power' (CSP), the technique of concentrating sunlight using mirrors to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to store solar heat in melted salts so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1985 and half a million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. CSP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.
CSP works best in hot deserts and, of course, these are not always nearby! But it is feasible and economic to transmit solar electricity over very long distances using highly-efficient 'HVDC' transmission lines. With transmission losses at about 3% per 1000 km, solar electricity may be transmitted to anywhere in the US. An area of 160 km x 160 km in California, Nevada or Arizona would be sufficient to meet the entire current US demand for electricity.
In the recent 'TRANS-CSP' report commissioned by the German government, it is estimated that CSP electricity, imported from North Africa and the Middle East, could become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in Europe, including the cost of transmission. A large-scale HVDC transmission grid has also been proposed by Airtricity as a means of optimising the use of wind power throughout Europe.
Further information about CSP may be found at www.trec-uk.org.uk and www.trecers.net. Copies of the TRANS-CSP report may be downloaded from www.trec-uk.org.uk/reports.htm. The many problems associated with nuclear power are summarised at www.mng.org.uk/green_house/no_nukes.htm.
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GerryWolff (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments)
on Monday, January 8, 2007 at 11:25:42 AM
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