Translation
The Green Revolution: Why it can't wait
Our future is being stolen. Our health is being destroyed daily by nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and a trillion dollar accident -- something that costs more than both Gulf Wars and will kill more people -- could happen in an instant.
In fact, such a catastrophe is inevitable if we don't close the nukes and switch to a green economy. And, no country with nuclear power can afford to threaten with nuclear weapons. We have nullified any long-term strategic advantage such weapons ever offered, by building so many "targets."
Each nuclear power plant produces about a ton per week of an incredibly highly-concentrated deadly dust -- a solidified poison gas that can be vaporized in a fire. Burning does not alter the decay rate of uranium or any other radioactive substance. It just releases the poison gas into the environment -- into our lungs.
So-called "accidental" releases are inevitable as millions of pounds of spent nuclear fuel are handled throughout the world. Some releases are much worse than others: Chernobyl probably vaporized more than a hundred million Curies of uranium and fission products. Three Mile Island probably vaporized more than ten million Curies. In both cases, monitoring was poorly done. For example, when numbers went off-scale for a few hours, improper reconstructions of the events never recognized that the hours off-scale were probably the most brutal time of all, and the scales were off by orders-of-magnitude.
Davis-Besse almost melted down in 2002. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission let the plant, located in a depressed part of Ohio, re-open anyway after nearly two years of rebuilding. The power fluctuations when it was going back online are probably what really caused the August 14th, 2003 blackout -- not some tree touching a power line, as the official story goes! After the fact, the NRC could not say if we were 5 seconds or 5 weeks away from catastrophe, but a football-sized piece of the reactor pressure vessel head had been eaten away by unnoticed corrosion, and the stainless steel liner -- never designed to take pressure without 8 inches of steel on the other side of it -- was all that held back the worst accident in American history -- and the liner -- only 3/16ths of an inch thick -- was already bulging out. Obligingly, the media never told the public how close we came to disaster, but it was very, very close.
All nuclear power plants are continuously poisoning the people around them with tritium. Even the lap-dog NRC considers tritium releases excessive if they are greater than approximately one teaspoon per year per plant. (Tritium is hydrogen, but with two neutrons and one proton instead of the usual single proton with no neutrons.) A number of communities have realized that their local nuke plant poisoned their wells with tritium, which has a half-life of 12.3 years, and are suing in court because of illnesses they have suffered. Other communities also suffer, but haven't been able to organize enough to file a lawsuit. Lawsuits are very difficult. They are expensive and time-consuming -- especially while you are caring for a child with leukemia!
In addition to tritium and many other radioactive elements that are routinely released, each reactor creates about a ton per week of spent nuclear reactor fuel -- high level nuclear waste. Spent nuclear fuel contains the most vile stuff on earth: Radioactive fission products. There are numerous radioactive decay steps after the original decay of uranium, before it becomes lead or some other stable element, and each radioactive decay step is also dangerous.
Some of the fission products of uranium have a special affinity for various organs of the human body, such as the thyroid, bones, liver, stomach, ovaries, or gonads. These fission products appear to be useful atoms to your body, which sees them as stable building-blocks of life. In fact they are either radioactive isotopes of useful elements, or they are chemically similar -- and radioactive.
The developing fetus is especially vulnerable -- as much as a thousand times as vulnerable as an adult -- so for that reason alone, you can (and should) say that the poison gases released routinely from nuclear power plants actually target your fetus! The rates of miscarriages, childhood leukemias, and many other diseases all go UP around operating nuclear reactors and down when the reactors are shut down. Reactor operators are baby killers, mass murderers, and terrorists.
While it's true that health-care system improvements can, and do, save millions of people's lives, the fact remains that preventing health problems in the first place is the real key. The primary goal is to preserve the quality of life for as many people as possible, for as long as possible.
Spent nuclear fuel -- solidified poison gas -- and especially the fission products -- must be carefully kept away from humans. In addition to tritium, radioactive cesium-137, strontium-90, and iodine-131 are routinely emitted by nuclear power plants, to mention just a few of over 200 different isotopes which are created during the "splitting of the atom" in a nuclear weapon (in a fraction of a millisecond) or a nuclear power plant (more slowly).
Spent nuclear fuel -- a witches' brew of radioactive elements -- can self-ignite if exposed to air, or if it is simply packed too tightly together, since it generates enormous amounts of wasted heat for hundreds of thousands of years.
Besides gaseous releases from fire, a "criticality event" is also possible in some cases, if spent reactor fuel is improperly handled.
Nearly a ton per week from each of more than 440 nuclear power reactors around the world (plus military propulsion units) is over 50 tons per day of new high level radioactive poison gas (temporarily solidified). That's the legacy we are leaving our children. An absolutely unmanageable mess, growing at an utterly alarming rate.
That is what we base our children's future hopes on --not on their ability to produce clean energy for themselves -- those solutions exist and just have to be implemented -- but on our children's ability to discover an as-yet-unknown way to keep our poison gas -- the nuclear waste we generated for our pleasure -- from poisoning themselves and their children! And in order to work, this "solution" must violate the laws of physics! For 60 years scientists have looked for the "holy grail" of nuclear waste storage -- a container that won't break down -- but it's hard to find good scientists willing to devote their life to the search, because good scientists know it's futile. When a radioactive element breaks down -- emits radiation -- it has enough power to destroy hundreds or even thousands of chemical bonds in things around it. Thus, all containers you try to put radioactive substances into are inevitably destroyed by the radiation.
The ability of clean renewable energy to completely replace all our current energy sources is only disputed by spokespeople for the energy sources that poison our environment and cause leukemia, cancer, heart disease, genetic damage, and other insults. Dirty energy sources that make money by robbing your children of their health, and doing so in your name -- because you allow it. The poison gas that is created is odorless, colorless, and tasteless, and can take decades to express itself in your body (cause cancer, for example). And corporations can make a lot of money if they ignore the risks or downplay the dangers to the public.
Humanity must get realistic about this, or it will continue to suffer and die at ever-increasing rates -- more frequent cancers, and cancers occurring in younger people.
The whole idea of green energy accepts that energy is vital to society, and it should therefore be produced in the most benign ways possible. Conservation can only get you so far -- after that, your source of energy must be clean. So stopping nukes is the most important goal of all energy users on this planet as well as of all realistic environmentalists -- or should be.
If you think Al Gore will help clean up the environment, think again. Al Gore thinks nukes can be part of the solution to global warming -- but he says he believes they can play "only a small role." Because he's subtle about his support for nuclear power, many would-be environmental activists are sucked in by his ruse, believing that we can let nuclear power continue to be a part of the mix -- as long as its portion doesn't go up.
The truth is: That's not nearly good enough. And a meltdown is the ultimate inconvenient truth.
Such appeasement of the current nuclear juggernaut of environmentally-damaging power reactors kills the whole green revolution before it takes its first step, because unless we shut the plants down (and maybe even afterwards, but it's far less likely), there will be an accident -- a meltdown. It's as inevitable as 100-year floods, 500-year earthquakes, thousand-year storms, and thousand-century volcanoes (and a meltdown could be caused by any of these). The results could be a thousand to a million times worse than the triggering event.
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carbon emissions. Not content to be mostly responsible for global warming, these short sighted fools refucse to apologize for their colossal blunder and continue to incite hysteria using worn-out old timey fear- mongering lies and suggest pathetically inadequate alternative like wind or solar photovoltaic, two really stupid ways to make electricity that cost many times what nuclear does (wind is five time more expensive to build, as calculated by lifetime power output capabilities. Solar photovoltaic is 10 times more expensive and neither generation method can produce dispatchable power - this means the costs are even more obscene since new demand requires more power plants , regardless of how many wind turbines or solar panels have been installed - they can't be counted on to meet peak demand. And why this dimwitted fellow believes tht building a nuclear power plant in Canada has anything to do with nuclear weapons is boyond all rational logic. Just another in a long string of silly lies to justify a really idiotic power plant.
The same dynamic applies to government scientists. The price of uranium was recently $230,000 per tonne, versus natural gas costs of $4.4 million per uranium-tonne-equivalent, and petroleum costs near $10 million per uranium-tonne-equivalent -- plus tax, in both cases. They know nuclear is the safest and cleanest power we have, but hadn't better say so lest their paymaster lose more oil-and-gas income.
The radioactivity that splitting the atom produces is indeed a nuisance, but insofar as this has been done for energy production, no neighbours appear to have been harmed in any way.
But as harmless as nuclear waste has been, what about its building up and reaching a tipping point? You can understand this is not a reasonable concern if you understand how much natural radioactivity there is in the Earth, much of it due, not surprisingly, to uranium; millions of millions of tonnes of it.
Our year-2107 descendants will inherit lands in which, buried a kilometre deep or less, are 250 billion watts of radioactivity. This may include, halfway down or a little further, our radioactive legacy to them, now approaching 0.3 billion year-2107 watts, in sturdy containers. The rest will be natural; it's there now.
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