@georgeob1,
georgeob1 wrote:
RexRed wrote:
Where in the hell do you get this ****? "Fukushima was a rare event" that nearly rendered life on earth extinct and still has the potential to do so. Considering nuclear technology is only about 40 years old how many rare events can the earth withstand? The Chernobyl disaster is only 30 years old and was that cleaned up? Hell no! Talk about deception! A year later after Fukushima terrorists explosives are found outside a nuclear complex in Sweden...
Yellowstone blowing up is a "rare event" nuclear power and its evident dangers are an inevitable event if we do not change our methods of collecting energy. Besides, plutonium is not a renewable resource either and the collection thereof is causing significant damage to the earth. ...And "emissions free"? What do you call nuclear waste and "radiation"? And Fukushima is "cleaned up"? Not hardly.... You have just equated your intelligence to saw dust.
The tusnami that caused the Fukushima reactor accident, and which also separately killed about 20,000 Japanese people, was indeed a rare geological event. It is noteworthy that though the reactor failure captured most of the media attention, it was but a very small portion of the damage done by the earthquake and associated Tusnami. Though 20,000 lives were lost in the event , none were associated with the reactor failure.
Nuclear reactors involve no emissions of greenhouse gas. That, despite your hysteria, is simply a fact. We live our lives bathed in nuclear radiation from the sun, the earth, and the materials in our own bodies. The general contribution to the radioligical dose of all manmade sources is a small fraction of the natural dose we get. Moreover the contribution to the manmade dose due to nuclear power is but a very small fraction of the manmade dose - medical testing exclipses it by an order of magnitude. High level nuclear waste is a readily manageable engineering problem. The fact is that the total quantity of it is rather small and its storage & management is quite straightforward.
Your understanding of physics is seriously deficient. Plutonium is exceedingly rare in nature.. It is instead created in nuclear reactors through neutron absorption by Uranium-238. Uranium is widely found in the earth and, though not inexhaustable, is readily available in amounts to last indefinately. In terms of the recorded duration of human civilization it is a nearly inexhaustable resource.
There was no public health impact whatever from Three Mile Island - none, zero. The Chernobyl reactor failure killed 200+ people in the weeks after the accident and the associated recovery effort. An additional estimated 1,000 cases of childhood thyroid cancer are estimated to have occured, all of which were easily preventable by the taking of standard iodine tablets after the accident. The Soviet Government deliberately lied and attempted to cover up the accident and, as a result took none of the standard safety precautions following it - things they were otherwise well prepared to do. Some claim that up to 20,000 cases of cancer, attributable to the accident, occurred in Ukraine in the decades following the accident. However for that to be true all other causes of these cancers would have had to stop, in that the incidence of the disease over the period in question did not rise over previous and subsequent levels. As a point of comparison over 40,000 Americans are killed, every year, in automobile accidents.
You are very energetic in pasting links to various opinion pieces, but very lacking in basic knowledge and understanding. You would be wise to invest more of your time in improving your understanding of science and engineering, and less in search of propaganda supporting opinions you appear to accept so unquestioningly from others.
I spend every day trying to learn this science stuff.
Just a cursory search of Google shows you are incorrect in your very first assertion... How many of your "facts" are unchecked?
You wrote: Though 20,000 lives were lost in the event,
none were associated with the reactor failure. It seems you are a victim of media blackout. How much more are you unaware of?
http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/01/police-die-of-radiation-in-fukushima/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FukushimaDiary+%28Fukushima+Diary%29
Apparently the number of people who have died from radiation is not general public knowledge. This is 100% profit based and not based upon friendly technologies. You keep saying how much clean renewable energy would cost WHO CARES? Is any cost to great to protect our finite planet?
It doesn't take a physics guru to understand the dangers of nuclear energy and radiation. You could easily learn the dangers from watching an episode of Star Trek. The world's greatest physicists are foaming at the mouth warning of Fukushima's ongoing pending dangers. We haven't invented a device that can even enter these reactor rooms and apply water to start the cooling process. And who is responsible for this cleanup, British Petroleum? I hope not! Just consider how poorly the Gulf of Mexico cleanup has gone and how truly dirty oil is then multiply that disaster by a million... We have near global extinction in Japan while China is all Gung-Ho on building new reactors like they are temples to their gods on the Yangtze...
I am saying the cost is too great and you are saying it would take a rare occurrence to wipe out human life. That is a chance not worth taking no matter the clean up price. The Exxon Mobil spill in Valdez Alaska, 40 years later it is still a lifeless and barren body of water now oil stained beaches as far as the eye can see... And the perpetrators have bought off presidents and congress to pardon their "accidents"... Just like Chernobyl.
How many billions of dollars can restore the life on earth after the next major catastrophe? What greedy company will stand behind their disasters when they have never fully done so in the past? Consumers don't seem to care either... No amount of money could fix that kind of nuclear disaster. We have created a scenario that has apocalyptic proportions and you are concerned about the price of a simple fan blowing in the wind? Or light capturing cells which every hand held device should have NOW were it not for greedy utility companies and slave labor in China...
Just look at what plastic (oil) has done to our world we have a garbage patch in the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans the combine size of a continent. With nuclear energy we will have the same problems but on a greater scale. One accident here one accident there till they pile up and an entire ocean and various land areas will be polluted for many millennia. All to save a few dollars at the tank for consumers who are a greedy and careless public, who are the very people who tossed their cigarette butts, barbie dolls and spent fishermen's nets into the ocean in the first place. All so they didn't have to walk to a trash can. We expect greedy and lazy people to keep us safe?
Then there is landfill... Plastics PCB's oozing from under the earth years later as methane and making people sick. This methane in a nuclear age will be radiation instead as more and more spent fuel rods are buried underground. And once again what about natural disasters? A lightning bold strikes and burns a forest down it can grow back but if it strikes a working nuclear plant or storage facility we are ALL doomed. As more and more nuclear facilities dot the landscape the greater the chance of total annihilation. All to save a few measly dollars at the pump so wall street can continue to monopolize our political discourse. All so oil companies can rake in billions in profit. All so we can take the easy way out. Energy takes collective energy, not laziness, politics and flagrant oversight and negligence.
I say that, you take the profit incentive out of energy and within a few years the entire world would be using solar and wind. We would not care about shareholders we would all hold an equal share in our green future.
