Comments on: Nuclear Power is NOT the Solution to Our Global Warming Woes

By: German Riot Police Clash with Nuclear Waste Protesters : EcoWorldly

German Riot Police Clash with Nuclear Waste Protesters : EcoWorldly — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:41:15 +0000

[...] setup barricades and blocked roads in order to stop a shipment of approximately 123 tonnes of nuclear waste to a nearby waste storage facility. Sources say the protesters managed to delay the arrival of the [...]

By: design

design — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:47:43 +0000

Perhaps going nuclear isn't the answer…. But people need to stop looking for just ONE solution. It's going to take a combination of different technologies to "solve" the problem.

By: Eve Stevens

Eve Stevens — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:41:41 +0000

Lets look at the facts. We have 7 ways to generate electricity, nuclear, hydro, oil, natural gas, coal, solar and wind. Cnsidering that the planet will run out of oil, using oil to make electricity is stupid. We will eventually run out of coal and natural gas but we have enough for about 300 years. Wind is not reliable making us have to use coal and gas burning plants as they can go up and down in generation rapidly. Hydro can also go up and down in generation rapidly. Nuclear plants cannot. They produce the same amount of electricity continually. Solar is also iffy.
At present coal plants are the cheapest to build. Nuclear and hydro plants should be the same price to build and they should be the mainstay of our electicity production.
My suggestion is to get rid of the red tape that makes nuclear plants so expensive to build and use both hydro and nuclear as electricity producing plants. We might as well keep the coal and natural gas plants for their lifetimes, they are not hurting anyone. Use solar for buildings and houses as per the owners decision. I would scrap wind power, too expensive and not reliable.

By: Ray

Ray — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:46:58 +0000

From a factual standpoint, this article is an absolute joke. Whether you choose to post my comment or not, I urge you to read this brief article:

http://blog.the-thinking-man.com/wind-and-solar-energy-versus-nuclear

And it’s not a plug. It’s an attempt to correct your shameless misinformation.

People like this “author” are the people truly responsible for damaging our planet: by halting progress and the conceptual mind.

By: Red Craig

Red Craig — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:26:06 +0000

Nick Taylor, as I'm always anxious to learn more I looked up your links. They all point to mechanical problems that had no consequences. There's this fundamental conceptual difference between scientific and political environmentalists. Politicals believe nuclear plants have to be perfect in order to be safe. Since, reasonably, they don't expect anything to be perfect, they naturally are convinced nuclear plants are dangerous, and also the spent fuel in whatever situation it's in.

Scientific environmentalists take a different view. Layers of safety make it implausible that nuclear plants could cause serious harm and unlikely that they could cause even minor harm.

The reactor at Chernobyl was inherently unsafe and didn't have the layers of safety that make Western reactors safe. Indeed, the Chernobyl reactor had no layers of safety. It was made of graphite, a flammable material, and covered by a sheet-metal shed to keep the rain off. Western reactors are made of steel and are built below ground and are encased in layers of steel and concrete. The Chernobyl reactor had instability built into it and at the time of the accident its emergency shutdown system and its emergency core cooling system were both disabled. In contrast, the accident at Three Mile Island destroyed the reactor but didn't harm anyone. No one was injured or made ill by that accident. The difference was the layers of safety.

It's entirely possible that your perception of the Soviet Union is more accurate than mine. What I saw was the country with the most agricultural land and it couldn't feed itself. The environmental damage done by its chemical plants and oil refineries was and is a health disaster. It put a basketball in orbit and then fell to last place in space research. As soon as people were offered a choice they chose to terminate it. But if you know of successes then by all means I should be corrected.

By: Mike in Nashville

Mike in Nashville — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:00:08 +0000

Comparing the operation of a nuclear reactor to the regulation of a modern economy is absurd. Nuclear fission is governed by natural laws that are known, predictable, and manageable – there's not been a major nuclear accident in a modern Western economy in over 30 years. In contrast, the system that is a modern economy is many orders of magnitude more complex than nuclear physics – seriously. In fact, one of the "laws" of economics is that things are random – you cannot truly know what the price of an asset will be tomorrow, only guess. The safe harnessing of nuclear fission for productive energy instead of destructive power is one of the great triumphs of the 20th century – we in the 21st would be foolish to ignore it, especially when we can continue to find ways to improve it.

By: G.R.L. Cowan, H2 ene

G.R.L. Cowan, H2 ene — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:42:10 +0000

Gas shills expressing concern that nuclear energy programs "just don't seem to pay off" are expressing a point of view that is not widely shared. When government and industry take big tax revenues and profits on oil and gas, most of us are paying those revenues, not enjoying them.

Recent US$ prices, inclusive of royalties but not of taxes per tonne-uranium-equivalent: uranium itself 114000, natural gas 3900000 million, petroleum 7200000. Does "Low Impact Living"'s mother know how he's paying the rent?

By: Elliott

Elliott — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:22:13 +0000

THINK ABOUT IT. WE GIVE FOSSIL FUEL FACILITIES THE GREEN LIGHT TO USE OUR ATMOSPHERE AS A WASTE DUMP. YET, WE REJECT EVERY PROPOSAL FOR NUCLEAR WASTE STORAGE AND REPROCESSING. FOOLISH AND SHORTSIGHTED.

Regulatory hurdles, red tape, and unfounded opposition have pushed the cost of nuclear power to 10x what it should be. And people argue that the capital cost is too high, well there's your reason. Reactors in reality should cost about as much as coal facilities but unfortunately the playing field is rigged.

By: Elliott

Elliott — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:14:15 +0000

YET ANOTHER ARTICLE THAT IS WRONG, WRONG, AND WRONG AGAIN ABOUT NUKE POWER.

Uranium and the other radioactive materials that are used for power generation are so energy dense that if fuel is spent and reprocessed to its potential there is enough energy for thousands of years. Yet, reprocessing as well as storage is banned because of FEAR MONGERING MEDIA AND POLITICS.

Coal-fired power plants spew out more radiation than is typically radiated or even leaked, at containment facilities. Yet we seem to be putting up coal plants like it's our job and keep accepting the unfathomable amounts of radiation from coal power. US nuclear industry has a nearly perfect track record; you compare three mile island (NOTHING) to millions of tons per year of soot and radiation, and oil spills from oil companies. And contrary to beliefs the overall return on investment is by far the highest; the government even considered a windfall profits tax for nuclear facilities cause they were immune to fuel price increases! Seems big fossil fuel is in their pockets! Yet nuke power is still "worse"?

By: Nick Taylor

Nick Taylor — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 06:08:11 +0000

@Red Craig re: Safety UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/29/br... France : http://www.euronews.net/en/article/24/07/2008/fra... Germany : http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,151... And those are just recent ones. To claim that nukes are safe because no one has been killed in these accidents - apart from the Soviet one (who did not (my xenophobic little friend) fail at everything they did) is both dishonest and irresponsible... but not untypical of nuke shills. The UK is currently spending around a billion GBP per year just to store the waste it already has... year in year out for as long as we can foresee. We're fobbing this burden off onto our children, our grandchildren... when we could have invested this money in renewables.