The Ojai Post

Thank you Brian. The video is excellent. I urge readers of all political persuasions to check it out.

For those who agree with me that global warming is by far the most serious problem we face today, I hope you are open to considering the benefits of nuclear energy.

No less than James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Hypothesis, argues that nuclear energy is the only hope to avert climate disaster. The dangers of radiation are real, but have been exaggerated -- and the danger of not getting off our addiction to fossil fuel is far, far greater.

I've posted at length on this subject in the past. Nuclear Fission power is a non-starter.

Last time I checked, Plutonium-238, the most common isotope used for nuclear energy, still had a half life of about 25,000 years. That's how long it takes for half of this substance to decay. One isotope of Plutonium (Pu-244) has a half life of 80 million years. Last time I checked, the barrels of radioactive waste at Hanford, WA were still leaking, still waiting after 50 years for one of our 50 states to say, yeah, you can bury your toxic radiation in our backyard. Just ease my mind about that and maybe I'll watch your video.

spk and Lanny,

Are you familiar with Lovelock's reasoning? have you looked at The Revenge of Gaia? If not, I highly recommend it.... not just for the arguments about nuclear energy, but for the overall perspective....

Lanny you poor fool, Actually uranium is used, but the halflife of 25,000 years that you are so concerned about is the rate of decay. That means that it does NOT radiate at a dangerous rate. What is dangerous is uranium with a short halflife, the shorter the halflife faster the decay and the more radioactivity.

David,

Lovelock is not a nuclear physicist. He is world renowned, but his education in medicine and his vast abilities at invention do not end the argument about nuclear power simply because he has embraced it. For every Lovelock, I can furnish you with 10+ Nobel Lauriates who are against nuclear fission power generation.

Brian,

I'll be sure to go out and get you a plutonium amulet you can wear around your neck.
500,000 homes. This is but one alternative in a vast sea of creative, technologically advanced, safe alternatives to nuclear fission power. There's so much wrong with nuclear fission power, that I simply do not have time to list all of the down-sides. I have listed many of them here on the post in the past, and I can't keep doing it whenever you decide to post another senseless pro-nuclear fission power article.

Since you are a free-market Republican, let me issue this one challenge. How about giving a green light to yet another commercial nuclear power station here in the US when it is possible to actually insure said power station. And I mean insure it without the help of the Federal government and the taxpayer, we've been a bit roughly used of late. Since "private" corporations are the ones who wish to build these things and profit from the relatively short time that they will produce usable energy, don't you agree that they should bear all of the costs themselves? Isn't that just good old fiscal responsibility and free market capitalism?

Sean,
I would like to call you simply ignorant about nuclear power but since you have read a lot of information about it you have to be called stupid now. The link that you provided with the energy being microwaved back to the earth, I assume, is ridiculous as a practical way doing energy production. Any large project has to have limits on the liability insurance, it's the same with jet airline companies, the government set limits on there liability, otherwise they would never have beeen built. One reason that the insurance is driven so high is because of fear. What do you think would happen if a terrorist flew an airplane into a nuclear power plant? Are you under the impression that it would blow up like a nuclear bomb? You seem intelligent enough to grasp these concepts.

Anyone who thinks that Bush is the Bestest President Ever should seriously consider what names they call others. Of course, I guess that's the irony of the situation.

Tyler, try to stay on topic please! I don't want to have to censor you !

Sean, The nuclear power plants that we have in this country now have been supplying power faithfully over the last 30 years, with zero emmisions, thats about the time that your solar panels will need to be replaced.

Did you read any of the comments on your microwave power scheme? That was proposed in popular science back in sixties for heaven sakes !

spk,

I don't think it is adequate to characterize Lovelock's background as being in medicine and as an inventor, although it is true he has been a prolific inventor and has worked in medicine. But his real background is in chemistry and its applications to Earth Systems Science, which makes him eminently qualified to evaluate the risks of nuclear power. I think it is aruable that he is the most far-sighted environmentalist we have.

In any case, I am not suggesting you accept his view based upon his authority as a scientist, but rather to read his arguments and evaluate them on their intrinsic merits. For those who may be interested, here is a brief taste of Lovelock's views:

"A television interviewer once asked me, 'But what about nuclear waste? Will it not poison the whole biosphere and persist for millions of years? ' I knew this to be a nightmare fantasy wholly without substance in the real world... One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets... I find it sad, but all too human, that there are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organisations devoted to decommissioning power stations, but nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide."

Okay, Brian. Even though you called me a fool (or maybe BECAUSE you called me a fool), I'll respond to your comments. Fine, let's assume your nuclear waste is decaying too slowly to be much risk. Does it pose any risk at all? If not, how come no states want it transported across their borders to the proposed "permanent" nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain that Nevada has been trying mightily to stop?

Do nuclear power plants pose any risks at all? What do you make of this Wikipedia account of the Chernobyl disaster?

"The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear reactor accident in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union. It was the worst nuclear power plant accident in history and the only instance of level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, resulting in a severe release of radioactivity into the environment following a massive power excursion which destroyed the reactor. Two people died in the initial steam explosion, but most deaths from the accident were attributed to fallout.

On 26 April 1986 at 01:23:44 a.m. (UTC+3) reactor number four at the Chernobyl plant, near Pripyat in the Ukrainian SSR, exploded. Further explosions and the resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Four hundred times more fallout was released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.[1]

The plume drifted over extensive parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Northern Europe, and eastern North America. Large areas in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people."

Please don't tell me, though, that it was just those clumsy Russians and it will never happen again. Or is it just another case of the "exaggerated" dangers of radiation?

By the way, I agree with David that we need to free ourselves of our addiction to fossil fuels. No argument there.

Lanny,
Sorry I called you a fool, but I'm also sorry that I have to tell you that yes the Russians were incredibly stupid. They may have well of flown a jumbo jet into a mountain as an analogy of what they did. Chernoble had no containment dome around the reactor, they deliberatly shut down all the saftey controls that were meant to keep the operation under control. What happened was that you had two seperate groups controlling the operations of that plant. The group that was testing the electrical part of the saftey operations did not understand the other side of the nuclear reaction part of the operation. That plant was not only making power but it was also designed to make material for bombs. The bi-product of the nuclear reaction was producing plutonium for weapons. It was a very bad design. Then when things did go wrong, after they shut down all of the saftey controls, there was an uncontrolled melt down that could not be stopped. They should have just dumped tons of borate on it but instead they did the worst thing you could possiblly do and that was spray it with tons of water. The water made the whole thing explode because of the steam created, not a nuclear explosion but from steam. This is what made everything become airborne. Are we going to just turn away from this source of energy because of this accident? France didn't, many other countries are not. France is 90% nuclear power and they have the cleanest atmosphere of any nation. Three mile island was operator error also, but no radioactive material was released and no one was injured or killed, the containment structure did what it was suppose to do.

Lanny and spk,

Lovelock says Chernobyl was "the worst example of the worst kind of nuclear technology." But he also argues that the actual consequences of the disaster were not all that extreme. (See pages 99 - 102 of The Revenge of Gaia for his careful discussion of this issue.)

More generally, he has this to say about nuclear waste:

An outstanding advantage of nuclear over fossil fuel energy is how easy it is to deal with the waste it produces. Burning fossil fuels produces 27,000 million tons of carbon dioxide yearly, enough to make, if solidified, a mountain nearly one mile high and with a base twelve miles in circumference. The same quantity of energy produced from nuclear fission reactions would generate two million times less waste, and it would occupy a sixteen-meter cube. The carbon dioxide waste is invisible but so deadly that if its emissions go unchecked it will kill nearly everyone. The nuclear waste buried in pits at the production sites is no threat to Gaia and dangerous only to those foolish enough to expose themselves to its radiation.