Owing
to the public's fear of radiation, abetted by the nuclear protection
industry and the media, nuclear power in the United States is at a
standstill, just when we most need it. Construction on all nuclear power
plants ordered after 1974 has stopped, and no orders have been placed
for any since 1978. In the last 15 years, 8 nuclear power plants in the
U.S. have been shut down because of escalating regulatory costs and
public fears about radiation (103 remain). The
U.S. uses fossil fuels, mainly coal and natural gas, to produce 70
percent of its electricity. Nuclear power generates 19 percent and
hydroelectric dams the other 11 percent. (Energy obtained directly from
the sun, gathered by mirrors or photovoltaic cells, and from wind
turbines generates less than one-sixth of one percent of our
electricity.) Production of electricity consumes 36 percent of the
energy we use. Oil
is now used primarily for transportation — to run our automobiles,
trucks, airplanes, ships, and most buses and railroad trains. Overall,
the U.S. obtains 85 percent of its energy from fossil fuels — about half
from oil and the other half equally from coal and natural gas. (Before
drilling for oil began in the 1800s, humans had just two main sources of
energy, other than their own manual labor: wood and animals. Today,
rather than ride horses, teenagers compare the horsepower of their
automobiles.) Compared
to coal and hydroelectric dams, nuclear power is the safest and
cleanest way, from an environmental standpoint, to produce electricity.
And the fuel it uses, uranium, is more abundant than fossil fuels (or
rivers left to be dammed). In contrast to the U.S., other countries do
recognize the advantages of nuclear power. France uses nuclear power to
generate 77 percent of its electricity, and 35 nuclear power plants are
currently under construction around the world, 24 of them in Asia. With
442 nuclear power plants operating in 32 countries for a cumulative
10,000 reactor-years of commercial operation, Chernobyl, in the former
Soviet Union, is the only accident besides the recent Japanese accident and we are still getting data on that, in the history of nuclear
power where any radiation-related fatalities have occurred. In that
accident (in 1986) radioactivity from part of the reactor's overheated
core escaped into the atmosphere. Acute radiation sickness affected 134
employees and 28 died. An estimated 70 extra cases of thyroid cancer
occurred in children as a result of the accident, which could have been
prevented by timely ingestion of potassium iodide. Otherwise, no
increase in the incidence of other cancers occurred (despite dire
predictions, based on the linear no-threshold hypothesis, that 110,000
new cancers would occur due to radioactive fallout from the accident). Chernobyl's real victims
were 200,000 pregnant women in Europe who, caught up in a wave of
radiophobic hysteria, feared that their fetuses would be damaged by
radiation from the fallout and had their pregnancies terminated. Low
dose radiation does not cause genetic defects, and fetuses exposed to
radiation from Chernobyl that were not aborted developed normally and
did not have any increased incidence of congenital abnormalities or
genetic defects. Chernobyl
is unique. That kind of accident will not happen in any other nuclear
power plants because all the reactors currently in operation around the
world are placed inside a containment building (Chernobyl was not). The
reactor core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, which happened when
its core cooling system failed, also produced a lot of radiation; but
the containment building the reactor was housed in kept it from being
released into the atmosphere, and there were no injuries or deaths. All
the nuclear power plants in the U.S. are second-generation reactors,
based on designs derived from those made for naval use. Third generation
reactors, with an output of 600 MW, are simpler, smaller, more rugged,
and reduce substantially the possibility of a core meltdown accident,
from a likelihood of 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 800,000 per reactor year.
(Third generation reactors have, for example, have 80 percent fewer control
cables and 60 percent less piping.) They are standardized to expedite
licensing and reduce construction time. Fourth generation fusion
reactors, one hopes, will be coming into operation in the foreseeable
future. On the Columbia River System, in Washington, 75 people died building the Grand Coulee Dam. Failure of the Teton Dam
on a tributary of the Snake River near Idaho Falls (in 1976) killed 14
people, obliterated one town (Wilford), severely damaged several others,
and caused $3 billion (2002 dollars) in property damage. The energy
released when this dam ruptured was the equivalent of ten (20-kiloton)
atom bombs, and it caused the greatest flood in North America since the
last ice age. (Fortunately, the dam failed during the daytime, which
saved thousands of lives because workers were there to warn the populace
downstream to evacuate, before phone lines went down.) The St. Francis
Dam near Valencia, California collapsed (in 1928) and killed 450 people.
The Machu Dam in India killed 2,500 people when it ruptured in 1979. Compared
to nuclear power, coal is a much less safe source of energy. In
addition to the pollutants and carcinogens coal delivers into the
atmosphere when burned, 100 coal miners are killed each year in the U.S.
in coal mine accidents and another 100 die transporting it. Per amount
of electricity produced, hydropower causes 110 fold, coal, 45 fold, and
natural gas, 10 fold more deaths than nuclear power. As Peter Beckmann,
founding editor of Access to Energy, shows in his book The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, nuclear power is the safest source of energy in all aspects, not excluding terrorism and sabotage, major accidents, and waste disposal. From an environmental standpoint, nuclear power is far superior to coal or hydropower. In
the U.S., coal is strip-mined (the way we get 60 percent of it) at a
rate of more than 65,000 acres per year, with over a million acres
awaiting reclamation. Of the 8 million acres that overlie underground
mines (to obtain the other 40 percent), one-fourth of that acreage has
subsided. When burned, the carbon in coal combines with oxygen to form
carbon dioxide (CO2) and carbon monoxide (CO). A large
coal-burning plant that produces as much electricity as a nuclear power
plant burns 3 million tons of coal annually, which generates 11 million
tons of CO2 (700 lbs. per second). Coal contains sulfur, 0.5
to 3 percent by weight, which combines with oxygen to form sulfur
dioxide, the principal cause of acid rain; and the nitrogen in it
produces nitrous oxide, a pollutant (a 1,000 megawatt coal plant
produces as much nitrous oxide as 200,000 automobiles). It contains
health-damaging heavy metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and
beryllium. Coal also has uranium in it in a concentration of 1 to 2
parts per million. As a result, a coal-fired plant releases up to 50
times more radioactivity than a nuclear plant, where the radiation
emitted by uranium and its byproducts is contained. (The EPA ignores
this fact.) Hydropower
is even worse. Hydroelectric dams generate 85 percent of the
electricity produced in Washington state. The dams in the Columbia
River Basin have had a devastating impact on its ecosystem. It began
with the New Deal, in 1932, when the Army Corps of Engineers submitted a
study of the river to President Roosevelt identifying ten promising
locations for dams. Beginning with the Bonneville Dam, built by the
Corps of Engineers, and the Grand Coulee Dam, built by the Bureau of
Reclamation, over the next 40 years these two federal agencies built 30
major dams on the Columbia and Snake River system. Its largest, the
Grand Coulee Dam, blocks salmon access to more than 1,000 miles of
productive river. Called the "cesspool of the New Deal" (by a New York
newspaper), its 125 square mile reservoir inundated 12 towns with 1,200
buildings. The
hydroelectric dams in the Columbia River Basin (along with hatcheries
that the Bureau established to mitigate their effects on fish) have been
instrumental in reducing the number of wild salmon that come back up
the Columbia River each year to spawn, from 10 to 16 million to less
than 200,000 now, a 98 percent decline. Eliminating the nutrients
(obtained eating crustaceans and plant life in the ocean) that salmon
provide for the Basin has had a major impact on its ecosystem. Salmon
gain 90 percent of their body weight at sea and carry the nutrients
obtained there back to their home stream. Grizzly bears, for example,
obtain up to 90 percent of the nitrogen in their bones and hair from the
salmon they eat. The environmental impact of the decline of salmon is
reflected in these Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates:
the Basin's population of fur-bearing mammals has declined from 13,000
to 500; game birds dependent on this landscape, from 120,000 to 2,000;
and winter songbirds, from 95,000 to 3,000. Twelve second-generation
nuclear power plants would produce as much electricity as all the
hydroelectric dams that have been built in this Basin, at a negligible
environmental cost. Nuclear
energy (that uranium 235 and uranium 238-derived plutonium produce)
emits no harmful gases or toxic metals into the environment. And, unlike
hydroelectric dams, it does not alter a region's ecosystem.
Furthermore, despite what activists and the media say, the wastes
nuclear power create are far less of a problem than those produced by
coal, or the silt that builds up behind dams. One pound of uranium
produces 20,000 times more energy than one pound of coal. A nuclear
power plant generates (high-level) radioactive wastes the size of one
aspirin tablet per person per year (a plant's yearly wastes fit
comfortably under a dining room table). Coal-fired plants generate 320
lbs. of ash and other poisons per person per year, of which 10 percent
is spewed into the atmosphere. Disposal personnel encapsulate nuclear
waste in (fireproof, water-proof, and earthquake-proof) boron-silicate
glass or ceramic and then bury these now effectively non-radioactive
artificial rocks. In the U.S., these "rocks" will (in 2010) be buried
deep in extremely arid ground in a remote part of Nevada, in a
repository at Yucca Mountain (where nuclear weapons tests were once
conducted). The chance that this encapsulated waste will ever harm
anyone is virtually zero (especially given that the linear no-threshold
hypothesis now disproved). Waste disposal is not a disadvantage of
nuclear power; it is one of its advantages. Yet
another advantage of nuclear power is the relative abundance of its
fuel, as this illustration, put together by Peter Beckmann, shows.
Uranium is the heaviest of all naturally occurring elements and is
present in most of the earth's crust. There is enough uranium 235 (box
C), the fuel for current-day U.S. nuclear reactors, to keep them
operating through most of this century. But uranium 238 (99 percent of
natural uranium), fuels breeder reactors. Breeder reactors turn
uranium-238 into plutonium. As Bernard Cohen points out in his book, The Nuclear Energy Option (in Chapter 13, which is available online), the supply of uranium 238 on the planet to run breeder reactors will last thousands of years. The Golden Triangle and US Military Bases in the Persian Gulf Oil
is dwindling fast in the U.S. because of radical environmentalist and
inane rules and regulations. In 1950 America produced one-half of the
world's oil and consumed 6 million barrels per day (MBPD), which was
more oil than all the rest of the world consumed. Today the U.S.
produces 4 percent of the world's oil and consumes 20 MBPD, and the rest
of the world consumes close to 60 MBPD. (China, with its 1.2 billion
people, leads the race in growing oil consumption, and it has to import
an increasing percentage of the oil that it consumes. India, with one
billion people, is close behind.) Sixty
percent of the known oil in the world lies within this "golden
triangle" in the Middle East. Oil wells there pump 10,000 barrels per
day, compared with wells in the U.S that pump 300 barrels per day. U.S.
oil reserves have now dropped to the point that if we were not able to
import any oil, at the current rate of consumption, we would exhaust our
22-billion barrel reserve and run out of oil in three years. Conversion
of our transportation fuels to Natural Gas and Liquified Coal Fuels
(much more environmentally friendly) along with the harvesting of known
reserves such as the Baaken oil field would put that number out to about
200 years. The
"War on Terror," as the Bush Administration had chose and as Barack
Obama has chosen to prosecute it, furthers a radical environmentalist
agenda and control of American citizens through energy interests by
reducing the amount of money the public keeps in it's pocket. It's "all
about oil." Iraq
has 11 percent of the world's oil, five times as much as the U.S. now
has developed. The only country with more is Saudi Arabia. This map, prepared by
the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Vice-President
Cheney (obtained by Judicial Watch through
the Freedom of Information Act) shows the location and extent of Iraq's
known oilfields and divides the western part of the country into nine
exploration blocks. Central
Asia is another important source of oil and natural gas. (America's
natural gas wells now produce only one-third the amount of gas they did
30 years ago but new technology has allowed us to greatly expand those
numbers by harvesting gas captured in shale in a method called
fracking.) The problem is how to get it out. There
is another way to get oil for our automobiles and airplanes, Compressed
Natural Gas, Coal liquification, and thermal depolymerization which
would eliminate the need for the United States to import any Middle
Eastern or Central Asian oil. American entrepreneurs are marketing the
new
technology called a "thermal conversion process"
that can make oil out of various agricultural, industrial, and
municipal wastes; and nuclear power is the best source of electricity to
run it. The process employs a technique known as thermal depolymerization TDP,
which in essence mimics the geothermal process that created our fossil
fuels, notably oil. Wastes subjected to temperatures of 500 degrees F
and pressures of 600 pounds per square inch, under controlled
conditions, will produce light oil that is half diesel and half
gasoline. You
can put most anything in it — sewage sludge, plastic bottles, old
tires, turkey offal, wet bandages and needles. If a 175 lb. person
accidentally got caught in the process, it would turn him into 38 pounds
of oil, 7 pounds of purified minerals, 7 pounds of methane gas, and 123
pounds of water. Putting all the country's agricultural wastes through
this process would produce 4 billion barrels of oil, the amount we
currently import from OPEC each year. What
about solar power and windmills as an alternative source of energy?
California is the leader in developing solar power. Its Solar Two Plant
in the Mojave Desert has a peak output of 10 megawatts. In order to
produce as much energy as a 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor, its mirrors
would have to occupy 127 square miles of land. The Solar Electric
Generating System in Kramer Junction, CA has a higher output — 100
megawatts. This system currently generates 90 percent of the world's
direct solar electricity. (It has rows of mirror-like shiny surfaces
that focus sunlight onto tubes filled with therminol fluid running along
the top of the array, which turns water into steam to power the
turbines.) Its mirrors have to be washed every five to ten days to
maintain a reasonable (70 percent) optical efficiency. It requires 33
square miles of mirrors for this system to produce as much electricity
as one nuclear power plants. Also, solar plants require substantial
government subsidies and tax credits to make the electricity they
produce economically feasible....in otherwords they make very expensive energy.. The
Nine Canyon Wind Project completed its Phase II expansion
last year, adding 12 new wind turbines to the previously existing 37.
With the wind blowing hard, they have a peak output of 64 megawatts.
Based on the average wind speed there it would take 50,000 wind turbines
of this size, in a 300 square mile area, to generate the same amount of
electricity one nuclear power plant produces. (If they were made to the
height of a 20-story building, it would take only 1,000 windmills to
produce that amount of power.) Windmills
kill a lot of birds. They act as bait and executioner for birds because
rodent populations multiply rapidly at their base, and the birds get
killed trying to get at them. The windmills on Altamont Pass east of San
Francisco, for example, kill eight times as many bald eagles each year
as those that died in the one-time Valdez oil spill in Alaska. This is
also a problem with solar energy. Bird deaths per megawatt of
electricity generated by solar plants are higher than at Altamont Pass, a
result of their flying into its mirror-like surfaces. Despite the
enthusiasm politicians and the media exhibit for solar and wind power,
these sources of energy, compared with nuclear power, produce tiny
amounts electricity; and they harm the environment. They cannot replace
fossil fuels, or nuclear power. The
many billions of dollars our government is spending occupying Iraq and
Afghanistan, to ensure a continued supply of fossil fuels, would be much
better spent building nuclear reactors. Our
country can bring the troops home and start building third (and
fourth) generation nuclear power plants, like China and other Asian
nations are doing. The War on Terror could best be served by our country
unleashing it's economic engine here at home, with our adversary
employing fourth-generation-warfare suicide attacks on civilians in
one's homeland, until our country pulls its stick out of the hornet's
nest and surrounds the nest with a bag to choke out the hornets....like
the way Reagan did to bring Russia to it's knees we are going to
unnecessarily lose lives. One way Muslim terrorists are going to leave
us, and our
allies alone, is if we cut off their ability to wage terrorism, and
every gallon of fuel from the middle east we buy puts more and more
Americans and innocents in the cross hairs of would be terrorists. This
is perhaps the greatest advantage of nuclear power, coupled with new
technologies like thermal depolymerization, coal liquification, and Compressed Natural Gas. It will better enable our
country to follow the advice its first President gave us in his Farewell
Address — to conduct dealings with other nations in the marketplace,
not on the battlefield. Building nuclear power plants can help end the
War on Terror, in addition to keeping our lights and computers on. |