redblueamerica.com

I was working on the Shearon Harris nuclear plant in NC when TMI "blew up". Three Mile Island is the most overrated "disaster" in American history, and the only thing it killed was the nuclear industry in America. The deadliest result of TMI, it is a statistical certainty that some of the 200,000 panicked residents who fled screaming into the night died in traffic accidents.

The French do two things right on nuclear power: they standardize design where our regulatory stucture mandated that we reinvent the wheel with every plant; and they ignore our ignorant refusal to reprocess spent fuel rods.

This last is crucial to nuclear power. It is a Carter legacy, part of his non-proliferation Treaty. As we see that worked well, didn't it? Forget Yucca Mountain, why in God's name would we want to bury something so valuable as spent fuel? If it is still hot enough to be hazardous, it is by definition a higher grade source of new fuel than any ore in nature!

I like the analogy by Gwyneth Cravens, the once-upon-a-time no nukes protester who has seen the light. In her book, "Power to Save the World; the Truth about Nuclear power" she paints our policy forbidding reprocessing thus: it is as though we have gone into a remote forest and cut down a huge tree for the fireplace. Then, at great expense, we haul the tree home and cut into stove length. Then we put it in the fireplace, burn the bark off it, declare the rest of the log useless and at even greater expense, go bury in a deep hole.

An unintended consequence of shunning nuclear: America is burning more coal than anyone this side of China. Uranium, like all trace elements is distriburted throughout the Earth's crust, and in the process of burning that coal, we release a tousand or so pounds of radioactives into the air every day. Fret not, it is too dispersed to hurt anyone, but it is a demonstration of of America's regulatory recto-cranial inversion as to reality v perception.

Bruce: The corporations aren't acting in a vacuum, though. They're producing profits by giving people what they want: Plentiful energy, cheap. The Enemy Is Us, to some extent. That, and the quarterly-report driven system of finance that focuses on short-term profitability at the expense of long-term investments.

DFP: Point taken, if a bit archly made. But just because a nuclear power plant doesn't appear to be making as much of a mess as some of those other energy sources you're talking about doesn't mean that it's not making a mess. There's the whole problem -- as yet unsolved -- of what to do with the nuclear waste. And there's the not-incidental question of what happens if there is an accident. Yes: The results can be horrifically bad.

That said: I still get on an airplane every now and again, even though the results of plane crashes can also be horrifically bad. So I'm still willing to be convinced, dfp, but your post didn't quite do the trick.

I agree essentially with Joel, but would like to add a comment. Fossil fuel, nuclear, solar and wind energy all have a potential for affecting our ecosystems. This is especially true as world population has reached a point where I believe the earth cannot sustain the population with any current form of energy. We are gluttons in energy usage and the corporations who eventually control the production of energy will always work for their profits and not the world's ecosystem. I feel somewhat pessimistic for the future but my hopes lie in the eventual discovery of a new truly clean and renewable energy source that does not depend on the profitability of a large energy company. I can always hope.

I'm not sure there's really such a thing as truly "green" energy. Solar and wind come closest -- but those wind turbines definitely affect the ecosystems they're planted in, and, well, those solar panels aren't made out of compost.

And I don't think we're going to start reducing our energy consumption, frankly, unless we're forced to. And when and if that happens, well: That's not going to be a pretty sight.

That said, I remain dubious about nuclear power. Because nothing's foolproof -- nothing. And Chernobyl showed us that when nuclear power goes bad, it goes horrifically bad. But I think I can be convinced. Anybody up for convincing me?