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nce upon a time, I bought the environmentalist diatribe against nuclear power.  Once upon a time, I was that kind of fool. I’ve learned a lot since then, and while I can’t verify everything in the email below, it does show just how extensive the Greenie misinformation campaign has been.  The email is from DuPree Moore and ran originally in Greenie Watch.

From 1968 to 1973, I was an engineering officer aboard U. S. nuclear submarines. The chief engineer would routinely sneak back into the engineering spaces and trip some piece of equipment off the line. These were not computer simulations. The equipment really would be in an emergency condition. We would be sitting in the reactor control room, and suddenly alarms would go off. We would have to figure out what had happened, and recover from it. The equipment is designed to survive such accidents. After many decades of operation under those conditions, the Navy has had zero deaths from nuclear power. You are more likely to drown in your bathtub than to die from operating a nuclear reactor.

A coal-fired electric power generating plant uses 120 railroad cars full of coal every day. A nuclear plant uses one semi truckload of nuclear fuel rods every few years. All the spent fuel from every nuclear reactor in the United States could be stored on one football field, a pile nine feet tall. Recycle it as the French do, and the pile shrinks to three inches. In 500 years it will be less toxic than coal ash.

It is preposterous to talk about nuclear waste remaining toxic for tens of thousands of years. It is preposterous to talk about tens of thousands of deaths from a nuclear accident. Those analyses are based upon a laughable error. If one person eats 200 aspirin, he will die. These people figure that if 200 people eat one aspirin each, there will be one death. If two million people are exposed to a dose rate of one aspirin per person, there will be 20,000 deaths. In fact one aspirin is beneficial, and low levels of radiation are beneficial. Geographical areas with higher background radiation have lower levels of cancer.

Chernobyl proved just how safe nuclear power is. There was no containment vessel. All radiation was released to the environment. There were less than 200 deaths, all among on-site personnel. An exhaustive international inquiry under the UN found no documented health damage beyond the immediate vicinity (except for a slight increase in thyroid cancer among children, which can be completely prevented by taking inexpensive iodine supplements in the event of a nuclear accident). The area around Chernobyl has been declared a radioactive dead zone at radiation levels about the same as downtown Warsaw, Poland, and five times lower than Grand Central Station in New York City. Plants and animals flourish in the region, showing no ill effects. It is stark raving mad.

Three-Mile Island nuclear accident caused zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation release to the environment. And it was not a close call. It might have been a close call from having much more extensive equipment damage, but the worst possible accident would still have been kept entirely within the containment vessel. There would have been zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation released to the environment. If terrorists flew an airplane into a nuclear reactor, it would not rupture the containment vessel.

During the 1970′s there was an anti-nuclear campaign, similar to the global warming campaign today. It was based on grossly inaccurate information, but it prevailed politically to impose onerous regulations which killed nuclear power as a source of electricity. I have seen a comparison of two nuclear power plants in the United States which began construction at about the same time. One finished up before the new regulations went into effect. It came in on budget, and generates to this day the cheapest, safest, and cleanest electricity on this planet. The second reactor ran afoul of the new regulations. It ran into massive cost overruns, and never was completed.

Lawrence Solomon was part of the anti-nuclear campaign during the 1970′s. Today he has done some excellent research disproving the global warming theory, especially disproving the assertions of a scientific consensus about it; but to this day he is wrong about nuclear power. To this day he says, “Nuclear reactors run flat-out 24/7″, and cannot be adjusted to match power demand. He is simply wrong. The reactor remains critical 24/7, but a reactor can be critical at zero power. The power output automatically matches the power demand. I have personally operated nuclear reactors, and I know for a fact what I am talking about. That is the kind of misinformation which has destroyed nuclear power, the greatest scientific advance in the history of the world.

And that’s the way it is … not the way Greenpeace and others say it is.

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ur home electric bill last month was $1,000. That’s what two central AC units (even high-efficiency ones), laundry, hot water, flat-screen TVs and computers will do to you. (Not to mention the old refrigerator in the garage!) So I liked the sound of this energy solution – even if Mr. As Long As It’s Clean and Safe may not be too dazzled with it:

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. …

The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.(The Guardian)

Hyperion claims to have 100 “firm” orders and says the $25 million mini-reactors should be able to produce power for as little as 10 cents a kilowatt.

Of course, it would take about 150 of them to power up OC, so there are obvious drawbacks. But in rural areas they could offer an interesting alternative, and in developing countries, they offer a cleaner alternative than coal. But doing the math, they cost $2,500 per household served; even if amortized over the planned 50-year life of the units, that $50/year would be a prohibitive cost in many economies – but nothing a little foreign assistance couldn’t achieve.

Standing in the way of emerging, hopeful technologies like this is one Barack H. Obama, who pandered to the green vote and stated his opposition to any nuclear reactor unless it can be shown to be safe (Hyperion says they’re safe, but Obama no doubt knows better.) and clean (Safe disposal deep under mountains doesn’t count).

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‘m all for John McCain’s proposal to unleash the Treasury in support of nuclear power, but anyone in the development business knows it may fall flat unless he unleashes the Department of Justice as well. If you haven’t been keeping up on your Waste News reading (registration required – DRAT!), you may not know the latest in the nuke-building wars. Here’s the story:

Alternative Energy Holdings Inc., which has proposed to build a nuclear power plant in southwestern Idaho, is suing an environmental group for making defamatory remarks.

The Boise, Idaho-based company filed the lawsuit in Idaho’s 4th District Court after the Snake River Alliance called the company “scammers.” The comments, broadcast Aug. 11, defame the company and its stockholders, said Donald Gillispie, president and CEO of AEHI. The company has passesd two independent financial audits, which have found nothing amiss, he said.

“These radical groups are allowed to make almost any claim they wish, regardless of the facts, and the media rarely questions [sic] them,” Gillispie said. “Someone has to hold them accountable.”

Indeed, someone should hold them accountable, with one of those Indonesian canes, if possible. But if litigation’s the preferred approach, just don’t do it in California. Suing a lie-spewing whacko in California can get you in big trouble because of legislation prohibiting or limiting SLAPP lawsuits (that’s Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation for the unitiated). A stupid-a$$ law if ever there was one, it’s used by Greenies, NIMBYs and other loud-mouthed fact-fabricators to keep those they abuse from using the courts against them.

In other words, in the eyes of California’s crazy, liberal legislature, some people have more First Amendment freedoms than others. The key word is “liberal.”

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Italy began the process yesterday of raising its arm toward OPEC and giving them the celebrated Italian version of the finger.

ROME (NYT) — Italy announced Thursday that within five years it planned to resume building nuclear energy plants, two decades after a public referendum resoundingly banned nuclear power and deactivated all its reactors.

“By the end of this legislature, we will put down the foundation stone for the construction in our country of a group of new-generation nuclear plants,” said Claudio Scajola, minister of economic development. “An action plan to go back to nuclear power cannot be delayed anymore.”

Italy joins Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and others in reversing its long-held anti-nuclear position … and results in the unpleasant reality that Europe actually is performing more intelligently than America. Do we all have to become liberals now?

Environmentalist opposition to nuclear power is thermo-hypocritical. They attack it because, although there’s a fine place to stash spent rods under Yucca Mountain, there’s no technology to convert the rods into a benign byproduct. Yet they want us to stop our reliance on oil and nukes in deference to a host of technologies that are technologically proven to be nowhere close to being able to fill the gap.

Do they want technological proof of solutions or not?

Three things stand in the way to greater US reliance on nukes: environmentalists, Harry Reid and production capacity.

We’ve covered the former, although the discussion is not complete without a reference to The China Syndrome, the post-Three Mile Island film starring Hanoi Jane as a crusading TV bubblehead. The film is as anti-capitalism as it is anti-nuke, and it turned a generation against nuclear power. The new generation hasn’t seen this awful film, thank God, so maybe nukes can begin to move forward here … unless Hollywood regurgitates it.

As for Harry Reid, he has his own hand gesture for nuclear power, standing defiant in his opposition to the nuclear waste repository under Yucca Mountain in one of the more bleak and desolate parts of his bleak and desolate state.

His opposition underscores the environmental and NIMBY battles that would be fought for years over the placement of a nuke anywhere in America. If we haven’t built an oil refinery since the 1970s what makes anyone think we can actually get the national gumption to build a nuke in the spineless thou shalt not offend era in which we live today?

And finally, there’s the market. Decades of doldrums in the nuclear industry has had its impact on reactor manufacturing capacity, and as the industry starts to wipe the sleep from its eyes, that capacity is maxed.

Given the environmentalists, NIMBYs and Reid, investing in nukes is a highly speculative proposition. So even if we played all our cards just right — and we won’t — don’t expect America to follow Italy any time soon … especially without an honest and comprehensive energy policy.

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John Edwards voted for the Yucca Mountain (NV) nuclear storage facility when he was in the Senate. Now that the Dems are whoring for votes in Nevada, guess what? He’s against it!

Here’s the NYT live blogging segment from the debate on the Yucca yuks:

10:27 p.m. | Yucca Mountain All three Democrats want to end the nuclear storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, in the same state where this debate is taking place. That happens to be the position of the Democrats’ majority leader, Harry Reid, who is from Nevada.

But Mr. Edwards takes his time to draw a difference among them, that Mr. Obama wants to build new nuke plants, Mrs. Clinton is agnostic on the question, and he, Mr. Edwards, is against any new plants. This gives Mrs. Clinton the chance to point out, gently, “But John, you did vote for Yucca Mountain, twice.”

Interesting that she’s been studying up on his record. What else is in the suitcase tonight?

While it’s not mentioned there, Obama’s against Yucca, too. What a shocker.

In an only slightly less irresponsible comment, Obama said he opposed dumping at Yucca even though his home state of Illinois has the most nuclear plants. Let’s see whether we follow the logic: His state is contributing more to the problem than any other, but he opposes the only likely solution. (USA Today)

So among the potential Dem next presidents, one has found Gaea and is pandering to the Deep Greens, who want to forsake nuclear power forever, all the while bemoaning global warming, and two are OK with nuclear power, but only if you store the waste at each power plant site, where it cannot be secured for centuries, where it’s close to big population centers, and where it’s vulnerable to terrorist attack.

That’s vision, my friends! That’s CHANGE!

That’s also why we can’t trust the Dems with our future. If there were another site secure enough to deal with the Achilles heel of nuclear power, we would have found it. There isn’t; it’s Yucca Mountain or nothing.

Clinton and Obama are too terrified to make this point in Nevada, home of Harry Reid, and home of Dems who have made it their premier head- in- the- oh- so- prevalent sand issue in desert Nevada. Why? Because unlike the GOP, the Dems don’t understand concepts like “greater public good.”

This is curious, because at the macro level, i.e., when they’re hiding in the distant bowels of Congress, they put the government above the individual, driving us to the Nanny State. At the local level, however, they stand for the Glorious Individual, who is supreme … but only when you have to look those individuals in the eye.

Being the president of America requires having to make difficult decisions. Once again, the Dems have proven than pandering is their expertise, not leadership. And unfortunately, America is a country where the majority are registered members of the Pander To Me! Party.

Oh, did I say Yucca Mountain was the only viable nuclear waste disposal site? Today’s USA Today editorial proves me wrong:

In the East, a spot that has been discussed as a promising place to store nuclear waste is the granite formations of, yes, New Hampshire, home to the nation’s first presidential primary. As if!

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Here’s the noble, green, oh-so-concerned about future generations Harry Reid, from his Web site:

I believe that global warming constitutes one of the greatest challenges of our time. … Our government must provide domestic and global leadership on this issue because we have a moral responsibility to leave future generations with a safe and habitable world. The President must build international support for global greenhouse gas reductions and work with Congress to increase U.S. efforts to do the same. I am hopeful that the Senate will again take up bipartisan legislation that will require mandatory reductions in our greenhouse gas emissions, and build upon the efforts of Fortune 500 companies and many state and local governments that have made significant reductions in their emissions. (emphasis added)

Wow! Harry must be really hot on this groovy little technology that generates electricity without the faintest wisp of greenhouse gas. You know, nuclear generating plants.

Nope. Prepare to enter Harry’s House of Hypocrisy:

The Energy Department unveiled legislation Tuesday to spur construction of a national nuclear waste dump in Nevada and increase its capacity. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., immediately vowed to block the bill.

That could spell more problems for the troubled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, already years behind schedule. …

The new bill is similar to legislation the Energy Department offered last year that didn’t advance. The political environment is even tougher for the measure this year now that Reid, an ardent Yucca Mountain opponent, is in charge of the Senate.

“This is just the department’s latest attempt to breathe life into this dying beast and it will fail,” Reid said. “I will continue to leverage my leadership position to prevent the dump from ever being built.” (AP)

Harry’s just playing to his constituents … every one of which will be 10,000 years in the grave as Yucca Mountain continues to just sit there. It’s got hard, cold facts and strenuous analysis on its, while its opponents have fearmongering, hysterical hype and runaway emotions on theirs. Guess which side the Senate’s leading Dem bellies up to?

Children, take note! If you want to grow up and serve America as a leader, use this man as a guidepost! Always remember to ask yourself, “What would Harry do?”

Then do the opposite.

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