From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 13:31:26 MDT
At 10:53 AM 6/1/2001 -0700, Anne Marie Tobias wrote:
>As for the cost of nuclear, I think it sad that nobody has mentioned
>the legacy of virtual genocide committed against Native Americans
>who live near the mines the government ramrodded onto their space.
>The results of radioactive mine tailings and heavy metal contamination
>has rendered many western reservations nearly uninhabitable. Those
>tribes that bore the brunt of our hunt for uranium, now suffer a legacy
>of birth defect, soaring cancer rates, and remarkably high infant
>mortality (even above and beyond that of other tribes.)
I am skeptical of this claim, and some of the above sets off my BS alarm
("radioactive mine tailings"? Compared to what?). Most locales that have
decent uranium ores also typically have high levels of arsenic, selenium,
radon, radio-isotopes, and heavy metals in their water supplies naturally;
the region in question has some of the richest heavy mineral ore deposits
in the world. Water in these areas have often had very high levels of
these elements long before any mining was going on. One does not have to
look far in the Mountain West to find natural springs with mineral levels
that would be considered super-nasty toxic waste by the EPA. It is a
consequence of volcanism and very active geologies and rarely has anything
to do with mining.
>I think an ethanol economy is an awesome idea...
On the surface it looks good, but in practice it is pretty inefficient and
expensive. Also, you still have CO2 and other emissions with ethanol.
>We need to look at all the cost/benefits when picking a viable energy
>source... producing nuclear power for pennies isn't cheap if you're up
>to your eyeballs in government subsidized cleanup messes, and eco
>disasters that take your tax dollars to fix.
Modern fission power is the second cheapest source of strategic power per
kWh when all costs, from building to cleanup, are factored in. Fossil
fuels are actually fairly expensive as energy sources go. The only
(slightly) cheaper source of strategic power is geothermal, which takes a
lot more time to develop due to the nature of it. A single geothermal well
can theoretically produce a maximum of about 10,000 kWh continuous
(depending on the grade of the the source and size of the bore hole -- most
produce much less), and requires very specialized drilling equipment. In a
region with a rich geothermal source, you can only drop about one well per
acre, so you typically set up geothermal farms to aggregate output from
multiple bores. Still the energy output per acre is substantially higher
than something like solar and the cost of operation is dirt cheap. But the
environmentalists don't really like geothermal either.
Given the size, geology, and power requirements of the U.S., the only
choices we have today with regards to cheap and clean strategic
("strategic" meaning it could easily scale to meet demands for the
foreseeable future based solely on domestic supply) power sources are
fission and geothermal. The only other strategic option we have is coal,
but that isn't very clean at all. Everything else has serious problems
that makes them poor choices as a cornerstone for energy supply in the U.S.
>We need to be asking neither
>the environmental extremists, nor the businesses with a vested money
>interest, but nonaffiliated scientists who are experts in this field.
No one is "non-affiliated". Most scientists have a political agenda, given
the opportunity.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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