[p2p-research] the case against nuclear and for renewables

[Michel Bauwens]

good summary of the arguments from
http://www.tikkun.org/article.php?story=20090622145925534



Are America's leaders and citizens aware that Germany is phasing out nuclear
power, as are several other European countries? Today, Germany has garnered
the leading worldwide edge for both wind and solar technologies. With
studies coming out showing increased incidence of cancer and leukemia
surrounding nuclear plants in the United Kingdom and Germany, isn't it time
America acknowledged that nuclear power is not "safe and clean" as
nuclear-industry-funded flaks like Patrick Moore and Christy Todd Whitman
shamelessly proclaim? Shouldn't Americans also know that 80 percent of the
fuel for nuclear plants, uranium, is imported? No, nuclear power will not
make us "independent of foreign oil," for only 2 percent of our electricity
is generated by oil (18.8 percent is the latest figure for electricity
generated from nuclear power in the United States).

*The Insuperable Problem of Plutonium*

Most Americans are well aware of the most obvious problem with nuclear
power: radioactive waste. This ultimately toxic waste still cannot be safely
contained for the necessary thousands of years. Plutonium-239 has a
half-life of 24,000 years. That means that after 24,000 years, half of the
quantity of plutonium-239 we started with is still radioactive. Experts
inform us that any radionuclide such as plutonium-239 is hazardous for ten
to twenty half-lives, meaning plutonium-239 will require absolutely complete
unbreachable containment for 240,000 to 480,000 years. It is unknown how
long current technological containment experiments can contain nuclear
waste. However, we do know that concrete only lasts about fifty to one
hundred years for its possible containment function.

Plutonium's lung-cancer-causing dose is one microgram, or one millionth of a
gram. With 454 grams in one pound, that means that one pound of plutonium
can theoretically cause 454 million lung cancers, if dispersed in small
enough particles via some accident to enter poor unknowing victims' lungs.
Thus, twenty pounds of plutonium (just one of more than 500 radionuclides
produced in each of our 104 nuclear plants every day by splitting the
uranium atom via fission) could kill every human being on earth by inducing
lung cancer, which could take up to thirty years to develop, and which would
have no label for its cause. Each nuclear plant produces between 400 and
1,000 pounds of plutonium among its radioactive wastes per year. Twenty
pounds of plutonium is sufficient to produce an atom bomb as powerful as
those that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War
II.

Remember that the nuclear power plant began as the unit that produced
plutonium for our country's first atomic bombs. Then someone decided that
these units could produce electricity that would be "too cheap to meter."
This did not prove to be true. Government subsidies and limited insurance
liability laws (e.g., the Price-Anderson Act, which limits nuclear industry
liability for a nuclear accident to a mere $10 billion, meaning the excess
cost above this designated amount would fall on taxpayers) have sustained
the nuclear industry. By this time it's a very "mature" industry, but it
still states that without large multibillion-dollar government loan
guarantees, no new nuclear plants can be built today or in the future.

*Chernobyl's Lessons*

The truly catastrophic danger of nuclear power is a nuclear accident like
the April 26, 1986, Chernobyl steam explosion and fire that occurred in the
Ukraine, which was then part of the USSR. Many of our new voters may not
recall that incident since they weren't born yet, or they were still riding
their tricycles and skateboards back in the mid-1980s. The expense of that
accident has been estimated to be about $400 billion, in a relatively rural
area. Imagine if that happened in a metropolitan area like New York City,
where the Indian Point nuclear reactor complex in Westchester county today
currently leaks strontium, tritium, and other radionuclides toward the
Hudson River, which is just 300 yards away. The monetary cost would easily
be in multitrillion dollars, devastating the hub of our economy and thus
wounding our national economy for an almost unimaginable period of time (not
to mention the human and environmental costs).

Although nuclear power proponents may repeatedly drum the number thirty-one
into our media subconscious as the death toll for Chernobyl, Dr. Alexei
Yablokov, president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, reports
that at least 300,000 people have died prematurely thus far as a result of
the world's worst human-caused industrial accident. Former Secretary General
of the United Nations Kofi Annan stated: "At least 2 million children in
Belarus, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation require physical treatment [due
to the Chernobyl accident]. Not until 2016, at the earliest, will we know
the full number of those likely to develop serious medical conditions."

Dr. Vladimir Chernousenko, nuclear physicist and former head of the
Ukrainian Academy of Science, supervised the "cleanup" of Chernobyl (and
later died from cancer). He informed us that an area approximately 375 miles
in diameter around the blown-apart Chernobyl plant would be contaminated for
100,000 years. While speaking about nuclear power during a U.S. visit, he
also stated:



To construct a safe reactor is practically impossible either here or in
Russia ... we simply cannot get energy from such enterprises. Because we are
dealing with nuclear processes, with uncontrolled reactions, which occur
within millionths of a second, and no matter what kind of protection
mechanism you design, sooner or later the objects must explode and they
will. Why were they created at all? When they were created, constructed, it
was understood that they were extremely dangerous, but at that point the
physicists were told that they must save the world from Hitler at any cost
and as soon as possible. And unfortunately the physicists accomplished this,
which they regret to this day.



This applies to all new but commercially untested nuclear reactors. Although
we may hear the phrase "inherently safe" oxymoronically proclaimed about
these awesome contraptions, remember that the Chernobyl accident occurred
when the reactor suddenly went from approximately 7 percent of full power to
100 times 100 percent of full power in less than one minute! New reactors
may improve upon old designs, but the ultimate danger shall always be there,
no matter the hype or the happy hopes the "nuclear power is green"
dreamer/profiteer errantly lays upon a desperately energy-seeking human
race.

*Nuclear Containment and Transportation in the United States*

>From mining to shipping to decommissioning, there are untold costs, both
health-wise and dollar-wise, in the nuclear cycle that Americans have been
shielded from hearing about. Yucca Mountain in Nevada has thirty-three
earthquake faults, and it has been rejected by numerous scientists as a safe
repository for nuclear waste. Up to 70,000 rail and truck shipments of
high-level radioactive waste over the next thirty years could wreak havoc
upon any community or city along their routes through forty-three states
should an accident or ambush occur to what are still, to this day,
inadequately tested casks. The *Nuclear Monitor *has called shipping the
"weakest link ... in irradiated fuel management," with only 2,500 to 3,000
such shipments actually transpiring "in the U.S. since the dawn of the
Atomic Age."

The *Nuclear Monitor*'s March 2006 issue reported: "Conservative estimates
reveal that each truck cask on the highways would carry up to forty times
the long-lasting radioactivity released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Rail
and barge casks, six times larger, would carry over 200 times the
long-lasting radiation released at Hiroshima. Release of even a fraction of
this cargo would spell unprecedented radiological disaster." Exposure to a
hot spill of high-level radioactive waste from three feet away for ten
seconds could deliver a fatal dose of radiation. The individual involved
would probably die from radiation sickness within two weeks-bleeding from
multiple orifices and suffering from an imploding immune system, as occurred
with many Japanese atomic bomb victims at the end of World War II.

No major TV networks carried the news that buried within the Senate version
of the economic stimulus bill was up to $50 billion for nuclear loan
guarantees, of which more than 50 percent was expected to end up in default
according to the Congressional Budget Office. Sadly, our major networks
never mentioned anything about the removal of these loan guarantees in the
reconciled stimulus bill, either. The nuclear story exists in the shadows.
Americans, beware that this unwarrantedly subsidized industry may sneakily
gain loan guarantees in the future if the light of the media does not shine
on the next attempt to bail out the nuclear cabal.

*Renewable Renaissance*

Importantly, no new nuclear plant would be ready for ten years, while we
could be supplying all our energy from alternative sources within a decade
should we spend our precious resources wisely. Denmark today gets 25 percent
of its electricity from wind. Spain expects to generate almost 30 percent of
its electricity from renewable resources by 2010, requiring all new and
renovated buildings to use solar power for part of their energy.

A 2.5-megawatt Clipper wind turbine can be made in one day. New thin-film
photovoltaics could be part of a rooftop renaissance of solar energy at
competitive cost without the need for new electric transmission lines.
"Small" hydropower capacity (from facilities generating less than 30
megawatts, theoretically not impacting fish spawning) in the United States
today is more than 275,000 megawatts-nearly triple our current hydropower
production. And then there is energy efficiency or "negawatts, not
megawatts" decreasing combustive pollution. As Amory Lovins famously says,
"because saving electricity is cheaper than making it, pollution is avoided
not at a cost but at a profit."

It is time to create an electricity system for the United States that relies
neither on fossil fuel nor nuclear power. We can do it, starting now--yes,
we can!


*Conrad Miller, MD, is a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician.  The
entire chapter on nuclear power from his latest book, *The Most Important
Issues Americans THINK They Know Enough About* (2008), plus more relevant
information is available at http://www.crestofthewave.com.*

-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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