Nuclear power versus nuclear bombs…
I’ll give retrograde conservatives credit—they always seem to be more focused than liberal progressives. In fact, the general fickleness of liberal progressives is often amusing. Already they are screaming “Chernobyl!” and “Three-Mile Island!” and “Down with Nuclear Power!” when just months ago they were wringing hands about the oil spill BP caused in the Gulf of Mexico. You can’t have it both ways, folks. One example taken from Dave Lindorff, Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist, says it all—his ThisCantBeHappening.net article is titled “The Idiocy and Hubris of Engineers” and comes down hard on GE and their reactors. Mind you, Mr. Lindorff has no scientific or engineering training and quotes only so-called experts that support his agenda—apparently idiocy and hubris are contagious?
What these Chicken Littles fail to realize is that no other energy source can compete with nuclear energy. Wind, solar, hydroelectric, ocean waves—none of these can offer the power levels obtained from a nuclear plant. Countries like France, Germany, and Japan lead us in the development of nuclear power plants precisely because they realized early on that they have no choice: they have no oil so they must become independent of foreign oil out of economic necessity. Even China, that behemoth of modern greedy capitalism, struggling mightily to control as much of the world’s oil that it can, has invested heavily in nuclear technology. The U.S. lags far behind.
One reason: we do have oil reserves. Our leaders are loath to use them, but their very existence reduces the anxiety that many of our leaders would normally feel. Forget the fact that we are more dependent on foreign oil today than we were twenty years ago, even though most presidential candidates include the independence from foreign oil in their campaign platforms. While our increasing national debt should be cause for concern about the viability of America’s economy in the future, our dependence on foreign oil should also be a concern—this dependence definitely increases our national debt. We must find energy alternatives. Sitting around waiting for Back to the Future’s Mr. Fusion won’t cut it. We need viable, proven alternatives now. Nuclear energy is the only one that is viable and proven.
I’ve always been against nuclear proliferation. That’s against nuclear bombs, folks! Too many liberal progressives equate nuclear power to nuclear bombs. They point to Japan’s present nuclear nightmare and the other accidents I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post as reasons for halting the construction of nuclear power plants. I laugh at their naïveté. These cases are all accidents. The Japanese reactors are safer than Chernobyl’s and our Three-Mile Island. They were hit by an earthquake registering 9.0 on the Richter scale, an earthquake that is not only insidious in its destructive power but also rare. So you up the ante against Mother Nature, folks.
You build reactors to withstand something even stronger than a 9.0 earthquake. You revise GE’s design and if it’s found wanting, get them to change it. Maybe it’s not too wise to build your reactor farms close to a fault line (several in California come to mind). You establish international rules and regulations that no more than N reactors can be constructed close together, where N < 4 might be indicated due to the Japanese disaster. Or, if the risk analysis of your reactor construction shows it can survive that huge earthquake, even near a fault line, maybe N = 10 is even indicated. You also make sure your new reactor farms are more than 100 kilometers away from population centers just to hedge your bets (hard to do in Japan, but not impossible). You do not—I repeat—DO NOT ADOPT the Neanderthal-like Luddite policy of halting all human progress and returning to the Dark Ages that Mr. Lindorff and others of the Chicken Little persuasion promote!
It’s rather unfortunate that the nuclear age started with weapons research. While nuclear reactors were used in this research, the focus was on beating the Nazis to the atom bomb. While liberal progressives wring their hands and march in anti-nuclear protests, especially in Europe, and retrograde conservatives pursue their even more insane policies of nuclear deterrence, the ideas about the peaceful uses of atomic energy may be lost to a whole generation. Now the horror we feel as rogue governments like North Korea, Iran, and, yes, Pakistan, India, and Israel, are developing their own nuclear arsenals, has blinded us to the atomic energy alternative in our quest for independence from foreign oil. My fear is that the press will make emotions will run high and nuclear energy will once again be off the table when discussing energy alternatives. Our media is already propagating this fear by showing cute Japanese children being subjected to Geiger counters and taking potassium iodide pills while the pundits focus only on only one side of the energy debate.
There has already been a rush on potassium iodide pills in this country. Newscasters are causing people to wring their hands and think apocalyptic thoughts. Nuclear energy technology is scary only because we are not willing to make the investment to make it safe and accident free. Hell, driving a car is scary, especially in Boston or New Jersey, the last two places I’ve lived—more people are killed every year on our nation’s highways than are likely to be killed in Japan from radiation—but we don’t react strongly enough to these traffic stats to ensure safer driving conditions, do we? Our summer vacations seem to be more important to us than making our country independent of foreign oil, even as we are faced with these stats and with gas at $4 per gallon or more. I don’t understand my fellow Americans. Patriotism seems to be measured by how many trips to Six Flags they can make.
Our nation is in for some tough times in the decades to come. Oil and coal are limited resources that pollute the environment. “Limited” means the supply won’t last forever, even if we continue to fight wars to control the world’s oil, the necon imperative. The world’s oil supplies are already beyond the tipping point. “Pollute the environment” means there is no such thing as clean burning oil or coal. Yes, there are plans to pump all that CO2 underground and other hand-waving ideas—talk about idiocy and hubris! What about all those bad nuclear wastes from the nuclear power plants? you ask. They last forever, you say.
Yep, a very small percentage of them do—well, not forever, but longer than an average lifetime. Technology must move on. Maybe it’s a mistake to store those wastes close to or in the same building as the reactor. Change the design, then. Let’s clean up the environment and maybe, just maybe, save the planet from run-away global warming that will make our planet Gaia into the planet Venus, by eliminating power generation via oil and coal burning. Sure, we create another problem, a smaller problem, by using fission technology to buy us a few more centuries. Perhaps by then we will have nuclear fusion if the retrograde conservatives finally decide to fund basic research.
However, it’s also possible that some of those rogue nations, or the U.S. and Russia with their vast arsenals of hydrogen bombs, will end all life on Earth. Whatever happens, nuclear power, as we know it, offers a temporary solution to a vexing problem: how to generate enough clean power to continue the march of progress? No one is claiming that fission reactor technology is perfect. The Japanese disaster shows, in fact, that it must be improved, especially if you insist on building your reactor farms near an earthquake fault. But it can be improved. And must be.
Al Gore has popularized the “inconvenient truth” of global warming. You can debate all the science details as much as you want, but you’re really smoking some good medicinal stuff if you believe that all that junk we’re spewing into the atmosphere from burning oil and coal is good for Mother Earth. There can be weather cycles that we’re just learning about and periods of receding polar ice caps and growing ones, but we’re not making the old girl any happier by what we’re doing to her atmosphere. It’s similar to the man who says his grandmother smoked until she was 90 and she was fine. Yeah, but was it good for her? Maybe she’d have lived past 100!
Barack Obama recently has taken an unpopular stance of not wanting to remove nuclear energy as one of his alternatives to coal and oil. Maybe he’s just in the pockets of GE—I dunno. I doubt it. I prefer to believe he’s thought about it, he has consulted enough experts that don’t have an anti-nuclear agenda (read: influenced by big oil companies), and has come to a reasoned decision on what’s best for the country. Al Gore has spoken about the “inconvenient truth”; Barack Obama has spoken about the “inconvenient solution.” I expect the press, liberal progressives, and retrograde conservatives will all excoriate him. I hope he sticks by his guns. If you see any other solution, write to him, and me too. I just don’t see it. And I’m willing to bet if Japan decides to shut down all its reactors, they will become a Third World nation in a blink of an eye.
I’m sorry about the disaster in Japan. The Japanese technicians trying to control those reactors and keep them from meltdown are awe-inspiring heroes. The U.S. technicians, trained for nuclear disasters in the aftermath of 9/11, are also heroes. They may be on suicide missions. Japan is dealing with a one-two punch from Mother Nature that caused a nuclear disaster that we can only hope doesn’t worsen. It is a terrible scenario of human suffering. Our news media is smacking us with its tragedy 24/7. But there are agendas here, and don’t forget it. I see the agendas and I don’t like what I see. My advice to those swayed by those using this tragedy to further their anti-nuclear agenda: Giving up is not the solution. You learn some lessons and move on. That is the path of the courageous. Anything else is cowardice.
