nuclear-news

U.S. environmental researchers warn Humans are destroying Mother Earth

The Canadian by Jason Miller, American correspondent 16 Sept 08

I am the earth. You are the earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers.
– Ymber Delecto

What a sorry lot we humans are, particularly those of us immersed in the “American Way of Life.” Killing is indeed our business. And business has never been better.

According to the World Resources Institute, 4 species go extinct every hour “due to tropical deforestation alone.”………………………Our dirty little secret here in the U.S. is that we built and buttressed our crumbling empire by unleashing a force so potent and so capable of rendering life on Earth extinct that it makes capitalism’s “slow motion” ecocide look like candy-striping. In 1945 we became the first and only country to harness the power of nuclear fission and utilize it as a weapon of mass destruction……………………………….Nuclear power only produces 20% of the electricity consumed in the U.S., but accounts for a number of staggering problems we simply keep sweeping under the rug for future generations to solve………………………..

Let’s take a closer look at the technology many are ready to embrace as the “remedy for Climate Change.”

Nuclear power is touted as a cheap alternative to coal (and other ways of producing energy). While it is a less expensive means of actually generating electricity once a reactor is online (the operating cost is about half that of a coal-fired plant), there are tremendous fiscal costs associated with building a nuclear facility, removing and storing radioactive waste, and decommissioning a plant once it is retired. (One hasn’t been closed yet but the estimated cost to do so is around $300 million).

And just who’s underwriting these outrageous costs? We the taxpayers!……………………..the threat nuclear energy poses to the environment is so high that calling it “green” is an absurdity one would think had sprung from the mind of Lewis Carroll.
Since nuclear plants rely on large bodies of water to cool reactors (and avoid a melt-down) and discharge about 70% of the heat they generate (as waste), they are vulnerable to droughts and cause significant thermal pollution in the bodies of water that cool them.

Nuclear power production begins to contaminate the environment with radioactivity before the fuel even arrives at the plant. It takes a tonne of uranium ore to produce 3 kilograms of uranium oxide. While the tailings that are left behind emit small levels of radiation, they do release radon gas and radioactive dust at a rate 10,000 times faster than the unmined ore. This nuclear contamination stays in the environment for 100,000 years and over time reaches such high levels that a Los Alamos Laboratory report concluded that we need to, “to zone the land in uranium mining and milling districts to forbid human habitation.”

Nuclear power facilities produce a steady stream of low-level radioactive waste, including gas, solid and liquid. Gaseous and liquid wastes are “cleaned and diluted,” but are eventually released into the environment. Solid wastes are transported to one of three low-level radiation disposal sites in the US where they continue accumulating and emitting radiation into the environment.

About once a year 33% of a reactor’s fuel rods are replaced, producing anywhere from 12 to 30 tonnes of high level nuclear waste. The frightening part is that we’ve been using this “green” technology for 40 years now and still haven’t figured out a safe and permanent means of disposing of its extremely dangerous and lethal by-products.

Temporary pools or dry cask storage (large steel cylinders that require constant monitoring) onsite at nuclear facilities house most of the spent reactor fuel, which will remain a dire threat to the environment for tens of thousands of years.

Scan scare
The STandard  (Hong Kong) Alan Zarembo September 16, 2008

Generating tens of billions of dollars each year, CT scanning has become an economic engine for hospitals and doctors. “It’s gotten into the culture of doctors,” says Geoffrey Rubin, a Stanford University radiologist.

But with the boom has a come a rising concern that the abundant use of radiation is beginning to have a subtle effect on health. Although the risk of a single CT scan is minuscule, even a tiny increase in radiation exposure spread over a large population can eventually add up to tens of thousands of cancer deaths a year.

A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that CT scans administered today could cause up to 2 percent of cancer deaths in two or three decades……………………..

Some researchers estimate that up to a third of scans could have been avoided or replaced by safer technologies, such as ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging. Scans can cost from a few hundred dollars for a single organ to a few thousand for a full-body image.

Today, scanner manufacturers, including Siemens and General Electric, tout the ease of making money with the devices. Just two scans a day can pay for a machine and its operation over five years.Ten scans a day can bring in more than US$400,000 (HK$3.11 million) a year in profit………………………….

Medical tests are now the biggest source of radiation exposure, recently surpassing background radiation, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements in the United States. Of particular concern is the rising use of CT scans for children and pregnant women.

For example, an abdominal scan in a five-year-old carries a 0.1 percent risk of triggering a fatal cancer, nearly 10 times the risk in adults older than 35.

The National Academy of Sciences weighed in on the issue in a 2006 report, saying that there is no safe level of radiation exposure and that even small doses pose some health risks.