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The Nuclear Goliath: Confronting Industrial Energy

TOWARD FREEDOM Frank Joseph Smecker 30 March 2009 Lately, many may have heard the affable radio jingles for nuclear energy as a clean and reliable candidate to supplant the U.S.’s reliance on foreign fossil fuels. This is sheer, malignant propaganda. Nuclear energy, along with its requisite mining, is not only unsustainable to a high degree, but is, in all aspects, violently rapacious as it dissolves the planet’s fecundity and ultimately encumbers the creation of life for generations to come. It is imperative that nuclear is removed from the lexicon of domestic energy policy and that we, as a people, consider alternative energy options while significantly reducing our consumption levels.

From its inception through mining processes to enrichment, fission, and post-fission, nuclear energy supplies the human race with more destructive waste than energy. A typical 1,000 megawatt plant produces roughly 500 pounds of plutonium and 20-30 tons of high-level radioactive waste annually. There is no known safe and secure way to dispose of the waste. The rate of decay of a radioactive isotope is called its half-life (e.g., the half-life of Plutonium-239 is 24,000 years). The hazardous life of a radioactive element–that being the amount of time needed before the element stops posing a significant risk to people’s mortal health–is at least 10 half-lives; that means plutonium-239 will remain deadly for at least 240,000 years.

DU (depleted uranium, U-238) has a half-life of 4.5 billion years–its hazardous life is uncertain. Despite there being no known safe and secure riddance of the material, the U.S. has made over 1 billion tons of DU for its own “practical” use. DU is used in armor-piercing incendiaries and has been released over Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Bosnia. According to research done by the World Health Organization (WHO), DU emits an ionizing radiation responsible for irreversible DNA and genetic damage, and ultimately cancer, an assortment of lethal lung/kidney diseases, and/or death; not to mention its fallout rings the globe by way of the jet streams above…………

Uranium mining is culpable for radiological contamination of the environment and for impacting groundwater systems. It requires approximately a ton of ore to extract two pounds of uranium. The leftover debris is known as uranium tailings (“for each ton of uranium oxide approximately 40,000 tons of tailings remain behind”) and they contain 85 percent of the original radioactivity of the ore. These tailings are comprised of alpha-emitting substances such as thorium-230 (half-life of 80,000 years), radium-226, radon-222, lead-210, polonium-210, etc. The tailings emit at least 10,000 times more radon gas than does the undisturbed ore. Radon gas can travel 1,000 miles in a day and can deposit on vegetation, soil, and water. The above mentioned radium-226, ubiquitous in uranium tailings, is a highly lethal “bone-seeking” alpha-emitting carcinogen with a half-life of 1,600 years. This element is “blown in the wind, washed by the rain, and leached into waterways” from the tailings. It concentrates by factors of thousands in aquatic plants and by the hundreds in terra plants. Radon gas from inoperative mines and abandoned tailings can be culpable for radioactive contamination not only on a continental level, but on a global basis as well…………

March 31, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, spinbuster, wastes