‘No’ to nuclear power

‘No’ to nuclear power

Author: David Kennell
People’s Weekly World Newspaper 7 April 09 – “…………………………….The inherent danger of a nuclear accident is recognized by the Price-Anderson Act, which forces taxpayers (not the company) to be responsible for any major accident. Even if no accidents occur, or if plutonium-239 (half-life of 24,110 years), created in fast neutron reactors, is not lost or stolen to make nuclear weapons, there is still no known procedure to eliminate the high-level radioactive waste.

More than 95 percent of the waste products are cesium-137 and strontium-90, which have half-lives (lose 50 percent) of about 30 years. They are not the problem. The “transuranics” (isotopes of uranium, curium-245 and plutonium) have half-lives of thousands of years. So far, the much touted “recycling” requires purification of the transuranics and is very inefficient and difficult and has only been accomplished on a small laboratory scale. The planet is accumulating these highly lethal products with no place to put them.

About half the U.S. nuclear waste is at Hanford, Wash., in nuclear “sludge” acquired from our nuclear weapons program. The other half is from our 103 nuclear power plants. The Hanford waste is beginning to leak into the Columbia River.

As an aside, the unknown cost of waste disposal by currently unknown means is never considered when calculating dollar costs.

But the real costs cannot be measured in dollars. We are saddling future generations, hoping that future technology can solve the problem that has not been solved during the last 60 or so years…………….

Using nuclear fission to boil water is not only absurd — it could be the greatest folly of all time.

April 7, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs