nuclear-news

Nuclear industry – dirty and no solution to climate change

Nuclear power is too risky – CNN.com Mark Z. Jacobson,  22 Feb 2010 “……The on-the-ground footprint of nuclear power, through its plants and uranium mines, is about 1,000 times larger than it is for wind. Wind turbines are merely poles in the ground — with lots of space between them that can be farmed, ranched or left open — or poles in the ocean. Geothermal energy also has a much smaller footprint than nuclear; solar only slightly more.

But while geothermal, solar and wind are safe, nuclear is not.For nuclear to meet all the world’s energy needs today — 12.5 terawatts (1 terawatt = 1 trillion watts) — more than 17,000 nuclear plants would be needed. Even if nuclear were only 5 percent of the solution, most countries would have nuclear plants.What’s worse, the nuclear industry wants to reprocess waste to obtain more energy from increasingly scarce uranium.

But this only produces more weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.A global push toward nuclear energy would mean that uranium enrichment — and efforts at nuclear weapons development — would certainly grow throughout the world..Nuclear proponents argue that not enough clean renewables exist to power the world. However, part of our work at Stanford University has been to map world renewable energy resources. Enough wind and solar exist in high-wind and sunny locations over land to power the world for all purposes multiple times over. There is no shortage.

Nuclear power is too risky – CNN.com

February 23, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear spin, nuclear wastes, uranium