I was talking with my crazy right-wing friend earlier. I made the comment that the dirty long-haired dope-smoking hippies were right about a lot. They were right about the war. They were right about nuclear power. They were right about the environment. They were right about nukes. They were right about free choice. They were idealistic, unrealistic, overly dramatic, young and naive, but they were still right about a lot of things! This made him all but crazy. "They were a bunch of losers! Oh who was that guy I met..." he lamented. I met him in Eugene Oregon. We were all partying... he was on that crazy rainbow bus... He was taking acid and completely out of it!... I can't remember his name but he was all into the hippy scene... As he talked my mind was racing... Crazy bus. LSD. Eugene Oregon... Was it Ken Kesey, I asked, almost jokingly. YEAH! he replied. That was his name. I think he wrote something... Uh yeah! He wrote One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest, for one!!! He is a very famous novelist! Oh, he replied. LOL!!! The guy partied with Ken Kesey and had no idea who he was! THAT is funny! He won't be living that one down for awhile. Oh yes, he loves the movie.
The systems used then WERE proven to be unsafe. During the Three-Mile Island incident, we had the two leading experts in the field screaming at each other and they didn't know what to do. It was a near disaster - far more so than we were told at the time. And the reactor in Japan was an allegedly safe design. But what we saw was a disaster due to utter stupidity. The generators needed in the event of a shutdown were located below sea level! Had the sea wall been ten feet higher, as they knew it needed to be based on the history of tsunamis, OR had the generators been protected from flooding, it never would have happened. So a so-called safe design was in fact not safe at all. They tell us they have new and improved reactors now where a meltdown is impossible. That may be true. But I still question what potential threat exists were terrorists to gain control a power plant. The mass production of fissionable materials also lends itself to national security threats from terrorism. The more nuclear materials are processed, the greater the threat of terrorists getting some of those materials. Not long after 911, when the nation was at as high of an alert as we've been since Pearl Harbor, security guards at nuclear power plants were caught sleeping on duty, on security cameras. There is no such a thing as a perfect system. So one has to consider the potential consequences in a worst case. And how can that same technology be used as a weapon against us. The logic of building massive dams has come into question as well. When a monstrous dam like the Three-Rivers dam in China fails, millions of people will die. Does it make sense to build structures and systems that put millions of lives at risk? It is a reasonable question.
Before that, graphite-cooled reactors were used, like the one at Chernobyl. They were safe too. The disaster in Japan was not due to a reactor failure. It was poor planning; and because they couldn't keep the storage pool for spent materials cooled. No amount of safe reactor design would have mattered in that case. It was a materials handling problem. It was a problem of dealing with all the dangerous waste materials produced by nuclear power plants.
Three mile island was almost no real danger to humankind. Anybody with any sense would know that Fukushima was a silly design to do in a tsunami zone.
Those long haired, peace & love hippies raised kids named Starshine who raised kids named Nikolas Jacob Cruz or David Hogg. Society has always suffered at the hands of leftist malcontents. Nothing new.
From someone living 800 feet from the Portsmouth Gaseous diffusion complex, they were right. Our cancer rate in this county (and the surrounding counties) is astronomical compared to the national average. This trend continues around virtually all nuclear sites with in the US. I won’t eat the deer in this county anymore, most of them have massive tumors (I’ve killed one and cut off the big tumor on its neck, the tumor weighed 11 odd pounds) on and below their necks/heads. Next time I drive next to the plant I’ll snap a picture for you. If you said “Fusion” wasn’t bad, I would agree. It’s the same process our sun uses. It will still give you cancer, it just takes a lot more exposure.
So when they said it could be trusted to be safe, they were wrong. Yes it was due to several cost-cutting measures. Save a buck, destroy a city. As for Three-Mile Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident They were fantastically lucky there was no oxygen in the containment vessel or it might have ended very differently. We might have had our own Fukushima. But it was still a very close call. And at several points the people in charge did not know what to do. It was almost this
Nuclear power is perfectly safe so long as there are competent, mindful humans preventing the reactor from achieving its designed purpose- to melt down. Most processes require humans to keep them going. Nuclear power requires humans to keep it FROM going. When humans stop maintaining the process (or stop maintaining the process skillfully, or stop maintaining the automated equipment), the nature of the reactor is to eventually return the radioactive material to its natural state- by releasing the radioactive material and chemicals associated with the process back into the air and water that we need to live. Historically speaking, humans being human and nature being nature, this will inevitably happen.
But....but.....aren't human beings part of nature? So everything we do is actually nature doing it. When did we become separate from nature unless you want to believe we are divinely created. But even then, God made us from nature...he didn't pop us into existence, he used dirt.
Sure. If you don't mind the natural process of dying from radiation exposure. Or we can try to prevent it.
Why? Renewable energy is far more preferrable and sustainable. We will be sending nuclear waste into space soon....when storage facilities run out....wait...are we doing that now?
