It seems that every generation must learn anew the insanity of war. Apparently each generation needs another disaster to learn again the madness of nuclear power.
The Corporate Conservatives continuously downplay the costs and dangers of Nuclear power and count on the ignorance and short term memories of the people.
Recently there has been a rush to embrace Nuclear power because it creates less CO2 than conventional sources (while at the same time denying that CO2 is causing Climate Change).
But the dangers of Nuclear power have still not been alleviated. The nuclear waste still remains dangerously radioactive for a quarter of a million years and we are no closer to a safe way of disposing of this poison than we were 67 years ago when the first plant was made.
It turns out that the Yucca Mountain Waste Depository is not geologically stable and is over a major aquifer with fissures running down to the aquifer. There are no other sites being seriously considered to get rid of the mountains of radioactive waste that continue to build up each year.
http://www.earthmountainview.com/yucca/y...Almost all of this waste is temporarily stored near the power plants where they are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. The waste from our light water reactors are not bomb grade material, but this waste can be combined with conventional explosives to spread radioactivity over major cities downwind of any such "Dirty Bomb".
The latest plans are to create "Breeder Reacters" that can burn the used fuel from the light water reactors, but this will result in more Plutonium which can easily be turned into weapons grade material, and allow terrorists to threaten our major cities with a nuclear bomb.
Every step in the mining, fuel production, use and disposal of this material is dangerous. The plants become more and more radioactive as they are operated, and it costs three times as much to decommission a plant as it does to build one, because it must be dismantled by robots and buried in disposal sites.
All of this highly dangerous technology simply to boil water! The process is inherently dangerous because the nuclear material is contained in Zirconium fuel rods that can explode when hot and which creates explosive hydrogen gas.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03...There are better ways to boil water like the sun. It takes about ten years to build a nuke plant and by that time there will be myriad safe alternative energy sources that will have become more cost effective than nuclear.
http://www.altenergy.org/nonrenewables/n...Here in California we are overdue for a major earthquake like Japan just experienced. Most of the Nuke plants here were only designed to withstand a 7.5 quake and most are near major population centers.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03...