After banning nuclear power for two decades, Italy has announced plans to build a new wave of nuclear plants. Concerns about oil prices, energy security, and fossil-fuel emissions contributed to the about-face by the world's largest net importer of electricity. "Only nuclear plants safely produce energy on a vast scale with competitive costs, respecting the environment," the country's minister of economic development said Thursday. But the switcharoo won't solve any short-term problems: the government may need legal action to turn over the popular public referendum that closed the country's nuclear plants in 1987, and new plants take about 20 years to build. Italy also needs to figure out how to deal with its existing radioactive waste (provided pawning it off on the U.S. doesn't work out). And the government should prepare for pushback: the nuclear-power plan is, says the director of Greenpeace Italy, "a declaration of war."
source: The New York Times, BBC News, Agence France-Presse, Bloomberg
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Comments
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Tasermons Partner Posted 2:28 pm
23 May 2008
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usandthem Posted 12:38 am
24 May 2008
People are so desperate to have what they want NOW and not worry about the future repocussions and this is childish,insane behavior.We can not have everything that we want,nor should we.It is time to be the responsible adult here and grow up!
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:05 pm
26 May 2008
This basically breaks the Truce of Nice because Italy is currently the largest customer of electricity...from nuclear powered France!
Yes, electricity (from nukes) is France's number 4 export and Italy it's number one customer. This makes it interesting in a few ways: one certainly is hypocrisy, as in, yes, I don't want a nuclear plant, but yes, I will buy the electricity of one if it's in your backyard.
Then also there's the why of...did the French just get greedy and start charging too much or is Italy mau-mau'ing the EU for some other goods and services.
Well, you know how long those Euro-Alliances last (cf. Archduke Ferdinand).
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northbranch Posted 9:17 pm
26 May 2008
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Wolverine Posted 4:57 am
29 May 2008
Brand has financial ties to the nuclear industry, because he is founder of the Global Business Network, which includes more than a dozen corporations and governmental agencies involved in the production or promotion of nuclear energy, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Moore has become a complete traitor to the environmental movement. Among other things, he chairs or chaired the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, a nuclear industry funded group that promotes nuclear power. He said as recently as this April that he doesn't believe human activities are causing global warming (his words were that there's no proof), which puts him on the level of oil company executives and people in the Bush administration on this issue.
So there are the two spokespeople for the so-called pro-nuke faction of the environmental movement. This is identical to what in PR is called an Astroturf campaign: it is made to look grassroots, but is actually funded and run by industries that stand to gain financially from the campaign.
The facts are these:
Nuclear energy is created by causing severe ecological destruction. Uranium must be mined, which causes two types of harm immediately: destruction of the land by mining, and poisoning of everything that comes near the now exposed uranium by exposure to additional radioactivity. A significant amount of oil is also required in order to mine uranium, so oil must be consumed and more greenhouse gases emitted.
The uranium must then be trucked to a processing plant, consuming more oil and emitting more greenhouse gases.
The "enrichment" of uranium, a deceptive euphemism if ever there was one, creates what has been called the most toxic substance known, plutonium. This "enrichment" emits large amounts of chlorofluorocarbon, which is not only a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, but was banned because of its destructive effect on the Earth's ozone layer.
Construction of the massive concrete buildings needed for the reactors also emits massive amounts of CO2.
Operating nuclear power plants emit hundreds of thousands of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year. Contrary to lies, propaganda, and half truths from the nuclear industry and its supporters, NO amount of radioactivity is safe, and ANY extra amount can cause additional harm.
Nuclear power has already produced THOUSANDS OF TONS of nuclear waste. There is no known way to dispose of this waste without causing massive ecological or medical harm, or both, aside from putting it into rocket ships aimed for the sun. This solution is not even considered because of the significant chance of those rockets exploding before they leave the Earth's atmosphere, which would cause the waste aboard to rain down on the Earth.
So, as can be clearly seen, nuclear energy is extremely environmentally and ecologically harmful and dangerous. Therefore, there is no real pro-nuke faction of the environmental movement, just a phony one. While some people who are otherwise environmentalists may, unfortunately, take a pro-nuke position in the erroneous belief that nuclear power is clean or that it's a solution to global warming, this is a highly anti-environmental position and is not held by any environmental group of any significance.
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