Comments billvon has made

the fracturing of the environmental movement

>The rising tide of pro nuclear power talking points
> from many environmental activists recently is very
>disturbing!

I think what you are seeing is the environmental movement begin to fracture.  It is getting bigger and bigger, and when things get bigger, they tend to specialize internally.

At one extreme we have the Earth Firsters, people who burn down houses and destroy cars to make their environmental points.  Their planks are a halt to any development in sensitive areas, strict vegetarianism, no logging etc - in other words, environmentalism through poverty.

At the other extreme we have the conservative 'environmentalists' who buy natural cotton towels and call it done.  They then drive home in their Ford Expedition, throw the towels in their electric dryer, and crank the A/C.  They are for clean coal and the clear-air initiative because those things sound good and don't cost them anything.

There's a big middle that's between two of them.  And many of those middle people are looking for a compromise, something that will clean up the environment and not destroy the country's economy, as shutting down all coal and nuclear power plants would do.  Only rich people can afford environmentalism, so destroying the economy will not be in anyone's best interests.

Nuclear is certainly not the best source of power out there, but it's better than coal, and it's the only way we're ever going to even get started on a hydrogen economy.  If we replaced every coal fired power plant out there with a nuclear power plant, we would generate far less nuclear waste, save the lives of 30,000 americans every year, and save millions of acres of land from stripmining.

That's mid-term.  In the long term, we may get hydrogen fusion working, or we may get to the point where we can store enough wind/solar power to be able to run on that exclusively.  But in the meantime we have to decide not what's perfect, but what's good enough.

--bill von

the big picture

jdhlax proposes several ways to reduce power usage, including:

>First, cover all roofs with solar panels.

Good idea, but that's not reducing power usage in the short term, it's increasing it.  The glass, silicon and aluminum needed to produce a solar panel takes a lot of energy to create.  Where does it come from?

>Eliminate wasteful use of electricity, such as streetlights. . . .

OK.  Let's say you get a tremendous amount of political capital, sufficient to remove all streetlights (and then weather the storm when fatalities at night go up.)  Even after that massive effort, you have reduced power usage by only 8% -  you can't even close half of all nuclear power plants in the US.

Or let's say you pass a law that says all homes in the US have to be solar powered.  We will ignore for the moment where you get the energy to produce the panels.  Now you have reduced power by 16% - you STILL can't close all the nuclear power plants in the country, and you have to leave coal power plants running full blast.

When you talk about reducing energy usage by 70%, you're not talking about turning lights off at night.  You are talking about doing without aluminum, trash collection, recycling, sewers, water, glass, rubber, textile mills, fertilizer, food transportation, hospitals, schools, telephones, the internet etc.  There's no free lunch.  We have to get rid of the basics too, because that's where that energy is going - to make aluminum, and pump water, and make clothing.  

Nor should we try to eliminate those things.  The reason we can buy solar panels is that we have a strong economy, so people can buy them, and we have spare energy, so factories can make them.  Take away any one of those things and environmentalism will cease to exist; it is basically a rich person's pursuit.

Does that mean we shouldn't try?  Not at all!  But even if we do an outstanding job (say, we can reduce power usage by 20%) we have to choose between the lesser of two evils, coal or nuclear.  And coal is worse than nuclear.

>There is no safe level of exposure to ionising
> radiation (i.e., radioactivity).  According to
> Dr. Helen Caldicott . . .

Helen Caldicott is an anti-nuclear activist.  My wife, who is a physician but is neither employed by the nuclear industry or by the anti-nukes, thinks that there are safe levels of ionizing radiation.  She has even had training in how much is safe and how much is unsafe.  I have several friends who are intact now because radiation was used to help fix them.

>However, this natural, background radioactivity
> also injures and kills people if the level is
> too high.

Exactly.  There is too much radiation and there is too little.  Bricks have a higher than background level of radiation, as do most basements and most granite.  Most coal does too.  Smoke detectors and CRT's emit radiation as part of their operation.  But none of these things are hazardous, because the level is not too high.

Now, take coal fired power plants.  They DO emit high levels of radiation.  They emit pounds of thorium and uranium every year directly into the air, and we end up breathing it in.  They are responsible for 30,000 deaths a year from the stuff they emit from their stacks.

Now look at nuclear power plants.  No fatalities of the general public due to commercial nuclear power plant accidents.  No emission of radiation.  Sure, we have the waste to deal with, but we do deal with it - we don't just pump it into the air.  It's not perfect, but it's much better than coal.
On An interview with longtime anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott posted 4 years, 6 months ago 18 Responses

Nuclear is bad. Coal is just worse.

>"If our approach as environmentalists is 'live
> your lives cold, miserable and unhappy!' I
> don't think we'll have much success."  Is that
> how you view traditional indigenous people?

Not at all.  The indigenous people I've met (primarily in sub-Saharan Africa) were among the happiest people I have met.  I'm talking about americans, who use more energy than anyone else on the planet.  An approach that they must forego 70% of their energy usage (laundry detergents, vehicles, antibiotics, fresh food etc) will simply not work very well.  Much better to plan how to get more done with less energy, and how to generate that energy more cleanly.

>However, if you set your goals too low, you
> won't accomplish anything meaningful even if
> you're successful.  Our goals in this regard
> should be to rid the planet of all nukes AND
> coal powered plants.

Again, you are proposing reducing our energy usage by 70%.  How do you propose to do this?  How would you alter your own life to meet this goal?  It is a good goal for the US at large, but it is unreasonable for anything but the very far future.  For us and our children, we need to make the best choices for both the near and the far future.

>However, there is no such thing as a safe
> amount of radioactivity, so that any amount
> added to the background levels is harmful.

Not true at all.  Low levels of radiation are actually beneficial.  Indeed, people exposed to no radiation at all suffer from diseases like vitamin D deficiency, and there is evidence that low level radiation stimulates our cell's natural anti-mutagenic system, a system critical to repair damage to our cells caused by reactive oxygen species in our bodies.

This should not come as a suprise to anyone.  We evolved on a planet that has a low level of background radiation from the uranium in the dirt, the ionizing radiation from the sun and the high energy radiation from deep space.  Our bodies are designed to work best in such an environment.  It is, of course, important not to increase it too much, but the statement that "no amount of radiation is safe" is not true.  A certain level of radiation is not just safe, it's how our bodies are designed to work.

>Finally, no one has even mentioned the fact
> that plutonium is THE MOST TOXIC substance
> known, period.  If you support nukes, you add
> more of this unnatural crap to the planet.

Of course.  But we are better off looking at a pound of plutonium from 10 miles away, buried in a cask, than breathing in a pound of uranium released by a coal power plant.

There is no doubt that nuclear power is not the best form of power out there.  Every form of power, from solar to wind to natural gas to coal to nuclear, has drawbacks.  But nuclear is far, far preferable to coal.  The 30,000 people whose lives were cut short this year by coal plants would likely agree.  It is hard to compose a philosophical objection that trumps that many lives lost.On An interview with longtime anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott posted 4 years, 6 months ago 18 Responses

Alternatives

I agree that nuclear power isn't the best deal out there.  But I have to wonder if we are doing the environment a disservice overall by choosing coal over nuclear power.  I know, no one consciously makes that decision.  But we all use power, and if we do everything we can to stop nuclear power, then coal WILL be used to take up the slack.  It is our only other major source of baseline power.

Compare a nuclear power plant to a coal power plant.  As Caldicott mentions, a nuclear power plant generates 20-30 tons of nuclear waste a year.  This waste has to be controlled very carefully, and is generally stored locally in monitored pools.  Losing even a pound of this material is a very big deal, and a lot of money and effort is spent every year to prevent that.

A coal plant, on the other hand, generates about 5 tons of uranium and 13 tons of thorium (a nuclear decay product of uranium) a year.  Most of this is just dumped on the ground in unlined pits, and eventually makes its way into the water table.  A small fraction of it is released directly into the air.  Imagine the incredible stink there would be if a pound of nuclear fuel was vaporized and released into the atmosphere by a nuclear power plant accident.  Now consider that a coal plant releases about 10 pounds of uranium directly into the air every year.  

And we breathe this stuff.  A recent study found that two coal power plants in Massachusetts alone kill 124 people every year.  Across the US, approximately 30,000 people a year die prematurely due to particulate emissions, primarily from coal fired power plants.

Compare their safety records as well.  A quick search of the net provided about a dozen coal dust explosions, coal power plant worker deaths, and coal train fatalities.  Now look at the worst nuclear power plant accident in US history, where two safety systems failed simultaneously and then operators turned off a third.  The fatality count at three mile island - zero.

There are a lot of problems with nuclear power.  Where to put the waste is a big one.  But we don't have the choice of not using any power - indeed, many of the solutions proposed by environmentalists (like hydrogen and CO2 sequestration) require massive new sources of power.  Nuclear is not a great solution, but it is far, far better than coal.On An interview with longtime anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott posted 4 years, 7 months ago 18 Responses