No nucbuddy? C'mon, nucbuddy, you must have a response to this. How about the other misinformation-spreading trolls? Can't quite defend the people who rip off us, the taxpayers, and poison millions of people in the bargain? Baseload, shmaseload. If the nuclear power industry and DoE were significently less circumspect(I'm being charitable here)about the business practices and lack of oversight, I might be willing to listen to your arguments. But since both the industry and the government agencies which are charged to protect us and look after OUR interests have not chosen the right path, I'm not particularly inclined to even pretend I have an interest in your words. Update the Mining Law(an update of which Mr. Obama voted against, I might add), make the polluters pay(hey, you made the mess, you clean it up; any one of us hoi-pllloi would be required to clean any environmental trash we deposited), and make them post a bond to finance said clean-up before a single shovel-full has been turned over. That's just a start. I welcome your suggestions on how we can clean up the uranium mining and nuclear power industries.

The mellotron is your friend.

Chip makes many valid and disturbing points.  The one that is already happening is the destruction caused by ORVs.  Southern Utah has been getting hit hard by illegal ORV use; it seems like everywhere you go in southern Utah there are tire tracks where there shouldn't be any.  I hope a new administration will fund the public land management agencies, particularly the BLM, to the point where there can be more patrols and enforcement.

This is by far the best thing I've read in Grist about nuclear power.  It is basically what I've been saying all along, that because of uranium mining & milling and nuclear waste, nuclear energy is NEVER acceptable.  I never thought about the ORV connection, though.  Those people are the most violent anti-environmentalists in the U.S., threatening and shooting even law enforcement personnel who attempt to curtail their often illegal activities.

Re the Dine (Navajo) ban on uranium mining, it should be noted that the U.S. government, operating as the lackey for Peabody Coal and other mining interests, forced traditional Hopis and Dine off their lands in order to allow more mining.  I spent a week on the Dine reservation in 1986 with other environmentalists (I was with Earth First! at the time) to show our solidarity with the traditional Dine in fighting the so-called relocation of traditional people.  If push comes to shove, I expect the same will happen again.  The problem is, the bad guys have all the money and military power, as usual.

If your comment to me means that you consider solar power, by far the least environmentally destructive source of unnatural electricity, to be harmful, then the only conclusions one can reach are that 1) we should totally stop using electricity, which is fine by me and the rest of the Earth, or 2) tough shit for the Earth, we want our electric luxuries and we're not going to stop killing other species and destroying the land, air and water to get it.  So, which is it?

Nucbuddy,

There are other ways to be creative than by physically destroying the natural environment and killing other species.  Physical human evolution is almost certainly at an end.  The proper direction to move is toward mental, emotional, and spiritual evolution.  The wrong direction, which in which humans have been going for hundreds if not thousands of years, is technological evolution, because technology per se is environmentally destructive.  Of course, if you don't feel any connection to the natural environment or other species, you won't relate to this idea.  But even in that instance, humans will eventually cause their own extinction and will additionally have retarded their own evolution.

If the USA would join with India, China, Russia, Japan, Korea, and France to encourage the construction of Generation IV reactors, specifically integral fast reactors (IFR), the question of mining uranium would be moot. All they'd need for fuel is spent lightwater reactor fuel and depleted uranium. We've already got enough out of the ground to provide all the power (not just electricity) our planet will need for hundreds of years. The only reason we'd have to keep mining uranium would be to fuel the LWRs we've already got until they're at the end of their life spans, and with many new uranium mines opening up around the world in the next few years (five in Kazakhstan alone) we don't need any in the states at all. Bear in mind, too, that there are much more environmentally sound and safer ways to mine uranium than the old methods described above. But the bottom line is that we should move to IFRs and be done with uranium AND coal mining, and oil and gas drilling too. Watch for Prescription for the Planet, due out in late July, for lots more about how this and other radical new technologies can transform our world.

It would take an estimated $50 billion to clean up all the abandoned mines and processing sites in the West.

Add to this the cost of safeguarding the plants and storing the waste for a thousand years- payed for by you and me. What a deal!

a liberal in redsville