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Re: News Advisory: Still Crazy After Oil These Years!



In <Pine.ULT.3.91.960716155935.16649C-100000@freenet.vcu.edu> David
Beorn <dbeorn@freenet.vcu.edu> writes: 
>
>On Tue, 16 Jul 1996, David Beorn wrote:
>
>> Eric Riley <103263.3410@CompuServe.COM>
>> 
>> On 8 Apr 1996, Eric Riley wrote:
>> 
>> > From: Eric Riley <103263.3410@CompuServe.COM>
>> > Newgroups: alt.energy.renewable, alt.save.the.earth,
>> >     alt.sustainable.agriculture, talk.environment,
sci.environment,
>> >     sci.energy, bionet.agroforestry
>> > 
>> > What's wrong with using nuclear energy?
>
>Absolutely nothing - as a matter of fact, those who are REALLY serious

>about cleaning up the environment WITHOUT going back to living in
caves 
>should consider it because it's the ONLY truly non-polluting power. 
The 
>power plant I worked at has stored ALL of the spent fuel on-site in
the 
>containment building and therefore there has been NO need for waste 
>disposal of this type.  The "environmentalists" who want to save the 
>environment should stop protesting it and embrace it!!!
>
>And by the way, for those of you who might point to Chernobyl or TMI, 
>these were HUMAN mistakes and TOTALLY preventable.  They KNEW what
they 
>were doing was by-passing the safety systems but they did it anyway -
and 
>hence the incidents we have had. .

In the case of TMI, operator error was involved but it was not due to
bypassing safety systems on purpose. As I recall, the PORV was stuck
open and there was no way to guage the amount of water in the reactor.
When they shutdown the water, the fuel melted. Can't compare TMI to
Chernobyl where techs really screwed up.

Taht being said, I agree that nuclear is environmentally benign if
managed properly. However, huge amounts of waste ARE accumulating at
the roughly 100 U.S. reactors in service today. Seems the gov't can't
get off its ass to either reprocess the fuel or store it at a high
level repository such as Yucca mountain.

The future of nuclear power? Just about lifeless now.


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