(Picture)Oil companies know they are on the way to being more severely regulated. It is only a matter of time before the brutal realities of global warming face even dinosaurs like Bush and Harper to step aside and let people who aren’t guided by their version of some deity’s word direct the fate of the world.
Always there, looking to how they can turn any crisis to profit for themselves, all the ones who prefer money to preservation of the planet and the prevention of mass death and suffering.
The push for nuclear energy is no big surprise. Promoted as a clean source of energy, it sounds like an easy sell. But some of us take the time to read and understand what nuclear energy would mean to world safety and the environment. There are reasons why countries didn’t jump into it without reservations decades ago.
A big problem with nuclear energy is waste storage. Here, Canada is indeed taking the lead, even over the US, but it isn’t anything to brag about.
Millions of people in Michigan get their drinking water downstream from Kincardine, Ontario, where a nuclear waste dump is planned near the shore of Lake Huron. But under draft guidelines for the project, Michigan will not be considered as part of the region that could potentially be impacted by the Canadian version of the proposed Yucca Mountain underground storage facility in Nevada. Many in Michigan are just now becoming aware of efforts to develop an underground nuclear waste storage dump in the Great Lakes basin. The proposed dump -- located roughly across Lake Huron from the tip of Michigan's Thumb -- would store waste from Ontario's 20 nuclear power reactors.
These sites seem to get approval without proper public consultation, or even without making the public aware until it’s too late to stop the projects.
"They are telling people that they don't have to worry [that the comment period is over], that there will be another chance to comment," said Kay Cumbow of Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination, "but if these guidelines are approved as written, Michigan will not be considered part of the Regional Study Area, and our comments are not going to count for very much. "We think that all of Michigan and all of Lake Huron and everyone who gets drinking water downstream from the dump or lives downwind from this dump needs to be considered part of the impacted area."
The fact that this facility represents an irreversible concentration of radioactive wastes from 20 or more Canadian nuclear reactors in an unproven and unprecedented underground facility on the shores of Lake Huron, surely should concern communities on the both shores of Lake Huron and in other communities downstream in the Great Lakes watershed. The spirit of the ESPOO convention is being disregarded if American citizens and political bodies are not actively informed of [Ontario Power Generation's] plans and invited to participate fully in the environmental assessment process.
Way to go, Dalton! Wonder what your brother has to say about this?
Then there are problems with the nuclear plants themselves. Most of us recall or have heard of the Chernobyl accident, recent accidents in Japan, the near disaster in Pennsylvania.
Last week, this incident -
Residents in the Vaucluse, a popular southern French tourist destination, were banned yesterday from drinking well-water or swimming or fishing in two rivers after a uranium leak from one of France's nuclear power plants. The leak occurred when a tank was being cleaned between Monday night and Tuesday morning but was not detected until yesterday.
Around 30 cubic metres of liquid containing uranium, which was not enriched, leaked out of a tank. Of this, 18 cubic metres poured on to the ground and into the nearby Gaffiere and Lauzon rivers, which flow into the Rhone. The plant has been operational since 1975.
As a scientist friend of mine said, with nuclear plants and nuclear waste disposal, it isn’t a matter of if a devastating accident will happen, but when it will. Time, as he said, assures that eventuality.
Containment ponds and storage fail. Over and over. The deadly waste seeps into the environment, into water systems, often not discovered until it has spread so widely that cleanup is impossible, only superficial.
Nor is energy from uranium as clean a process as the industry and governments would like us to believe.
Contrary to what the nuclear industry would have us believe, the nuclear fuel cycle is far from clean. The process of mining and building nuclear power plants requires huge amounts of energy obtained from fossil fuels. Thus, carbon dioxide emissions are produced.
Further, nuclear energy depends upon uranium 235, which is naturally radioactive and undergoes decay, meaning it spontaneously radiates or ejects small particles of energy. Once uranium is extracted from the ore that once cradled it, much soil or tailings are left behind. These tailings are loaded with additional radioactive elements such as radon 200 and radium 226. Uranium 235 is a gamma emitter, is carcinogenic, and causes bone cancer. Radon 200 is an alpha emitter, is carcinogenic, and causes lung cancer. Radium 226 is both an alpha and gamma emitter, is also carcinogenic, and causes bone cancer.
While these are the radioactive elements one is exposed to through mining uranium, creating nuclear energy through uranium fission produces more radioactive elements such as strontium 90, iodine 131, and plutonium 239. Strontium 90 is both a beta and gamma emitter and causes bone cancer and leukemia. Iodine 131 is both a beta and gamma emitter and causes thyroid cancer. Plutonium 239 is an alpha emitter that is both mutagenic and teratogenic and causes genetic mutations and gross deformities in our newborns.
It doesn’t require an accident for these dangerous elements to be released.
Through "venting," nuclear reactors routinely release these radioactive by-products into the atmosphere. Uranium mining and processing produces carbon dioxide. It also contaminates the air, land, and water with radon, radium and other radioactive elements. In addition, the process of uranium fission produces more radioactive elements such as strontium, iodine, and plutonium.
These radioactive elements hold the energy necessary to harm us in three ways in that they are carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic.
Nuclear power isn’t the answer to reducing global warming. It simply offers a whole new set of problems, more dangerous ones at that.
What is needed is change in lifestyle - less dependence on energy, less use of energy and alternate sources such as solar and wind power.
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