Don't Blame Me for $4 Gas

But the anti nuke guy is just sooo wrong!

The pro nuke guy is a bit off on a few points, namely the Cesium and Strontium that would be a by-product of fuel recycling would require at least 600 years of storage before it reached background levels probably closer to a 1000 if we concentrate it. But then the lead in a lead acid battery used to store solar energy will be dangerous forever.

The anti-nuke guy is still an oil war monger in my book. And so Wrong

The French get 80% of their electricity from nuclear power, Was more in the 1980's but then they went and made more French people. None of them died from nuclear accidents.

No one was even injured by Three Mile Island.

More people died making Organic insecticide at Bhopal than were killed by Chernobyl.

We can recover the 3 parts per million Uranium from the water in the oceans and have enough fuel to power us for centuries. You can then use the plutonium made in spent fuel to run #breeder# reactors for centuries more.

Some day they may make fusion work, but they are showing no signs of starting parabolic containment research again so I predict another 30 years of wasting time and money on toroids. It is a form of nuclear power, so when we pull our heads out and make it work, there's a few more centuries for you.

There is no way to have a nuclear explosion with a modern reactor. Chernobyl was a bunch of fuel in a giant charcoal briquette, It combusted more than it exploded. Nobody builds them like that anymore. We operated 10 similar plants between 1943 and 1973 without any reactors blowing up or burning. Our navy has operated over 300 reactors in every ocean in the world, with the crews living yards away from the reactors and we still pay naval pensions and we never lost a ship or a sub or a sailor to a nuclear accident.

Every year over 300 people die looking for and producing oil in the US alone. We won't count the thousands that die in Nigeria and elsewhere fighting over oil every year. I don't even want to look at the statistics for coal. We average about 200 people killed refining oil to Gasoline. There is the 2 in a million increased risk of cancer when you smell fumes.

More people have died erecting and servicing wind turbines in the last 10 years than have died in nuclear plants.

If we were to attempt to make the same amount of power with Solar energy, more people would die from battery explosions every year than have died in US power reactors in the last 50 years.

To worry about nuclear being unsafe is not only wrong, its immoral,

You have a much better argument pointing out how expensive it is to decommission a nuclear reactor and how much money we would be spending right now if we had built a lot of reactors 30 years ago. But, you have to realize that 50% of the cost is due to allying irrational fear. And even still, I'll bet it would be less than the 150 billion a year we are borrowing to make the middle east a better place to buy oil.

Michael Weselman of TX 5:51PM July 01, 2008