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DrumBeat: January 13, 2008
Posted by Leanan on January 13, 2008 - 10:01am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Oil and the looming threat to Iraq
Access to and control of Middle East oil has figured prominently in the strategic thinking of American policy makers. In the Bush administration, State Department policy planners discussed scenarios for taking over by force the oilfields of the Middle East and internationalising them.Jane Mayer revealed in the New Yorker that a secret Bush National Security Council (NSC) document dated February 3, 2001, instructed NSC members to cooperate with Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force for "reviewing international policy towards rogue states" and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."
Iran warns Turkmenistan to resume gas supplies soon
Iran will stop buying Turkmen gas altogether if its neighbour does not resume supplies cut off two weeks ago, oil minister Gholamhossein Nozari was quoted as saying on Sunday.
KazMunaiGas reaches deal with Kashagan partners
Kazakhstan's KazMunaiGas has reached a deal with an Eni-led consortium over developing the giant Kashagan oil field which will give it an equal share in the project with the largest shareholders.
New Zealand: Oil firms feel heat as crude price drops
Pressure is mounting on petrol companies to cut near record prices after the cost of crude oil dropped to US$92.69 a barrel.But relief for motorists is far from assured, with fuel companies expected to reassess current costs this week and warning world oil prices remain volatile.
Speculators drive oil price rise - OPEC sec-gen
Speculators have driven oil prices to record highs rather than any supply shortage and OPEC is ready to boost output when the market needs more, OPEC's secretary-general said in an interview published on Sunday.A slowing global economy would not impact demand in the short term or lead to a price collapse, OPEC Secretary-General Abdullah al-Badri told Cyprus's Phileleftheros newspaper.
Iran Darkhovin oil field at 100k bpd output-report
Oil production from Iran's Darkhovin field has been doubled to 100,000 barrels per day (bpd), an Iranian official said on Sunday, referring to part of a plan to hike output from OPEC's second biggest producer.
Sarkozy Confirms Plans For UAE Nuclear Deal: Paper
French President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed on Sunday plans to sign a nuclear cooperation agreement with the United Arab Emirates amid reports French firms could construct up to two nuclear reactors there.
Sarkozy in Saudi Arabia to deepen 'strategic partnership'
With nuclear ambitions, lucrative business opportunities and ballooning petro-dollar budgets, the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia is attracting world leaders from US President George Bush to his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia - a potentate with increasing regional and international clout - will play host to Sarkozy later on Sunday and to Bush on Monday.
Vanity, not catastrophe, led to the sale of the first $100 barrel of oil. But what is really causing price increases, and how bad will it get?
Nigerian militant group offers cease-fire for release of imprisoned leader
The main Nigerian militant group in the country's oil region offered Sunday to halt attacks if one of its leaders is released from prison in Angola, where he is being held on arms smuggling charges.The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said it would immediately halt hostilities if freedom was given to Henry Okah, who the Nigerian government is seeking to put on trial.
Syria Rebuilds on Site Destroyed by Israeli Bombs
The puzzling site in Syria that Israeli jets bombed in September grew more curious on Friday with the release of a satellite photograph showing new construction there that resembles the site’s former main building.Israel’s air attack was directed against what Israeli and American intelligence analysts had judged to be a partly constructed nuclear reactor. The Syrians vigorously denied the atomic claim.
Joe Kennedy, Hugo Chavez and that free heating oil
So what if Joe Kennedy and Hugo Chavez get a propaganda bonanza, you may say, so long as poor people are benefiting ? Kennedy himself has defended the program as "righteous."So let's see; the poor should accept charity from a would-be dictator who has formed an alliance with Iran and Cuba, who has denounced the United States as the greatest threat to peace and security in the world and called the U. S. president "the devil"and "a genocidal murderer. "They should permit themselves to be used by a man who attempted to subvert his country's constitution, proclaimed his goal as "socialism or death," and launched the most comprehensive assault on freedom of the press in Latin America this side of Castro?
Iran Encounter Grimly Echoes ’02 War Game
There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.
Bush: Iran threatens world security
President Bush said Sunday that Iran is threatening the security of the world, and that the United States and Arab allies must join together to confront the danger "before it's too late."Bush said Iran funds terrorist extremists, undermines peace in Lebanon, sends arms to the Taliban, seeks to intimidate its neighbors with alarming rhetoric, defies the United Nations and destabilizes the entire region by refusing to be open about its nuclear program.
Lives of Poverty, Untouched by China’s Boom
When she gets sick, Li Enlan, 78, picks herbs from the woods that grow nearby instead of buying modern medicines. That is not a result of some philosophical choice, though. She has never seen a doctor and, like many residents of this area, lives in a meager barter economy, seldom coming into contact with cash.“We eat somehow, but it’s never enough,” Ms. Li said. “At least we’re not starving.”
A Long-Dry California River Gets, and Gives, New Life
The river, 2 to 3 feet deep and 15 to 20 feet across, will not be mistaken for the mighty Mississippi. And an economic boon promised to accompany the restoration has yet to materialize.Yet the mere fact that water is present and flowing in the Lower Owens River enthralls residents nearly 100 years after Los Angeles diverted the river into an aqueduct and sent it 200 miles south to slake its growing thirst.
A Spot Check of Global Warming
If you’ve got any thoughts on how to interpret the results on Dr. Pielke’s graph — or how to look for other indicators — let me know. I’d be glad to hear suggestions from scientists at the popular Real Climate blog on a short list of variables (beyond temperature and sea ice) that might be used to compare with specific IPCC predictions and point interested readers to where data on them can be found.
Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.
Moving Billions of People on a Still-Green Planet?
A century or more is the rational time for conceiving a transport system. The infrastructures last for centuries. They take 50-100 years to build, in part because they also require complementary infrastructures. Railroads needed telegraphs, and paved roads needed oil delivery systems so that gasoline would be available to fill empty car tanks. Moreover, the new systems take 100 years to penetrate fully at the level of the consumer. Railroads began in the 1820s and peaked with consumers in the 1920s.Fortunately, during the next century we may be able to afford green mobility. In fact, we can clearly see its elements: cars, powered by fuels cells; aeroplanes, powered by hydrogen; and maglevs, powered by electricity, probably nuclear. The future looks clean, fast, and green.
Pincer movement has Britain in grip of an energy crisis
UK consumers are feeling the pinch from soaring electricity bills as the nation is hit by a double whammy of sky-high oil prices and dwindling North Sea supplies. Richard Wachman explains how it happened.
Residents are forced to make difficult choices to keep their homes heated
With the costs of home heating fuel skyrocketing, Bangor Daily News reporters set out to discover the actual difficulties those costs are creating. Many alarming stories emerged, some of which will be told in more detail next week. Some are not being told at all because the victims of $100-a-barrel oil feel too embarrassed by their circumstances to let us reveal them. Here are some vignettes of Mainers in Crisis.
The rising cost of energy is one factor increasingly putting families into the red.Gasoline prices bumping up against $3 a gallon are hurting virtually anyone who has to drive. The cost of natural gas, propane and heating oil continues to rise, making it tough to keep the thermostat up. Residential customers of Delmarva Power in Delaware, who saw electricity bills spike 59 percent after the state removed price caps in May 2006, are finding it harder to pay their bills. By the end of 2007, 11 percent of Delmarva's 467,000 residential customers in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia had fallen behind in their monthly payments, said utility spokeswoman Bridget Shelton.
Iran: Oil minister due in Majlis today
Iran's Oil Minister Gholam-Hossein Goudarzi will attend Majlis on Sunday to brief MPs on measures taken by his ministry to supply necessary fuel for people trapped by spreading wave of cold weather, Majlis speaker said.
Pakistan: Rickshaw drivers consider switching back to petrol
Twenty-seven-year-old Nasir came to Karachi three years ago, lured by the stories his friends told him about the city being the “Dubai” for auto rickshaw drivers. He bought a rickshaw and had it converted from petrol to LPG just before gas prices increased to Rs 70 per kg, making him reconsider running his rickshaw on petrol.
Work on Kenya-Uganda Oil Pipeline will Begin in May
Construction work on a Kenya-Uganda oil pipeline will begin in May, as Uganda seeks to end its over-reliance on road and rail for importing fuel products from Kenya, the Ugandan president said late Sunday.
A couple of weeks ago, plans for a wonderful new coal-fired power station in Kent were given the green light and I was very pleased.This will reduce our dependency on Vladimir’s gas and Osama’s oil and, as a bonus, new technology being developed to burn the coal more efficiently will be exported to China and exchanged for plastic novelty items to make our lives a little brighter.
With nuclear rebirth come new worries
Global warming and rocketing oil prices are making nuclear power fashionable, drawing a once demonized industry out of the shadows of the Chernobyl disaster as a potential shining knight of clean energy....However, some countries hopping on the nuclear bandwagon have abysmal industrial safety records and corrupt ways that give many pause for thought.
Author takes on oil dependence, U.S. policy
The next “Da Vinci Code”? That is Steve Alten’s goal.With his new book, the author is looking to impact the presidential election and, he says, “change the world.”
Alten figures if his political novel “The Shell Game” is a success, he’ll accomplish both of those goals.
Energy proposal falls short: West Virginia ignoring sensible solutions
The “plan” totally avoids any mention of the influence of fossil fuel exploitation upon our climate. It has been suggested that the scientific consensus around atmospheric carbon emissions is rivaled only by the consensus on gravity. It is increasingly recognized worldwide — and increasingly experienced locally — that humans are having significant, potentially dangerous effects on their atmospheric and hydrologic environment. We must all make serious adjustments. Rather than going after 15 percent more coal, West Virginia needs to sign on to the Oil Depletion Protocol, which calls for a 2 percent a year reduction in carbon emissions through 2050.
The stance of the 'mainstream' is logical and, understandable. They must assume that they will have to give up their positions of privilege under the "new" dispensation. Therefore, it makes sense to gamble on the perpetuation of the existing order for a little longer rather than lose everything now. Notwithstanding all the planning for the future (insurance, savings, etc) that the current world order has engendered, it is essentially a culture based on short term thinking. Thus, even the "long term" thinkers among us rarely think of the future beyond the life of our children till their middle age. Therefore, so long as it seems to them that the current world order can be perpetuated for another 50 years or so there is no (or very little) incentive to abandon it.Countless debates (and actions) on a host of issues, including, global warming, the mid east conflict, ecological degradation, peak oil, all reflect this mindset. Each of them (debates) ultimately centres around the problem of how to "manage" the perceived crisis. Of course, the overt assumption is that technology will come up with a solution in the meanwhile: solar power, wind energy, hydroponic farming, genetic engineering, and so on. However, it is increasingly obvious that this assumption is fallacious. It is also obvious that even assuming that we will be able to carry on for another 100-200 years by adopting these methods, the price that the inhabitants of this earth (I don't mean humans only) will pay for this perpetuation will be horrendous and, from my point of view, unacceptable.
Duality on display at Detroit auto show: Alternative-fuel-powered cars and gas-guzzling trucks
There will be no shortage of alternative-fuel-powered cars, crossovers and compact trucks among the more than 50 new production and concept vehicles being introduced this week.But high-performance vehicles and big, gas-guzzling trucks will be seen in abundance on the show floor at Cobo Center.
As a former bike messenger and onetime taxi driver, Andrew O. Brown knows how frustrating city driving can be.And as a practicing psychiatrist, Brown also knows that too much stress and too little exercise can lead to some very unhealthy people.
With his business, The New Amsterdam Project, which uses people-powered “TriCycle Trucks,” instead of gas-guzzling cars and trucks, to move merchandise around the city, Brown is trying to curb city driving and improve people’s health.
Kabul gets only 3 hours of electricity a day, despite millions in U.S. and global aid
Gul Hussein was standing under a pale street lamp in a poor section of east Kabul when the entire neighborhood suddenly went black."As you can see, it is dark everywhere," the 62-year-old man said, adding that his family would light a costly kerosene lamp for dinner that evening. «Some of our neighbors are using candles, but candles are expensive, too.
More than five years after the fall of the Taliban - and despite hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid - dinner by candlelight remains common in the Afghan capital of Kabul. Nationwide, only 6 percent of Afghans have electricity, the Asian Development Bank says.
Israel: An incompetent bungle from start to finish
After making a dramatic, albeit meaningless, announcement in September that it was declaring Gaza a "hostile territory," the cabinet declared on October 28 that it would cut the exports of regular diesel, industrial diesel and gasoline - paid for by the European Union - and reduce Israel's direct supply of electricity to the Gaza Strip.More than two months later, it has restored the cuts it made in regular and industrial diesel to pre-October 28 levels and has been unable to implement the electricity cuts at all.
Libraries Digging Deep for Geothermal Savings
Nine months after the library opened to great acclaim, staff members are keeping an eye on the geothermal system, which uses the earth’s constant temperature below the frost line to heat and cool the airy 47,000-square-foot building. During a cold spell this month, they had to reduce the intake of fresh air that gets heated by the system because it could not warm up the frigid air fast enough.
Global warming is not just about temperature
The world facing such consequences of a globally warmed surface will also be facing another (geological) complication: at some point in our future we can expect the demand for oil to irreversibly exceed worldwide production, as that non-renewable resource is finally and irrevocably depleted. Though the timing of this so-called "peak oil" crisis is disputed -- with some believing it is decades or more away, and others claiming it has already occurred (did you ever wonder why oil-rich countries in the Mideast are building nuclear power plants?) -- the point is that peak oil will represent a tough economic context within which to deal with all the consequences of global warming.
Study Says Glaciers Formed During a Very Warm Period
Giant glaciers formed about 90 million years ago during a warm period when alligators thrived in the Arctic, researchers said Thursday, calling into question the belief that all ice melts in a “super greenhouse” climate.
One technical note. There was an active debate on the "New nukes for the UK" article by a handful of people when it was cut off by the "No new comments may be added" a several days ago.
I agree that comments typically fall off significantly when an article goes to page 2, but sometimes there is still viable, and worthwhile debate.
In the case in point, the ultra# pro-nuke side was stating that nuclear reactors immersed in a pool of 500 C hot sodium was perfectly safe, and that uprating existing nukes by 50% by using doughnut fuel with water flow up the middle (think straws) was technically and economically feasible. And they ascribed all of the reasons for teh past collapse of the nuke building industry to outside factors, while I see it as hari-kari. IMO, the last Rush to Nukes destroyed the demand for new nukes due to internal industrial faults (massive cost over-runs, delays and almost complete plants that were denied operating certificates).
I was wondering what technical constraints required this cut-off of debate and if an exception policy could be instated ?
Thanks,
Alan
# I consider myself pro-nuke, but with a skeptics eye to the possibilities and problems.
As someone that has observed the results of water coming into contact with sodium, the very idea of surrounding a nuclear reactor with a pool of liquid sodium makes me more than a little nervous. Yes, I know that there are all sorts of precautions in place to prevent just this sort of thing from happening. It is the contingencies that were not anticipated that worry me.
Some high-end cars used to use sodium-filled exhaust valves to keep the seats from burning. As exciting as the reaction of sodium and water is, it's still a managable engineering problem.
How do you feel about that sodium azide detonator pointing at your face as you sit in front of your airbag?
I am glad that my car does not have them.
An earlier car sent me to hospital (ER visit & discharged same day) when they went off in a "fender bender".
Front airbags are not much better than a properly secured seatbelt.
But we accept 40,000 auto deaths and 100,000s of lafe altering injuries from cars & SUVs every year.
Alan
And you're questioning that? You have a problem with a Vietnam War's worth of death and maimings yearly? What are you, some kind of Un-American scum? Honestly, I'm being sarcastic here but it's Un-American to think or talk about this. Just think of the cars as the lions who used to "harvest" humans on the African veldt a million years ago.
Hi fleam,
re: "Just think of the cars as the lions who used to "harvest" humans on the African veldt a million years ago."
I had this same exact thought a while back.
The machine-animals - (they do, after all, require food and care)- can sometimes be deadly.
Some are even designed deliberately to be so.
LIke many Japanese people used to living in train-based cities, my wife didn't know how to drive until she learned at the age of 31 upon moving to a suburb in the US.
To an adult accustomed to the relative safety of trains, cars seem outrageously perilous. Short of jumping onto the tracks of an oncoming train, it is pretty hard to hurt yourself on a train even if you are stumbling drunk. In a car, however, a few seconds of inattention can mean a quick death or injury. Indeed, it is probably the only thing that most people do, during a day, that has that potential for instant death.
The idea of two multi-ton masses of metal speeding toward each other at up to 55 mph with nothing more than a yellow line of paint on the pavement to separate them does seem incredibly foolish and reckless. (But not wreck-less!)
Where do you live where people obey the speed limit? Driving at 55 in most places that are not heavily patroled or known speed traps will get you run over. Most stretches of I57 between Chicago and my home you need to do 75 just to keep up with traffic.
The reason is spam prevention. Spammers like to target threads that are no longer active, and add their blocks of links. No one notices...until you link to it as a reference and find a thousand porn links appended.
If a discussion that is still on-topic and productive has "timed out," feel free to continue it in a new DrumBeat.
And I have seen this elsewhere.
You're doing a great job here, Leanan
8D
Whatever the merits -- safe, clean, available, etc. -- nuclear power was an economic disaster in the Pacific Northwest. Taxpayers and ratepayers have not yet forgotten the hit they took from WPPS in Washington and Trojan near Portland.
Granted, no one died. But plenty of people lied in trying to bring these projects on line-- some of them were abandoned before they were completed-- and all of them are gone now.
It doesn't seem likely that nuclear power could ever be "viable" without massive government subsidies. There are, of course, massive hidden subsidies in our hydrocarbon and hydroelectric infrastructure -- and in any rational world, the subsidies would all be put on a spread sheet and a rational decision made about supporting them for the "public good." But of course, only TOD is "rational." Everything else is homo politicus
The disaster which befell nuclear power was mostly caused elsewhere. To list some of the exogenous causes:
Add to this the paranoia pushed on a scientifically-illiterate public by propagandists claiming that American PWR's, Soviet RMBK's and nuclear weapons are all the same, and the industry couldn't keep up.
See Selafield UK on what all nukes have to look forward to.
And Yucca Mt after you've seen Selafield.
The waste problem will always be with us.
Just cutting off water flow thru a nuke waste site is mega death.
That's a misunderstanding that tends to perpetuate carbon monoxide poisonings, each of which has associated with it a few tens of millions of dollars in fossil fuel tax revenue.
When spent fuel is old enough to leave its cooling pools and go into dry casks -- minimum five years, I think -- it no longer requires any cooling water.
Our year-2108 descendants will inherit lands in which, buried a kilometre deep or a little less, are 250 billion watts of radioactivity. This may include, halfway down or a little further, our radioactive legacy to them, now approaching 0.3 billion year-2108 watts, in sturdy containers. The rest will be natural; it's there now.
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
I've been protesting nukes since TU's Matagorda Plant.
I've neglected in depth studies to concentrate on other matters.
I'll engage you across the board on this, but note that we'll be decommissioning
these plants faster than we can get new ones up and running.
I note you didn't bring up Sellafield and Yucca.
We can start at 1998:
Friends of the Earth: Press Release: BNFL/WESTINGHOUSE DEAL ...
The NII has urged British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), which runs Sellafield, ... including Sellafield (also Yucca Mountain in the US, and a site each in East Asia ...
www.foe.co.uk/pubsinfo/infoteam/pressrel/1998/19980624164849.html
Then 2000:
Crisis deepens over British nuclear reprocessing plant
Before the approval of the Yucca site, BNFL had expressed interest in transporting waste materials from the US for storage in Sellafield. ...
www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/nuc-a03.shtml - 20k
2004:
[Jan 15, 2004] Irish MEP Nuala Ahern has called for a team of international experts to investigate possible contamination at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Britain. Ms Ahern said yesterday that a study conducted by the British Ministry of Health found higher levels of plutonium in people living close to ...
2007
Sellafield 'not fit' for nuclear waste disposal | Business | The ...
It was last updated at 09:54 on November 02 2007. The government has been warned that it would be "wrong" and possibly illegal to use Sellafield in West ...
www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/nov/02/nuclearindustry.greenpolitics - 60k
And do Yucca Mt the same way.
If you so desire.
Sounds like you're changing your ground.
The Matagorda nuclear plant? Do you think you made a difference?
Not at all.
Just establishing my postion/bona fides.
And yes I did.
(3 Mile Island/Chernobyl did it and cost over runs)
As much as protesters brought VietNam to an end.
(Mutiny in the ranks did it and cost over runs).
I'll stay with Sellafield and Yucca.
" But lingering resentment over cost overruns, concerns over spent fuel storage and fear of terrorist attacks or human error that could cause catastrophic destruction means California's major utilities may have to look outside the state to build a nuclear power plant -- at least initially, Mr. Wan says."
And it seems no one has talked about Matagorda in awhile.
I asked, "The Matagorda nuclear plant? Do you think you made a difference?".
'mcgowanmc' answered,
Then we agree.
That's what I figured, since I hadn't heard of a Matagorda plant.
We agree you made a difference. Has anyone died, in the region that might have been powered by the plant you stopped, from domestic carbon monoxide poisoning? From natural gas explosion?
That is the sort of difference I believe you have made. Also, government has made a lot of money taxing fossil fuel that might, but for you, have stayed in the ground.
If no-one's talking about the Matagorda plant any more, maybe you should restart the talk. It is not impossible for a traitor to mend, but time is limited.
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
Senator Reid has done an excellent job delaying Yucca Mountain.
And dont forget a million tones of radioactive gloves, packaging, pipe lagging, floor sweepings, nose blowings - the sort of stuff piling up at places like Drigg near Sellafield [300 metres from the sea incidentally].
We are going to be diverting enough energy cleaning up non-radioactive landfill.
Name all the people who have died from civilian nuclear waste in the last 10 years.
Didn't 160 people or so get fried in one single platform (piper alpha) in the North Sea?
Name all the people who have died from civilian nuclear waste in the last 10 years.
Just on the death certificate, or is it OK if the life was shorten because of processing material that ended up in in some manner that a civilian paid for the kWh?
If there were any statistical evidence for this, fine.
the fact is that studies have now confirmed that the standards which were set for radioactivity were based on a false premise - that from the amount which would outright kill you straight off, down through a dose which would make you really sick, and then right down to tiny amounts they thought might affect some future generation, there was a straight line function - IOW any dose at all of radiation was harmful.
It is now apparent that we had (rightly) been over-conservative, and that below certain levels it was impossible to show any ill effects - I am not just making that up, that is now standard knowledge for medical treatment, radiation assessment and so on.
This means that you don't need to worry about living in Denver! - no excess deaths are detectable there due to the mile-high location!
It also means that all the talk of so many millions dying, mostly in fact hypothesised for future generations, were in fact based on this mistaken notion.
Don't go eating tritium sandwiches, but most radioactive material is a lot less harmful than mercury, released by the bucketload by the coal industry, and with a half-life of forever!
The discussion is the waste, not radiation. The waste is:
Tailings from the mines
The heavy metals
In short - things not U-235
Iraq, Kosovo and other places have some of 'civilian waste' as fine dust. When some of that dust was a sabot, said sabot did kill someone.....is that dead wo/man to be included in the body count requested?
How much harm has non-nuclear power oriented mine tailings done? Enormously more.
The comparative benefit from nuclear power relative to costs is very high.
In Iraq the deaths from uranium quite pretty insignificant from the deaths from fast moving lead and steel.
"When some of that dust was a sabot, said sabot did kill someone.....is that dead wo/man to be included in the body count requested?"
Sure, once you add up consider the many more thousands killed by petroleum powered bombers as oil deaths.
I.e. "no".
The question is civilian nuclear power, operated in a regulated environment.
Not weaponry designed to kill efficiently.
Is this magical thinking which applies only to things nuclear? That there is a vicious and essentialist spiritual contamination from clearly horrible nuclear weapons and uranium-containing missiles?
So, how many people have died from nuclear waste from civilian power in the last 10 years?
A few hundred to thousand coal miners die in China, the pollution undoubtably kills many, many more. Nuclear power directly replaces coal, or it ought to.
This is like banning vaccinations because there is a tiny chance somebody will get sick from the vaccine instead of the much larger chance of harm from the wild-type disease itself.
People die mining coal every month. People get killed driving cars every month. Thousands of people die each year due to accidental electrocution in the home, falling off ladders, building site accidents etc. Farmers get run over by their own tractors a few times a year.
Pretty much everything is dangerous to some degree.
On the other hand, the French seem to be able to manage to generate most of their power from nuclear reactors without poisoning their population. And there are plenty of reactors operating in the USA, Germany, Switzerland and Japan without problems.
The dangers associated with nuclear power are exagerated for emotional effect.
As for waste, it's waste now. Sometime within the next 200 years we are likely to figure out how to reprocess it to extract the remaining radioactivity for energy. Building a facility that will last 200 years isn't that hard - the Romans could do it.
I really don't see it doing any harm while it sits out in the desert a thousand miles from anyone.
Compared to the current fossil fuel setup, nuclear is a clean option. As an alternative to the anarchy of a poorly managed global powerdown and rapid population decrease, it looks pretty good.
Talk to the tens of thousand of sub-mariners who spent years to careers within 50 yards of an active nuclear power plant. They don't seem to be dying early. And, as their job involves possible Armageddon, any psychiatric effects and we probably wouldn't be here to talk about it. Consider the French countryside. Nuclear power is safe. Realize there is no net increase in radioactivity, rather a concentrating of natural radioactivity and a hastened and harnessed decay to less radioactive elements. Yes, there are problems. No I don't think it can entirely solve PO issues, but until someone gives me a well reasoned argument otherwise I see it as part of the (possibly temporary) solution. Ever hear of miner's black lung disease? I am open to other views but perspective is needed.
One further point, and understand that I am not rabidly pro-nuclear but this occurred to me after I just posted. The net radioactivity of the Earth decreases from nuclear power. U235, or is it 238, decays in a chain reaction through an elaborate decay scheme basically to mostly lead I believe (to bad for the alchemists;) The point is radioactivity from nuclear power cannot somehow (easily) poison the whole world. It is less than what was input as starting material. If it leaks from Yucca Mountain and distributes to an area equal to what it was gathered from it has returned to a natural state. It is only the concentration of radioactive elements that is problematic. If you want to avoid radiation exposure, and this no joke, avoid unnecessary whole body CT scans done with current equipment.
No doubt this is all true. But what is remembered is how much it cost, and the visible bones of dead nuclear plants, commemorate a vast swindle. I'm not really sure safety was the main issue -- I lived in Oregon when all that was going on, and a friend of mine was on the WPPS board. We mostly thought it was just a con game. After all, the really toxic nuclear stuff was /is upriver at Hanford -- and WPPS is small potatoes compared to that.
It was pigs at the trough then, just as now. I'm really surprised anything at all ever gets done constructively. It certainly is easier to tear things apart than to build them.
The Rancho Seco nuclear power plant near Sacramento, California was shut down decades ago because they could never get the plant to produce anywhere near its rated capacity reliably. There are now fields of solar panels on the property that produce electricity cleanly from the sun. While the panels do not produce anywhere hear the output of the nuclear plant when it was operating, it serves as a symbol of what can be done.
That seems to sum it all up right there. The nuclear power plant didn't work perfectly as advertised (over-hyped?), so therefore it makes more sense to do even less with these solar panels. The whole argument with the anti-nuke types is full of this sort of idiocy.
To speek,
And, ironically, you display your own inability to think logically.
One tech uses horrible poisonous materials that are radioactive for millennia. We have to use extra-special measures to protect us and the rest of the environment from these wastes for thousands of years. Therefore, we want these processes to be as safe as possible, if not perfect. The potential harm is so great from a "minor" slip-up that we must think in terms of perfection.
On the other hand, solar, which is far less dangerous and requires no millennia long interment efforts, does not require such safeguards. If you screw up with solar, you simply get less power.
So, anyone with the thinking power of an eight year old can see that your argument is so flawed as to suggest you have recently suffered a brain injury.