At 13:47 4-7-01 -0700, Darryl Shannon wrote:
>First of all, France and Japan have
>the biggest nuclear power programs of any countries. Do they have much
>higher cancer rates than other countries?
They (and many other countries' governments) certainly don't seem to have
unlimited faith in the safety of their own nuclear reactors. The website of
the International Nuclear Safety Center has a map of Europe that shows the
locations of the various nuclear power plants. Notice that there are quite
a lot of them built near national borders and near oceans.
http://www.insc.anl.gov/pwrmaps/map/europe.html
(For better image quality, look at the .PDF file that is linked to at that
page)
There's only one reason I can think of to build nuclear power plants near
the border: if something goes wrong, part of the problem won't be *your*
problem. If nuclear plants are as safe as the nuclear energy advocates want
us to believe, why aren't they built where most users of electricity are:
near cities throughout the country? As Dan pointed out earlier, building
power plants far from the people who will use the generated electricity
leads to a lot of line loss.
The same goes for building reactors near the ocean: if something goes
wrong, at least part of the problem will drift out to sea (and who cares
what damage it might do there, right?). That, and it makes it easy to dump
the coolant. (No, you don't build them there so you can use the sea water
as coolant -- it's too salt, the pipes would corrode).
This practice of building near the border isn't something typical European,
BTW. The link below leads to a map of the US, that shows the locations of
the various nuclear power plants. Guess what: many of them are built near
state borders.
http://www.insc.anl.gov/pwrmaps/map/north_america.html
(For better image quality, look at the .PDF file that is linked to at that
page)
BTW, I also noticed a lot of nuclear power plants were built near rivers,
no doubt because it makes it easy to get rid of coolant. Are there any
recent studies on-line regarding the condition of those rivers? If you
continuously dump lots of warm/hot water into a river that has a different
temperature, you stand a good chance of doing damage to the river's ecosystem.
Jeroen
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