As usual you didn't mention my point. If Japan loses forty million people from this accident it will be the worst ever in the world but if Japan is polluted as American industry polluted my home town, then Japan could be useless from decades to centuries to millennia with a dead countryside. That's the potential of nuclear power. I have no problem with toxic solutions as long as they are regulated and successfully controlled. But Harry, I've heard your statement about "inherently safe" so many times from American business that it seems it would be an embarrassment to use it. The little Dutch Boy was saying that lead paint was inherently safe for children's furniture when I was in high school. They said the mill ponds were inherently safe to swim in as well. The dust was fine and the lead didn't cause harm. Then it was the gasoline with lead and then it was the Fluorocarbons and the ozone and we need not worry about volcanoes, tornadoes or asteroids either and on and on. Business people just say things to make a sale. I do not share your seemed belief that private enterprise would allow the proper regulation for such toxicity to be rendered safe enough to boil water without an accident. I also don't share you myths about death and safety. I find your derisiveness about the military undeserved and far from my own experience in the military. And in the eighties I had a student, a tenor, who took me through the laboratory at Los Alamos, he was and is a civilian associated the Harvard physics department and lectured at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He invented a whole new method of calculation that actually worked.
At Los Alamos they told me that Nuclear Power had a 300 million dollar cap on liability or it could not be capitalized. The subsidy according to the news is larger today than it was then. The market will not sustain Nuclear Power without ample government subsidies. I spoke with the people who designed such things at Los Alamos and my Cherokee Priest teacher had been an engineer at Three Mile Island and died from a cancer that appeared suspiciously after that accident even though denied by the authorities, like agent Orange in Vietnam. The official story at TMI is that no one died. Of course they didn't count the accident where he fell thirty feet in the cooling tower and had to have his bone marrow replaced. You may feel safe in California but I think it's an atrocity that the artistic capital of America and one of the great treasures of the world is down river and wind from Indian Point, the number one hazardous reactor in America. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Harry Pollard Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 2:46 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Question: The nuclear companies have paid out billions of dollars into the insurance fund, which has hardly been touched. This source of power is inherently safe. (I believe they are trying to get some of it back, but I doubt they'll succeed.) The two dangerous nuclear situations you mentioned in a previous post (but forgot to explain) - that is Los Alamos and Fort Dix - were military sites, not nuclear power plants. Coal, which supplies half our power and which we couldn't do without, is much more dangerous in actual yearly deaths (from rail transportation), from premature deaths from pollution, and from diseased miners. (Some time ago, their union chief said 500,000 miners suffer from black lung.) We need a lot more nuclear plants but superstition and ideology is stopping their construction. Small self-contained nuclear power plants are much in need and would be produced plentifully if politicians though more about what we need and less about what they need - re-election. Harry ****************************** Henry George School of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 (818) 352-4141 ****************************** -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 9:51 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Question: By not contemplating the end of Japan, a nation of islands the size of California with 133 million souls, and what that would mean in the world, are we practicing the same kind of denial the builders of those reactors practiced? In America there is a 300 million dollar liability limit on all nuclear accidents built into the law. Otherwise no private company would build one. The Japanese have to stay indoors and avoid panic while Der Spiegal and the foreign embassies all relocate. We rarely speak of the implications and necessity of that 300 million dollar cap on liability. That's always ignored when discussing nuclear power. Could we call it the Joseph Goebbels/Frank Luntz theory of politics. It's not the reality that matters but "how you say it." "final solution" for example or all of those names on Republican bills that destroy culture, the environment and the middle class. If such an accident happened in America, would the upper 1% just relocate back to their ancestral home? REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 10:39 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Futurework] Question: Some years ago I was in conversation with the head of Bell Northern Research. I said that isn't it odd that Silicon Valley and all the high tech activities and research was located along the San Andreas Fault. Aren't we taking chances? What will happen if we suddenly lose the people and research/manufacturing capacity when an earthquake hits, as it surely will one of these days or years. He said Yes, he thinks about it too. But you know the enormous investments are still there and the San Andreas Fault is still there and after it happens everyone will say: Why didn't we do something about it. Human nature and denial is the X factor in all of this. arthur -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Gurstein Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 8:30 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Futurework] Question: This might work for the folks in Japan, but what about for GE the designers/builders of the reactors? M -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 8:56 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Futurework] Question: this was how it was done in times past http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_hari_kari -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Gurstein Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 12:14 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Question: Should officials who, out of greed and stupidity locate a nuclear plant with inadequate safety measures on a well-known earthquake fault line be tried for crimes against humanity? 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