2011/3/16 John Francis <[email protected]>: > > Oh, I don't think anybody would argue too strongly with you there. > > It's just that you seem to have some quaint belief that this is is > some way unique to nuclear power, and that coal/oil/gas/whatever > is in some way a safer option.
unique: not really. I hold the firm believe that large corporations have no ethics whatsoever. all they care about is profit. it is called shareholder value. and their managers had better be some place safe on the day of the grand awakening. safer: yes. depends of course. dams can break. coal is dirty. oil is dirty. gas is somewhat dirty. deepwater horizon told its own story. shell in nigeria is yet another story. photovoltaics are IMO safe but produce lots of toxic waste in panel manufacture. wind turbines... well, they kill birds and the offshore wheels apparently disorient whales and dolphins. solar thermal plants seem fairly safe. sodium acetate waste heat storage looks pretty promising. they all have one advantage though: nothing they do has anywhere nearly the half life of plutonium or MOX. > The main difference is that the nuclear industry concentrates their > risk into highly-visible incidents such as the one we see at present, > while other methods of power generation spread their level of risk > uniformly over the time period. That doesn't mean that the total > level of risk over time is lower, though. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
