And Shoreham died for the sins of NIMBYism. -----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 03, 2006 11:54 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Do we have peak uranium, too?
Zell, Chris wrote: > >Nuclear power plants have been rejected by power companies, not > >citizens. > > Are you serious? Is this a joke? Do protests mean nothing? >Political pressure? Lawsuits? Earth First vandalism? None of that makes any difference at all to large power corporations. They kill 20,000 people year burning coal, and they stole billions of dollars from the citizens and government of California without blinking an eye. The only thing that matters to them is money. The Three Mile Island meltdown was the most expensive industrial accident in US history, and the accidents at Brown's Ferry, Rancho Seco, and Connecticut Yankee also nearly bankrupted the power companies involved. Even though the government pays for the insurance cost of nuclear power, no power executive in his right mind would invest in it as long as the power reactors are likely to meltdown and cost $10 billion before breakfast. Next-generation power reactors may be much more reliable. (It is hard to imagine how they could be made less reliable.) If you have any doubt about that, I suggest you read the detailed histories of TMI, Brown's Ferry, Rancho Seco, and Connecticut Yankee, and the other serious accidents. They did not kill anyone, but they demonstrated that the operators are incompetent and criminally dishonest at times, and the reactor designs are shockingly bad. Overall, the nuclear industry probably killed a few thousand people in the US. Not from the operation of the reactors but from uranium mining and production. Despite this, the industry is safer than coal, and modern mining techniques are a lot safer than they were back in the 1950s when uranium miners were killed by long-term exposure to radiation. - Jed
