--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Susan" <wayback71@...> wrote: > > I just saw Pandora's Promise, by Robert Stone, an environmentalist who has in > the past been active in anti-nuclear energy protests. He got convinced > otherwise and has made this docu. It features info and also interviews with > several environmentalists who have educated themselves and changed their > minds about nuclear energy. Stuart Brand (Whole Earth catalogue) is one and > so is Mark Lynas, who wrote the book Six Degrees in 2007. I have mentioned > that book here several times - terrific and accessible read about climate > change. Lynas was anti nuclear for years - and now changed his mind. A > worthwhile movie to see - and while I am not at all an expert on nuclear > power, it made a really good case for the positives. It also seems that > there is a type of nuclear power (IFR) that produces waste that is recyclable > by the nuclear plant itself. The safeguards on these are also incredible.
These pro nuclear environmentalists make me laugh, I think they come from a place where we absolutely *have* to keep consuming power at the insane rate we have for the last hundred years and that cutting back on consumption isn't a plausible option. The sad fact about nuclear power is that we don't have enough uranium on this planet to outlast the coal supply should we switch wholesale and build more reactors. Then there's terrorism, if al queda had been smart they would have flown the 9/11 planes into a nuclear reactor (but don't give them ideas) and then there is the black market in dirty plutonium, so simple to make a dirty bomb, drive it into a major city and.... It's just bound to happen sooner or later. But the real disaster is waste, I have heard of these fast breeder reactors but I'm not even sure they have been demonstrated to work very well and they do still create a small amount of waste and it becomes much more toxic than the 11,000,000 barrels of stuff we have lying around the UK waiting to be buried. And that is what will happen, just brush it all under the carpet and let mankind of the future deal with it. I read that British Nuclear Fuels put a few million in the bank hoping that some bright spark in some wiser future will know how to deal with it. Until then it's being buried in places like this: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/apr/24/nuclear-waste-storage Saw a chilling documentary about this place. Just what do you put on the door? Imagine if our Neanderthal predecessors had been burying dangerous waste since they first came to Europe, it would still be as dangerous as the day they sealed it up. Do our descendants deserve to have to deal with our stupidity just so we can keep our 24/7 lifestyle? They'll be kicking us for not going solar, which is the *only* serious choice.
