THE CASE AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER

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ACE HOFFMAN - There are currently over 400 operating nuclear power
reactors around the globe, employing approximately one million people,
and holding all seven billion people on the planet hostage.

Nuclear power is a very expensive way to provide electrons in wires.
There are constant dangers from proliferation, terrorism, waste
mismanagement, and accidents. There are numerous clean alternative
energy solutions, but the cost of conversion is considered too high
because we give nuclear power a free ride on most of its costs to
society. Nuclear power could never have started, let alone continued,
under equitable economic conditions. It is the most subsidized industry
in history. Also the most secretive, the most poorly regulated, the
dirtiest (even compared to coal), and the most environmentally invasive,
too -- it's radioactive byproducts get into everything. . .

Assuming you've managed to operate your reactor successfully for 20 to
60 years (a big if), then there is still the problem of what to do with
the radioactive waste. You have to keep it away from humans for about 20
times the half-lives of the elements. Before settling on Yucca Mountain,
a government-appointed scientific team looked at, and then eliminated,
every other possible solution, including deep-sea burial, sending the
waste into outer space, and even just grinding it up and releasing the
fission products into the environment (like what they do in France and
England). After rejecting every other possible solution anyone could
come up with, they were forced to assume that Yucca Mountain was going
to be the actual solution, even if it wasn't a very good one, which it
isn't for many reasons. . .

It is not "sound science" to base the nation's energy policy on
completely uninvented future technological breakthroughs -- especially
ones that we've already been looking for intensely for more than 60
years, and have already put tens of billions of dollars into trying to
find.

The only real politics involved in nuclear power is the combined
politics of greed and ignorance. Congressional and White House promoters
of nuclear power have never studied the facts -- they've always let
nuclear industry insiders tell them the "facts."

Shutting all the nuclear power plants down now would save lives, money,
and global storage space. There is no time to wait -- every day, another
50 tons of spent reactor cores becomes waste -- deadly, solidified
poisonous gas.

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