Re: So what now do we do?

Blake wrote:

"Yucca Mountain will not do anything to endanger the
residents of Nevada or anywhere else, so I am not sure
why putting the repository there will be the end of
the State, a State which interestingly has always been
a staunch supporter of the Nevada test site."

My comment, "Nevada was never much of a state to speak of, was it?", was just a poetic way of saying with a large dose of hyperbole that, when people acclimate themselves to the inevitability of nuclear energy, they'll also acknowledge the need to set aside areas for waste storage. And didn't you think the comment was just a tiny bit humorous, too? But I guess it could have been read also as a severe indictment of the hazards of nuclear energy--which was not the intent.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Dr. Blake Nelson
  To: Don Winterstein ; Walter Hicks ; Lawrence Johnston
  Cc: asa
  Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 5:31 PM
  Subject: Re: So what now do we do?

  Huh?
  --- Don Winterstein <dfwinterstein@msn.com> wrote:
> Right. I predict that one day well before a
> gallon of gas costs ten of today's dollars, people
> will wake up en masse and say, "Hey, nuclear
> (fission) energy really isn't that bad after all, is
> it? And Nevada was never much of a state to speak
> of, was it?"
>
> Don

  Don, how much do you know about the current (now 30-40
  year old) generation of boiling water and pressure
  water reactors? Or the next generation advanced light
  water reactors, pebble bed technology, gas cooled
  reactors, sodium cooled reactors, etc., and the
  additional passive safety features in such designs?
  Or the fuel cycle, or long-term spent fuel storage, or
  what exact health threats radioactivity poses?

  Nothing about current or future fission reactor
  technology nor about long term spent fuel storage
  poses any serious threat to public health. The only
  reason there aren't more nuclear reactors in the U.S.
  is that fossil fuels are so cheap (and current
  decommissioning financial assurance requirements are
  prohibitively expensive for deregulated merchant
  generators). Of course, the health risks of fossil
  fuels, the environmental damage, etc. almost none of
  which is borne by the generators using those fuels
  (unlike nuclear) are far greater than nuclear power by
  any objective measure.

  Yucca Mountain will not do anything to endanger the
  residents of Nevada or anywhere else, so I am not sure
  why putting the repository there will be the end of
  the State, a State which interestingly has always been
  a staunch supporter of the Nevada test site. I would
  rather have a spent fuel repository in my backyard
  than an atmospheric test range (or formerly an
  atmospheric test range), but hey, that's just me.
  Apparently, that's not Nevada, which is really, really
  odd from a public health perspective.

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Received on Sat Dec 6 04:51:10 2003