NUCLEAR POWER

NUCLEAR POWER AND ALTERNATIVES

by Lawrence Wilson, MD

Some people today are calling for the resurrection of nuclear power in the United States. Indeed, even some environmental groups have changed their minds. They now suddenly believe the plants are safe and cost effective. This is untrue! Nuclear power is as dangerous and costly as ever. Here is why:

1. Uranium is always unsafe. It is terribly unsafe for those who must mine it. It is unsafe for those who work around it to refine it. It is unsafe to transport it. It is unsafe in the power generating plant, and it is extremely unsafe to reuse it, re-refine it or try to store it for hundreds or thousands of years. It tends to pollute the air, water and food supply during mining, and perhaps during storage and usage as well.

Read Low Level Radiation by Sternglas, and other books on this subject for confirmation and documentation about the terrible, but subtle effects of low level radiation. I hear experts say over and over that “no one has died” from a low-level radiation release. This may be true in the short term, but statistics show that just living near a nuclear power plant increases the risk of some birth defects, leukemia and other horrendous diseases.

2. Most uranium comes from unstable regions of the globe. It is hard to locate, and will cause wars over availability, just as we are seeing today with oil.

3. Uranium is not a plentiful material and will require tremendous and disgraceful mining operations.

4. The power plants become too radioactive to use after 50-100 years. Then they must be “cleaned up”, which means tons of concrete poured over the entire plant. This is dangerous for the workers, ugly, costs billions of dollars, and the radioactively pollutes the earth for literally thousands of years.

5. Radioactive waste must be transported somehow to dumps deep within the earth. If an earthquake occurs, which will happen from time to time, some could be released into the air. Is this the legacy we want to giv our children and all their descendants for thousands of years, when it is totally unnecessary?

6. Nuclear plants are ridiculously expensive. They have to be strong enough to withstand bomb attacks, if that is even possible, and to avoid mishaps that could easily kill thousands and spread radiation far and wide, as occurred at Chernobyl.

The reason America stopped building them was mainly financial, and this has not changed one bit. After the Japanese disaster, all plants around the world will hopefully be upgraded, costing billions more dollars. Nuclear power is an industry that is completely non-sustainable financially and a drain on the pocket book of every nation that builds these plants.

7. Nuclear is dangerous to national security. It can be sabotaged rather easily with a well-placed device like a small nuclear bomb or even conventional explosives. Such a terror attack could inflict severe damage to any nation, killing or maiming thousands of people, or just forcing huge evacuations of major cities that might be uninhabitable for hundreds of years. This would be a disaster on a magnitude never ever seen before on earth. In this age of terrorism, it makes no sense at all to deploy such technology.

8. Having nuclear plants means there is lots of radioactive fuel around for terrorists to steal. Plans to build a nuclear weapon, I am told, are available on the internet. It makes no sense whatsoever to make this fuel so readily available to rogue elements in society.

9. Nuclear technology is not safe at any cost because no one knows where the next earthquake will strike. Earthquakes seem to be getting stronger and more unpredictable. There is no way to prevent damage if a quake is close enough, or powerful enough.

This is just common sense, once again. One can plan for many contingencies, but the danger of nuclear power is so great that it is playing Russian roulette to think that any reactor can sustain a powerful earthquake without dire consequences, as has been shown recently in Japan.

10. Nuclear power is clearly unnecessary. America, for example, has enough natural gas to last 100 years and enough to power all the cars and everything else. Idiotic laws prevent her from developing her own resources. She also has plenty of coal and oil shale. There is also plenty of these resources elsewhere in the world for a long time to come.

Global warming and climate change are fictions and these movements need to be discredited before the environmentalists cause far more damage with nuclear technology. For more on the subject of climate change, read Global Warming on this website.

Also, there are far better alternative energy sources, as described below.

WATER TECHNOLOGY – AN EXCELLENT NEW FUEL

The use of water added to gasoline engines offers improved fuel efficiency, cleaner burning engines, and much less usage of fossil fuels. This technology has been around for a long time, but has been suppressed by various interest groups such as the oil cartel and even by some car manufacturers, perhaps.

This technology basically involves splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, also called hydrolysis. It produces a unique gas that is variously called HHO, Brown’s gas and perhaps goes by other names as well. It is, indeed, a special mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, that works better than either of these as an auto fuel and for running all types of machinery, including the generation of electricity, cars, aircraft, ships, trains, etc. It has other remarkable properties as well, such as burning at a low temperature under the right conditions, and others that are fascinating. It can be used for welding almost anything, for example, and is safer than acetyline and other welding gases.

Brown’s gas or HHO can also be burned in any internal combustion engine without any pollution or residue, except a little water. This remarkable fuel alternative that is available today at low cost, can be used in our existing fleet of vehicles, trains, planes and power plants, is far safer than gasoline and oil, and that creates no pollution at all. It is so much better than nuclear power there is no comparison. A number of websites discuss it if one types HHO or Brown’s gas into a search engine on the internet.

WHAT ABOUT BIOFUELS, SOLAR, WIND, TIDES AND GEOTHERMAL POWER?

These all have some future possibilities. Geothermal is the best – a simple, non-polluting and cheap technology that most nations just ignore. Hydroelectric is good, but costly to develop and it causes some environmental damage as rivers and lakes must be dammed up to produce it in most caes. Solar, wind and tidal power are also possible, but costly, at this time.

Biofuels offer some possibilities for the future, using fast growing plants such as some algae or seaweeds that can grow 6 feet in one day. These are then fermented or just burned for fuel. Also, some plants have been identified that contain vegetable oils that can be burned exactly like diesel fuel with little or no processing. This is where the research and focus should be, not on horrendously dangerous and extremely costly technologies like nuclear power.

Also read Nuclear Update – 2011, Should You Take Iodine?

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