How to go green

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<font color="#CC6600" size="1">[ June 12, 2008 06:44 AM: Message edited by: travelinman ]</font>

Trav-

I totally agree, but with several caveats. I read a book one time called "Cult of the Atom," that was written in 1982 and basically offered a history of nuclear power and the nuclear industy in the U.S. from the 30s through the early 80s.

Although the author injected a lot of techno-geek science into it (you know, stuff that only people like D2 can understand), there was a lot of political history as well.

The bottom line is, it was a situation where their eyes had a bigger appetite than their stomach. Once the eggheads learned how to split the atom, they literally believed that would be the end of the world's problems, and that by the end of the 20th century we would all be living in a utopia (and they would be worshipped as gods). Nuclear power was unlimited energy that could be used to do most anything, and wouldn't cost hardly a thing to do it.

Needless to say, things like safety and risk management didn't factor much into the equation. And any egghead that did raise questions about safety was quickly pushed to the back of the line (or ignored altogether).

Well, here we are, over 70 years later, and we haven't quite built our utopia. The nuke industry loves touting Three Mile Island as a non-incident, that not one ounce of radioactive material leaked, and that not one person was injured. Well, that's true, but it misses the point. It is believed that the Three Mile Island reactor came within an hour of a meltdown. And what the nuke industry failed to recognize was that there was no margin for error. You can't sit there and say, well, we're going to build this plant, and there's only a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that there could be a catastrophic failure. (and Three Mile Island wasn't the only one, there was a fire at Browns Ferry, Alabama in 1974 that also exposed the reality of a serious problem).

That number has to be zero. If you nuke a city, you basically render it inhabitable for decades (maybe hundreds of years), to say nothing about the people you kill. Why we would built these things next to cities blows me away. They should be built in the remotest of areas.

Now, we have come so far in terms of technology in recent decades, and I would be willing to give it another shot. I don't really see as we have much choice, irrespective of what the militant green a-holes think. But, if we are going to do it, we have to go in with a much different mindset than we did during the Eisenhower administration.

You worry too much Lew.

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