News & Articles

I write in praise of John LaForge’s October 31 “nukewatch” column in which he exposed the inflated charges leveled against three activists who cut a fence to enter a nuclear facility near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they painted signs on buildings and hoisted banners - later to be charged with property damage, which is understandable, and with “injury to the national defense,” which reveals the insanity of a culture gone nuts on security. (The Tennessee site pales in comparison to Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Waste Site, which is half as big as Rhode Island. Tom Zoellner, the author of URANIUM, has called Hanford the “most polluted piece of real estate on earth.”)
 
LaForge fittingly included a list of the nuclear waste hazards we created during weapons testing in our long dedication to building nuclear bombs, but it’s also necessary to explain that burning coal is equally bad. Besides dumping thousands of tons of climate-changing CO2 into the air every year, coal-fired power plants are responsible for 30% of the emissions that cause 13,000 premature American deaths per year plus hundreds of thousands of cases of lung and heart diseases.  These plants also expel radioactive elements into the environment, exposing us to 300-400 times MORE RADIATION than comparably sized nuclear plants – which brings me to his equally valuable October 31 column regarding the consequences of Fukushima.
 
Fukushima began operation in 1971, and ran without issue for 40 years, during which the reactors added ZERO CO2 to the atmosphere. Following the 2012 earthquake, the 18-foot seawall (that Tepco had been told was grossly inadequate) was swamped by a tsunami that severed Fukushima’s connections to the grid.  (Scattered across the region are old, deeply weathered Sendai “stones” that warn “Don’t build below the ~150 foot elevation.” – see photo.)
Emergency diesel generators located in the BASEMENT predictably flooded. Batteries then powered the coolant pumps for 8 hours before failing, and without coolant, meltdown was assured.  Had a reservoir or water towers been built nearby, and space was available, the reactors could have been flooded by gravity-powered water.  The tsunami took 20,000 lives that day, but at last report, the Fukushima failure directly took the lives of just three firefighters.
 
Unlike Fukushima, Japan’s Onagawa nuclear plant, which was closer to the epicenter of the quake, not only survived the quake (as did Fukushima), its 45-foot seawall easily also blocked the tsunami. Unfortunately nuclear power has been tarred by the Fukushima disaster, but the failure was NOT the fault of nuclear power. It was the caused by corporate penny-pinching, by building too close to the ocean, by ignoring warnings about seawall height, and by installing backup generators in easily flooded basements.  
 
At Fukushima, reactors 1 - 4 are now useless, but due to placement and other factors, reactors 5 and 6 remain unaffected, and are still capable of producing badly needed power. However, they have not been activated – largely due to a surplus of wrong-headed, anti-nuclear hysteria.
 
Because of these anti-nuclear opinions, I am deeply concerned that a frightened, ignorant public will never learn of the overall safety record of nuclear power. Will they learn that no one has died in Western Europe or the Western Hemisphere because of nuclear power, but MILLIONS have died from the use of coal or oil? Will they learn that our nuclear navy has been operating its submarines and aircraft carriers for 50 years without incident?
 
Somehow, the public must learn that, if we give nuclear power a score of 1 on watts produced per fatality, coal is 25 times worse, and oil gets a 38. The cost per kwh of nuclear electricity is cheaper than coal, as it is for wind and solar. Just one average nuclear power plant CONSTANTLY generates as much power as 2,500 wind generators, which are intermittent, unpredictable and require vast tracts of land. In addition, nuclear power could be even safer, more efficient and cheaper if we replace solid fuel uranium reactors with Molten Salt Reactors that cannot melt down under any circumstances and do not generate the explosive hydrogen that blew up Fukushima.  

As I wrote in Thorium Nuclear Power: Climate Change Killer for the 21st Century,  “James Lovelock, a patriarch of the environmental movement, has begged his friends to drop their objection to nuclear energy, writing,  ‘…its worldwide use as our main source of energy poses an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of lethal heat waves and sea levels rising…. civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear power—the one safe, available, energy source—now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by an outraged planet.’”
Carbon capture from the atmosphere and underground “sequestration” of the CO2 is NOT the answer.  According to David Archer, author of The Long Thaw, “the prospect of recapturing and sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere is an exercise in futility fueled by stupidity. Once CO2 is released, it will take even more energy to reclaim it“.
In addition a coming report from the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts more severe storms, sea level rise, health problems and acidified oceans that will provide drastically less food.
Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann told the AP that the report’s summary confirms what researchers have known for a long time: “Climate change threatens our health, land, food and water security.”
So what to do? The answer is to employ the single, most effective way to put the brakes on this worsening problem – that being to replace all carbon burning with nuclear energy as rapidly as possible.  

People must educate themselves about the effective ways to moderate climate change. Start by reading The Answer by Reese Paley, Power to Save the World by Gwyneth Cravens or Super Fuel by Richard Martin.  

For web-based material, go to http://thoriumforum.com/thorium-nuclear-power-climate-change-killer-21st-century and http://thoriumenergyalliance.com

George Erickson – Eveleth, MN www.tundracub.com 

Member - Union of Concerned Scientists, Member - Thorium Energy Alliance, past VP American Humanist Assoc.
 
To sponsor Dr. Erickson’s Power Point presentation on nuclear power for your group or organization, email tundracub@mchsi.com or call 218-744-2003.