Comments on: Nukes on

By: Nomen Nescio

Nomen Nescio — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 04:24:15 +0000

i’ve always liked nuclear power. i think we need more of it. i know for a certainty i would much rather live next to a nuke plant than a coal burner; there’s just no comparing them for day-to-day pollution and long-term risk.

there’s no comparing the waste products, either. i know something about what’s in a fossil-burner’s ash and soot, and i don’t want that in my back yard. the spent nuke fuel is nasty, sure, but there’s comparatively very, very little of it - little enough that we can afford to deal with it sensibly. fossil burners create insane amounts of waste, and then pump most of it into the atmosphere whence we can’t call it back.

personally, i’ve always wanted to see a plutonium economy develop. it wouldn’t give us infinite energy, but it would come closer to it than anything else that’s technologically feasible. won’t happen in my lifetime, though, if only for the obvious political reasons.

but i’ll always think fast breeder reactors are one of the neatest, niftiest ideas us humans have ever come up with. they’ve just got that mathemathical beauty you almost never find in the real world; creating new fuel out of their own waste at a greater rate than they use it up… cool!

By: Major Tom

Major Tom — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 04:04:56 +0000

Nuclear activity is quite fearsome to me that in any given moment, I won’t approve any of them. We might as well burn in carbon-dioxide than face extinction by the spread of nuclear polltuion in our atmosphere. But i guess my views is highly impractical now knowing that next to oil, it is nuclear fusion that the first world is holding on as energy source. maybe we can change the world, maybe we can’t. But I sure hope the world shall be nuclear-free.

By: george.w

george.w — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 13:07:43 +0000

Hi Washingtonian! I grew up in Ellensburg and loved it there. It depends who you mean by “them,” and the answer is, we won’t trust them. That’s why I am so rabid about free speech and a free press. The mess at Hanford was created in absolute secrecy.

The other problem is the curious notion that it is unpatriotic to criticize military weapons development or excess. The Pentagon needs to be held to – well maybe not the same environmental standards as industry, maybe that should be a case-by-case basis – but to higher standards than “we’re the Pentagon, we don’t have to obey environmental laws.”

As for commercial nuclear power generation, high standards, period. And I don’t know if people understand (Bush certainly appears not to understand) that we’re facing a global climate disaster with carbon fuels.

Here in our county in Illinois they just put up a giant wind farm. I think those things are beautiful.

By: Terry

Terry — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 06:46:13 +0000

I’m downwind of the Hanford Reservation in WA State ... we can’t even get them to clean up the existing mess there. How can we trust them with more reactors?

By: Socialist Swine

Socialist Swine — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 04:10:27 +0000

I don’t really have any thoughts about nuclear energy. It seems like it would be a necessary evil if we were to reduce carbon emissions, hydro-electric, geothermal, tidal, and wind energy just wouldn’t be sufficient to meet the needs of North America (unless we got a lot better at reducing the amount of electricity we expend). However, watching the nuclear explosions makes me wonder why we still keep those things around. When something has such destructive potential you would think that we would want to do our best to ensure that we would never have to deal with one of them going off. Instead, it seems that there are those who like to live on the edge and continue to stockpile these things. I mean, you can’t hug your children with nuclear arms. I always wanted to say that….