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Title: The Fukushima crisis should not spell the end of nuclear power.
Source:
Monbiot
URL Source: http://www.monbiot.com/2011/03/16/atomised/
Published: Mar 16, 2011
Author: George Monbiot
Post Date: 2011-03-16 14:29:48 by go65
Keywords: None
Views: 19729
Comments: 27
The nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan is bad enough; the nuclear disaster unfolding in China could be even worse. “What disaster?”, you ask. The decision today by the Chinese government to suspend approval of new atomic power plants. If this suspension were to become permanent, the power those plants would have produced is likely to be replaced by burning coal. While nuclear causes calamities when it goes wrong, coal causes calamities when it goes right, and coal goes right a lot more often than nuclear goes wrong. The only safe coal-fired plant is one which has broken down past the point of repair. Before I go any further, and I’m misinterpreted for the thousandth time, let me spell out once again what my position is. I have not gone nuclear. But, as long as the following four conditions are met, I will no longer oppose atomic energy. 1. Its total emissions – from mine to dump – are taken into account, and demonstrate that it is a genuinely low-carbon option. 2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried. 3. We know how much this will cost and who will pay. 4. There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diverted for military purposes. To these I’ll belatedly add a fifth, which should have been there all along: no plants should be built in fault zones, on tsunami-prone coasts, on eroding seashores or those likely to be inundated before the plant has been decommissioned or any other places which are geologically unsafe. This should have been so obvious that it didn’t need spelling out. But we discover, yet again, that the blindingly obvious is no guarantee that a policy won’t be adopted.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 6.
#1. To: go65, Mad Dog (#0)
(Edited)
And politicians and plant owners are prepared to deal harshly with environmental saboteurs. Just say no to eco-nazis! Eco-nuts are responsible for 100's of thousands of spent fuel rods being stored at Fukushima. Eco-terrorists are directly responsible for the worst of the radioactive nightmare happening in Japan. These storage "pools" do not have the same durable containment vessels as the reactors, and are the source of most of the emissions. The stuff belching out of them is greatly hampering work on the reactors. Nuke power can be very safe, if you can keep eco kooks out of the process.
Fuck off. Greed because of the expense was the cause of that stock piling. The simple truth is, the waste problem is the Achilles heel of that industry. Where to put it? The Japanese's could of found their Yucca Mountain to store it; perhaps in Australia, or some other place that would accept payment for the dubious honor. After all, money does talk that way. As does greed when this stuff is stockpiled where it was used. The simple truth about this industry is it has no real future. All the easy to extract Uranium has been extracted and used, and there is what is now estimated to be a 30-40 year supply of harder to process ore available to make fuel for this sort of plant. The simple truth is the nuclear protest movement has been small and stalled the past few decades, and has never really existed in Japan like it did here. You are like a German Nazi who scapegoated Jews for everything. You want a straw man to beat about to blame for the inherent weaknesses and shortcomings of this industry.
And it's expensive because of?.... Eco-nazis have fought safe and sane storage tooth and nail. Your buddies at Save Japan Dolphins, have screwed the pooch. The dolphins will soon be glowing in the dark. Environ-mental-cases don't really care how many people, dolphins, or other living things they kill, because they're for "population reduction". They'd rather kill humans because they believe that they're evil, but they take what they can get in the end.
Cetaceans are at the top of the food chain and long-lived, therefore they bio-accumulate marine pollutants in their internal organs and muscle (red meat), especially heavy metals like mercury. Many tests since 2001 have shown dolphin and whale meat to be extremely toxic with high levels of mercury, way above the government standard safe level of .4 parts per million (ppm). Mercury and methylmercury are strong neurotoxins, which can cause severe neurological diseases, especially to the fetuses of pregnant women and brain damage to children. Methylmercury is organic mercury which is especially toxic and crosses the placenta and blood brain barrier. Minamata Disease Since the 1950s, mercury poisoning from the Chisso Corp. plastics plant dumping into Minamata Bay on Kyushu, has caused over 2,000 deaths, and as many as 30,000 victims from “Minamata Disease.” (AP 9/30/07) Minamata Disease is a severe neorological syndrome with symptoms of ataxia, paralysis, impaired vision, hearing and speech, and in extreme cases insanity, coma, and death. Toxic mercury in some of the dolphins in Taiji are now higher than in the fish that caused Minamata disease, most of which had 9-24 ppm methylmercury (Understanding Environmental Pollution by Marquita Hill, 1997. p. 217). Despite this history of mercury poisoning, local schools in the Taiji area have been feeding toxic dolphin meat to children in their school lunches. The Japanese Minister of Health and Welfare confirmed the high mercury levels in a 2003 survey, but has done nothing to safe-guard the public. The Fisheries Agency has issued an advisory urging pregnant women not to eat dolphin meat more than once every two months. This meat was sold as whale meat at a market in Katsuura. (It was very popular). -Helene O'Barry photo Taiji Councilmen Speak Out Against Toxic Dolphin Meat Fortunately, two Taiji councilmen, Mr. Junichirou Yamashita and Mr. Hisato Ryono, discovered that 150kg of short finned pilot whale meat had been served in local kindergartens, primary and junior high schools in October of 2006. They had samples of pilot whale meat tested by the minister of Health, Labor and Welfare, which showed mercury 10 to 16 times higher, and methylmercury 10-12 times higher than the maximum safe levels. Consequently, they have come out publicly against feeding dolphin meat to school children. In early December 2006, the Japan Times tested a package of striped dolphin meat from the Shingu Central Okuwa Supermarket, and found and reported mercury at 5.40 ppm - 13.5 times higher than the 0.4 ppm safe level. On December 26, 2006, the Okuwa Supermarket Corporation banned the sale of all dolphin meat in all their stores. Tetsuya Endo is a famous researcher at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido, who studied the brains of deceased Minamata mercury poisoning victims that showed even low levels of methylmercury can damage or destroy neurons. In a study done in 2005, Endo found the average level of methylmercury for false killer whales was 11.5 ppm, and the highest found was for stripped dolphins at 26.2 ppm, 87 times higher than the safe level. In an interview with The Japan Times, Endo stated, “Everyone should avoid eating dolphin meat. If people continue to eat dolphin, there's a high probability of them having damage to their brains ... No government agency is studying the problem - no scientists in Japan want to study the subject; it's very political.” http://www.dolphinspirit.org/mercury.html You obviously do not believe me when I tell you dolphin meat is no longer consumed in Japan and the local slaughter halted because of that, so read it in black and white.
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Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried.
#2. To: hondo68 (#1)
#5. To: Ferret Mike, buckeroo, Capitalist Eric, jwpegler (#2)
Fuck off. Greed because of the expense was the cause of that stock piling
#6. To: hondo68 (#5)
Appeals to stop the dolphin slaughter on humanitarian, moral, and animal cruelty grounds have not worked. Our best appeal is now based on food safety and the health of Japanese children and adults who are eating mercury poisoned dolphin meat. A hopeful sign is that one super market chain has banned selling dolphin meat, and two Taiji councilmen have broken the “code of silence” and spoken up against children eating toxic dolphin meat.
Replies to Comment # 6.
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