the propaganda war is on...
Jan. 12th, 2008 06:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eThe government and a few ultra-rich sociopaths are hell-bent on mining more uranium in Australia. I notice the propaganda deluge has jumped up a few notches recently. Talk to everybody you know about why it is such a bad idea. We really need to stop this obscenity.
Nowhere around the world is private money used for nuclear power plants -- it is all funded by government (and military) money. That's because it is far too risky and nuclear power almost never makes a profit. When it does look like a profit is turned it is only when the citizens pay for the expensive decommissioning, etc. Private investors are not idiots. If it was a profitable industry they'd be pushing for the chance to build nuclear power plants.
Whenever people talk about the money to be made from nuclear power it is always done by misleadingly speaking only of one tiny part of the whole thing. Nuclear power loses money because military security costs so much, building the plants is so damn expensive, keeping the radioactive waste out of naughty hands costs forever, cleaning up the inevitable accidents is unimaginably costly, and decommissioning a nuclear plant is incredibly expensive. When people talk about making millions out of "free" nuclear power they are either con-artists or fools or miners who hope to make money out of selling someone else the expensive problem..
The number of nuclear power plants worldwide is falling as old plants are decommissioned and not enough new ones are being built to replace them. Wind power now produces more energy than nuclear power.
Nuclear power plants are inherently fallible. On the worst end of the scale this means an accident that spreads radioactive clouds over entire nations, but on the more mundane scale it means they have to be shut down for safety checks. This means that you need to build far more power plants than "should" be needed in order to avoid regular blackouts.
Nuclear power plants are insecure. When a country is under threat what is the first thing bombed? Centralised power plants always cop it first. If you have a nuclear power plant then that is the primary target. On the other hand if every house has solar cells on the roof then there is no centralised power source to take out and it is very difficult to knock out thousands of small wind farms.
Nuclear waste must be locked up for the rest of human life on this planet. One of the shortest-lived radioactive by-products, plutonium, declines in danger by half in 250,000 years -- that is longer than human civilisation on Earth so far! And at the end of that time it is still half as potent. Considering how incredibly lethal this stuff is (a miniscule dust particle of it will kill you) that is very worrisome. And that is only plutonium. Other products take hundreds of millions of years to lose half their radioactivity. So we can't just store these things till they are safe -- we have to store them forever. If we continue to sell uranium then sooner or later we are going to be required to store the waste products here. That means committing our children and our children's children and their children to paying for a waste dump to be under armed guard for the rest of time. Why would we mortgage our children's future that way?
We will be told over and over again that we need nuclear power because it is the solution to the global warming problem. That is an utter lie. Nuclear power plants take many, many decades to be built and start operating. We need to solve the global warming problem long before that. Nuclear power diverts money from the real solutions.
And the most important reason of all: nuclear bombs and armor-piercing shells are made from nuclear fuel and its waste. No matter what safeguards we put in place history has shown it is impossible to prevent the theft of nuclear material, or even worse, the turning of supposedly peaceful plants into weaponry. Signing treaties doesn't help. The nuclear bombs India exploded during the scary tensions with Pakistan some time back were made from nuclear fuel that they promised to use only for peaceful reactors. They lied. And you don't even need to have the specialised knowledge to make nuclear bombs. Any halfwit can make a conventional bomb that scatters radioactive dust over any city in the world.
We have to stop this.
Nowhere around the world is private money used for nuclear power plants -- it is all funded by government (and military) money. That's because it is far too risky and nuclear power almost never makes a profit. When it does look like a profit is turned it is only when the citizens pay for the expensive decommissioning, etc. Private investors are not idiots. If it was a profitable industry they'd be pushing for the chance to build nuclear power plants.
Whenever people talk about the money to be made from nuclear power it is always done by misleadingly speaking only of one tiny part of the whole thing. Nuclear power loses money because military security costs so much, building the plants is so damn expensive, keeping the radioactive waste out of naughty hands costs forever, cleaning up the inevitable accidents is unimaginably costly, and decommissioning a nuclear plant is incredibly expensive. When people talk about making millions out of "free" nuclear power they are either con-artists or fools or miners who hope to make money out of selling someone else the expensive problem..
The number of nuclear power plants worldwide is falling as old plants are decommissioned and not enough new ones are being built to replace them. Wind power now produces more energy than nuclear power.
Nuclear power plants are inherently fallible. On the worst end of the scale this means an accident that spreads radioactive clouds over entire nations, but on the more mundane scale it means they have to be shut down for safety checks. This means that you need to build far more power plants than "should" be needed in order to avoid regular blackouts.
Nuclear power plants are insecure. When a country is under threat what is the first thing bombed? Centralised power plants always cop it first. If you have a nuclear power plant then that is the primary target. On the other hand if every house has solar cells on the roof then there is no centralised power source to take out and it is very difficult to knock out thousands of small wind farms.
Nuclear waste must be locked up for the rest of human life on this planet. One of the shortest-lived radioactive by-products, plutonium, declines in danger by half in 250,000 years -- that is longer than human civilisation on Earth so far! And at the end of that time it is still half as potent. Considering how incredibly lethal this stuff is (a miniscule dust particle of it will kill you) that is very worrisome. And that is only plutonium. Other products take hundreds of millions of years to lose half their radioactivity. So we can't just store these things till they are safe -- we have to store them forever. If we continue to sell uranium then sooner or later we are going to be required to store the waste products here. That means committing our children and our children's children and their children to paying for a waste dump to be under armed guard for the rest of time. Why would we mortgage our children's future that way?
We will be told over and over again that we need nuclear power because it is the solution to the global warming problem. That is an utter lie. Nuclear power plants take many, many decades to be built and start operating. We need to solve the global warming problem long before that. Nuclear power diverts money from the real solutions.
And the most important reason of all: nuclear bombs and armor-piercing shells are made from nuclear fuel and its waste. No matter what safeguards we put in place history has shown it is impossible to prevent the theft of nuclear material, or even worse, the turning of supposedly peaceful plants into weaponry. Signing treaties doesn't help. The nuclear bombs India exploded during the scary tensions with Pakistan some time back were made from nuclear fuel that they promised to use only for peaceful reactors. They lied. And you don't even need to have the specialised knowledge to make nuclear bombs. Any halfwit can make a conventional bomb that scatters radioactive dust over any city in the world.
We have to stop this.