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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-12 02:17 am (UTC)Private investment abounds, from the mining of uranium to the transportation to the running of the reactors themselves. Excelon alone runs 17 nuclear reactors and appears to be highly profitable, paying regular dividends. Decommissioning costs are indeed huge, but not a significant problem when the total outlay including decommissioning makes nuclear one of the cheapest forms of power available.
UK study on cost of generating electricity for base-load plant (p/kWh):
Gas-fired CCGT 2.2
Nuclear fission plant 2.3
Coal-fired pulverised-fuel (PF) steam plant 2.5
Coal-fired circulating fluidized bed (CFB) steam plant 2.6
Coal-fired integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) 3.2
In normal use, nuclear power is much safer than many other kinds of power generation. How many thousands have been killed and poisoned in the production of power from coal vs uranium? Coal kills huge numbers of miners over time, along with all the pollution. With its relatively tiny quantities, uranium is much less dangerous to mine. You appear to be falling for preferring lots of death in small parcels rather than a miniscule risk of a bigger event. I bet that if every single house had solar cells on the roof, we would have more death and injury from people falling from roofs than the likely death toll from running a nuclear power plant.
Basing decisions on what might happen in a war is like basing your vehicle-buying decisions on what happens if it snows in Brisbane. OMG! Someone might try to bomb them! They might try to bomb bridges too, so I guess we shouldn't build any bridges either. Tell you what, let's just live in holes in the ground. Apart from anything else, there are about 500 reactors in the world and in the case of a large war, Australia not having one will make no difference whatsoever.
The nuclear arms argument is, likewise, dubious. There have long been enough nuclear weapons on earth to obliterate us. More isn't a good thing, but neither is it significant.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-12 06:10 am (UTC)If you look more closely at profitability figures from nuclear corporations you'll find sweetheart deals with government that absorb their biggest costs. Even then many don't survive.
I'll post some references.
Interesting that the list of energy sources you cite don't include anything cheaper or safer than nuclear, coal, and gas. The Queensland government funded a study into power costs then tried to bury it, even pulling it from the net when they decided, against their own study's recommendations to go for nuclear.
I've just spent about an hour trying to find it. I'll be going home tonight. I have it saved on my computer there and will post it later.
Coal is an absolute nightmare, but that isn't an argument for nuclear power. What? We are so bad now that it is acceptable to be merely less evil? We should be aiming at being good.
The effects of radioactive accidents and radioactive war kill and sicken people for many generations to come. They aren't "just" limited to the people killed during the actual event. Saying that it's unlikely, and so it shouldn't be considered, is very shortsighted.
There have long been enough nuclear weapons on earth to obliterate us. More isn't a good thing, but neither is it significant.
This an argument often used to paralyse attempts to disarm.
It just isn't valid. If you look carefully at it, it is actually meaningless and simply carries a powerful message of crippling hopelessness. But all is not hopeless. We are the generation that eradicated the scourge of smallpox. It used to kill countless numbers of mostly children in the most horrifying way. Nuclear power is less obviously just as dangerous. We can divert efforts into safer, more decentralised, more reliable efforts. In fact it is happening. The world is gradually abandoning nuclear power.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-12 07:21 am (UTC)So? If government pulled out of funding any major power production, it would be unlikely to survive. Who else could have built Yallourn or Hazelwood? We're talking about multi-billion-dollar projects with only one customer. They have to be performed by, or at least in extremely close cooperation with, that one customer, the government.
The world is gradually abandoning nuclear power.
Propaganda and/or wishful thinking. As of August, there were 439 reactors in operation with another 34 under construction. Projections show the amount of nuclear power increasing over the next 30 years. It's true that other forms of power production are increasing more rapidly, but that doesn't mean nuclear is being "abandoned".
no subject
Date: 2008-01-15 10:54 pm (UTC)Redundant
no subject
Date: 2008-02-27 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-29 12:05 am (UTC)Huh. Just looked it up and thought for a while that I must have been wrong because most dictionaries don't mention that. I was puzzled because I was sure that was a major part of the definition. Eventually I found the definition as I remember it, but on the Encarta dictionary, which I haven't seen before:
The (paper version of) American Heritage Dictionary is the one I usually refer to, but its online definition, which usually corresponds to the paper one now says:but I'm sure it didn't say that before. That is dictatorship, not fascism. I'll look it up when I get home.
I just found a quote:
Ahhh... okay. Just looked at wikipedia's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism
It seems things are not as simple as I thought.