nuclear nuts
May. 25th, 2008 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eBackground Briefing today was about how the nuclear power industry is key to the spread of nuclear weapons, and how the two are inextricably tied together. Increase one and you increase the other.
A while ago I posted a short rant about how dangerously stupid nuclear power is. I made the usual points about links to bombs, the difficulty and high cost of safe storage for millions of years, and the awful danger posed by nuclear accidents. I also made a number of other points, like the fact that Australia, being one of the driest places in the world should not be contemplating building power stations that are even more wasteful of water than coal-fired power plants -- both are glorified steam engines, and boil vast amounts of water away to run their turbines. But the point that seemed to catch in the throats of some was that nuclear power is driven by governments, not private capital. I said at the time that I'd back this up with more info, but never got around to it, having been distracted by many other things in the meantime.
Well, here is data on why private capital is not investing in nuclear power, and how it is paid for by tax dollars instead. The article was published recently by physicist and energy consultant Amory Lovins and a couple of his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The original is one of several articles in a pdf document which is here, but if you hate pdf as much as I do I have painstakingly extracted the article and reformatted it into a web page, which is far easier to read.
http://miriam-english.org/alia/ForgetNuclear.html
An extremely condensed version was published in Newsweek too.
A while ago I posted a short rant about how dangerously stupid nuclear power is. I made the usual points about links to bombs, the difficulty and high cost of safe storage for millions of years, and the awful danger posed by nuclear accidents. I also made a number of other points, like the fact that Australia, being one of the driest places in the world should not be contemplating building power stations that are even more wasteful of water than coal-fired power plants -- both are glorified steam engines, and boil vast amounts of water away to run their turbines. But the point that seemed to catch in the throats of some was that nuclear power is driven by governments, not private capital. I said at the time that I'd back this up with more info, but never got around to it, having been distracted by many other things in the meantime.
Well, here is data on why private capital is not investing in nuclear power, and how it is paid for by tax dollars instead. The article was published recently by physicist and energy consultant Amory Lovins and a couple of his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The original is one of several articles in a pdf document which is here, but if you hate pdf as much as I do I have painstakingly extracted the article and reformatted it into a web page, which is far easier to read.
http://miriam-english.org/alia/ForgetNuclear.html
An extremely condensed version was published in Newsweek too.