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  • Uranium: Safely and Efficiently Powering the Future
    I cringe when I hear the words "safe" and "clean" always put before the words "nuclear energy" (as is often the case lately). I cringe that people are mixing marketing-speak with their intellectual arguments, which immediately minimizes my trust of a pro-nuke argument. I have a unique perspective as I used to be friends with someone who worked as a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant in California. He scared the crap out of me, telling me how many near-disasters at this plant that were never were publicized (perhaps there are a lot more minor accidents than we hear of). One of the biggest problems, according to my inspector friend, was that the maintenance and replacement of old parts were not always done to spec, often because different suppliers offered kickbacks to the plant buyers use their sub-standard replacement parts. Yes, as long as humans are involved, there are ways that perfectly designed plants can become dangerous -- you never know who might take a short cut to line their own pockets. The other scary thing for my inspector friend was seeing spent rods pile up in the cooling pool that was never designed to store so much radioactive material. These rods need to be actively cooled in the pool, or there will be a meltdown -- so you can't just stop the reactor and walk away. I'm not sure what the answer is to our energy needs, but I want to punch everyone who always adds the marketing buzzwords "safe" and "clean" as a prefix to the words "nuclear energy" as if it were a fact. BTW, on my fairly small roof I have 24 solar panels that produce more energy than my family and home-based business consume (on a year-over-year basis). I'm not saying solar is going to solve the world's energy problems tomorrow, but it most certainly can be a bigger part of our energy plan.
    May 09 14:39 pm |Rating: 0 0 |Link to Comment |View article

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