-=> LEONARD ERICKSON wrote to ROY J. TELLASON <=-

 -=> Quoting Roy J. Tellason to Wayne Chirnside <=-

 WC> A search on "nuclear accidents" is anything but comforting.

 RJT> Yeah,  no doubt.  And as I type this there's a thing on the TV about
 RJT> Indian Point (NY),  and how it's a terrorist target...
 RJT> Did I ever mention that I _see_ Three Mile Island on my way to work?
 RJT> The whole nuke thing bothers me because they *still* haven't got a
 RJT> good answer for waste disposal.

 LE> Actually, they've got several. As with just about everything
"nuclear"
 LE> the problems are *vastly* exaggereated.

LE> The waste from the reactors won't be any more radioactive than the
 LE> original uranium ore after a measly 300 years. that's a long time, but
 LE> it's nowhere *near* the *thousands* of years that people insist storage
 LE> facilities be designed for.

Really now, last I looked the half lives of plutonium
and uranium ran into hundreds of millions of years.
This is the time for that radioactive element to decay to half
it's elemental mass. Mind you that during this time the redioactive 
elements by nature of their decay are also generating deadly radioactive
daughter products.
In fact it is these very daughter products that make uranium
and plutonium used in a nuclear reactor so much more deadly
in the first place. It's a fact you can hold a freshly 
manuafatured near pure uranium pellet in your hand for
a couple of minutes with no significant harm.
Don't try this with the same pellet at the end of it's fuel cycle
as you'll wind up dead. Plutonium isn't safe from the get go because it 
can spontanously burst into flames generating plutonium oxide
fumes easily inhaled and quite deadly, examples avaialable
by researching Rocky Flats and other sites where such has occured.
Yucca Flats permanent nuclear storage facility is not geologically
stable having had a quake there that caused significant damage to 
surface buildings just 18 years ago. Scientists have said
this site may never be suitable for permanent storage yet
politicians have given it the go ahead.
Bear in mind this stuff only needs to be jarred around some so
that a sufficient quantity generates enough heat to cause
a steam, non-nuclear, explosion sreading this crap far and wide.
This DID happen in the USSR during their weapons development program
and there are very questionable storage tanks at the Hanford
Washington site as well.
You say these radioactive elements only remain active and dangerous 
for three hundred years? Well a great deal of the heat
from the Earth's core is generated by nuclear material, thorium
perhaps as my recollection isn't perfect.
Guess the world is only three hundred years old written history
not withstanding.
Do a net search on "nuclear accidents."
You'll get hits on everything from an entire town in
Mexico contaminated by a single source that killed dozens,
20,000 sources lost annually at Logan airport alone. Radioactive
seeds being left in cancer patients who died as a result.
A missing H-bomb off Thule Greenland, Spain and in a swamp
in the southeastern United States. Many thousands of more examples.
Near me in Mulberry Florida people die at an accelerated
cancer rate from radon gas at a rate of three to six times
the national average depending on who you take as a reliable source
and this is a daughter product of your natural uranium
you claim is so safe and it's not even high grade uranium 
ore but merely the trace amounts found along with 
phosphate mining. Plenty of dead uranium miners too.

 LE> I could go on about other things, such as Three Mile Island being proof
 LE> of how *well* designed US reactors are. They had far more things go
 LE> wrong, most due to human error, 
 
You mean human error such as the stuck pressure relief valve
and defective indicator light on that same valve at TMI?
The human reactors operators were performing precisely 
according to the book by draining reactor water under
the assumption the reactor was _overfilled_ and thus the low
pressure when in fact _two_ simultanious  _technological_ failures
led to this erronious pressure reading.
Here's another example, read "We Almost Lost Detroit",
a rather interesting read about a nuclear reactor outside
Detroit over which operators fussed and fumed over a month 
afraid to do ANYTHING because it might disturb a near critical 
mass at the bottom of the reactor. Eventually
the entire reactor was dismantled, shipped off in containers
and buried. The same thing nearly happened at TMI both
between the hydrogen bubble of unknown size and the
melted mass of enriched uranium at the base of the reactor
of which no-one knew how close it was to criticality.
These are _technological_ errors not human ones and 
who the heck cares where the fault lies anywy when the consequences
are so terrible?
It's been soft peddled but look at the projected death tolls
from Windscale in southern England as well as those from
Chernobyl. Speaking of human error, how about transporting
all that rad waste across the country?
I've spent literally hundreds of hours reading up on actual
nuclear accidents either on the net or in books and I've not
even breached the subject of a dirty bomb or terrorists
getting their hands on weapons grade materials.
We're still storing spent fuel rods on sites at nuke
plants because there is nothing else we CAN do with it
and think what a lovely terrorist target all that contaminated
soup would be.
We protect football stadiums with concrete barriers
to keep out truck bombs but as yet do no such thing at
nuclear plants in populated areas.

 LE> than any "worst case" put forth by the
 LE> anti-nuke camp and yet all that happened that "shouldn't"
have was the
 LE> release of an amount of radioactive material that's dwarfed by both
 LE> natural radiation and by the radioactives released *hourly* by
 LE> coal-fired power plants (which produce far more waste than nukes do and
 LE> it is toxic *forever*)

Yeah,  a trivial amount was released by Chernobyl, so little
in fact that the first knowledge outside the USSR was
Norwegians going _into_ work at nuclear plants setting off
radiation alarms, mass killings  of raindeer herds due to contamination
and death toll estimates upwards of 130,000 in the USSR.
Windscale in England had everyone guzzling iodine tablets so not
as to take up the radioactive isotope in their thyroids and the
English killed most of their dairy cattle in Southern England
because they were way above supposed safe levels of contamination.
Strontium and Cesium are't too nice either and are taken
up and concentrated in different body parts and these
are just a few of the istopes that come out with those 
spent fuel rods.
So answer this question, since nuclear power is so
cheap, dependable and technologically mature why are no new
nuke plants being built in the U.S. and why did the U.S.
government find it necessary to place a unrealistically
low insurance liability cap on the industry?
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