🚀 go-pugleaf

I suggest that anyone interested in the safety, environmental impact,
and politics of nuclear power should read a book called "The Health
Hazards of Not Going Nuclear," by Petr Beckmann. As far a I am
concerned, this book is *the* classic book on this issue. It was
published in 1976 by Golem Press (and republished by some other
publisher I can't remember). Here is an excerpt:

``1.8 billion years before Alfven fantasized about `poisoning the entire
globe' and Barry Commoner invoked images of a `nuclear priesthood
watching over wastes for thousands of years,' there was a natural
reactor in operation in what is now the Republic of Gabon in Africa.
Water pockets in a uranium deposit acted as neutron traps, and at least
four, perhaps as many as six, `reactor zones,' (30 ft by 30 ft by 10 ft
thick) went critical 1.8 billion years ago, producing an average of 20
kW thermal power for about half a million years.''

``... An international scientific conference, organized by the
International Atomic Energy Commission, was held in Gabon in June 1975,
and among the facts it firmly established were these:''

``There had been 12,000 lbs of fission products, and 4,000 lbs of
plutonium (virtually all decayed now). All of these have remained
completely in place.''

This me again:

Imagine that. All that nuclear ``waste,'' sat completely untreated in
the middle of water pockets for millions of years, and it didn't go
anywhere.

Twenty years ago we had the technology to convert nuclear waste into a
solid, water-impermeable glass form, encase it in stainless-steel-lined
concrete containers, and put it 2000 feet below the ground where water
hasn't flowed for hundreds of thousands of years. And that is supposedly
not safe enough! No, we need a ``nuclear priesthood'' to watch over it!
Wake up, folks! This is one of the most preposterous lies ever told.

In the meantime, coal-fired power in the U.S. alone generates some 15
tons of waste every second, 90% of which goes into the atmosphere and
kills an estimated 10,000 people per year. (That happens to be roughly
the rate at which American troops died in the Viet Nam War!) And the ash
is hauled away from a large plant at the rate of about two 100-ton
railroad hoppers every 2 minutes during peak periods. The land required
to dispose the ash from 2 weeks of coal burning is about the same as for
10,000 years worth of nuclear waste! But this certainly is not to
suggest that coal-fired power is bad, only that nuclear power is
incomparably cleaner.

Russ Paielli
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/9488/