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This energy source could solve all of our problems — so why is no one talking about it?
The Week ^ | March 4, 2014 | Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

Posted on 03/05/2014 2:03:32 PM PST by kingattax

Energy is arguably the single most important strategic issue of our time. It literally powers everything we do. The world economy see-saws to the gyrations of oil prices. Most of our geopolitical squabbles are about energy in one way or another. And, of course, above all hovers the threatening Armageddon of global climate change.

But when it comes to energy, you probably don't know who, or what, to trust. Clean energy! No, wait, that doesn't work! (And what does that mean, exactly?) Shale gas! No, wait, you will pollute everything.

There's a band of hipsters within the community of people who think hard about energy who think this is a bunch of hoo-ha. We already have a perfectly useful and clean energy source, they say: nuclear power.

In terms of its capacity, nuclear power could provide almost all of our energy needs. In terms of carbon emissions, nuclear power is totally clean. Outside of a handful of countries whose names you probably already know, proliferation isn't an issue. Of course, there's the issue of safety.

But nuclear power is safe, advocates say. Chernobyl happened because of the insanity of communism, and Fukushima because you probably shouldn't build reactors on the path of tsunamis, not because of anything inherent to nuclear power. The solution to nuclear waste, they say, is more R&D, so that waste can be recycled.

Look at France! It draws almost all of its energy from nuclear power, with no serious incident to note in the past 50 years, and the power is cheap, plentiful, and clean.

(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: energy; nuclear
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To: Sherman Logan

As long as politicians are involved rest assured there will be nothing “logical” about it.


21 posted on 03/05/2014 3:45:51 PM PST by Lurkina.n.Learnin (This is not just stupid, we're talking Democrat stupid here.)
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To: thackney
Yep, (pg.17)

"An example of a projection derived for the total number of radiation-induced cancers among the population affected by the accident at TMI was 0.7."

22 posted on 03/05/2014 3:55:28 PM PST by Riflema
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To: kingattax
I thought this was the most interesting statement in the article; "If you have an emergency in a thorium reactor, you shut it off, and it cools down on its own. It can't melt down." I'm not sure that's true, but it's interesting.

Some years back I asked a good friend of mine who works in nuclear power what he thought of thorium reactors and he knew basically nothing about it. When asked why, he's a total engineer type who doesn't think political at all, he supposed thorium wasn't considered because it probably couldn't work.

Proving yet again that politics can indeed distort science. Without restraint, politics is probably the most dangerous this we'll ever face.

23 posted on 03/05/2014 4:33:53 PM PST by WhoisAlanGreenspan?
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To: kingattax

It has nothing to do with “vision” but everything to do with politics.

Think global warming, think one world government, think holding hands singing kumbayah and you’ll get the picture.


24 posted on 03/05/2014 5:07:01 PM PST by 353FMG
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To: thackney
Ok; you stepped in it. I threw you a bone and you threw it back at me, in my face, after crapping on it and saying it was gravy:

Your original comment:

TMI was a success story. Contained even when it hit the fan.

Your reply to my 'helpful link':

most of the radiation was contained and the actual release will have a negligible effect on the physical health of individuals.

FAIL

That's pure propaganda anyway. I'm not going to draw the money-quotes from the other report; do your homework:

Three Mile Island: A Report to the Commissioners and to the Public, Vol. I

Three Mile Island: A Report to the Commissioners and to the Public, Vol. II, Part 1

Three Mile Island: A Report to the Commissioners and to the Public, Vol. II, Part 2

Three Mile Island: A Report to the Commissioners and to the Public, Vol. II, Part 3

If you then still believe what you're preaching you have an agenda and I have a reservoir in Japan you can draw your water from...

Parroting prior statements, I am not against nuclear power, only stupidity. The irony is that the SS had no idea the danger Carter was exposed to when he traveled there.

25 posted on 03/05/2014 5:23:36 PM PST by logi_cal869
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To: Resolute Conservative

What’s the China Syndrome?...


26 posted on 03/05/2014 5:30:08 PM PST by dalereed
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To: logi_cal869
three mile island wasn't an accident, it was sabotage.

Sacramento’s reactor is exactly the same and a friend of mine who's is an engineer, now retired, told me immediatly after it happened that one certain valve had to be intentionally, not accidentally, closed to cause the “accident”!

It was nothing but publicity for some movie by Fonda.

I don't know what one since I haven't seen a movie since 1957.

27 posted on 03/05/2014 5:39:04 PM PST by dalereed
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To: dalereed

I’ve read that and find it compelling. I think it was this

http://atomicinsights.com/three-mile-island-initiating-event-may-sabotage/


28 posted on 03/05/2014 5:54:00 PM PST by logi_cal869
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To: dalereed

Sorry...that was the most recent.

I think this is the text of the report I read years ago

http://www.archive.org/stream/TheGilbertsonReportOnSabotageAtThreeMileIslandTheHarrisburgHoax/3mileIsland_djvu.txt


29 posted on 03/05/2014 6:03:18 PM PST by logi_cal869
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To: logi_cal869

He was an engineer for SMUD at the Sacramento reactor when it happened.

If we’re both alive when we have our 70th class reunion in 11 years, i’ll ask him more about it!


30 posted on 03/05/2014 6:04:23 PM PST by dalereed
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To: logi_cal869

Wow. Big bold print. That must make your point of view fact.

Have a great day. God Bless.


31 posted on 03/06/2014 4:39:11 AM PST by thackney (life is fragile, handle with prayer)
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To: thackney
Wow. Big bold print.

Yes.

That must make your point of view fact.

NO!

This and this does:

Bill Peters, Owner of Auto Body Shop, New Cumberland, PA, 46 yrs. old.

“We heard on the news Wednesday morning (March 28th) that there was a minor mishap or something like that down at Three Mile Island. It was nothing that even concerned us. We kind of laughed about it.

Thursday, we were in the garage working. It’s a large garage and I have large doors that a tractor-trailer type truck would back in. Well, my son and I, we were in there working all day on Thursday. We weren’t outside. We had the doors open ‘cause the weather was warm. We were inside working. We went up about nine-thirty, ten o’clock at night and took a shower. I had come out joking. I said, ‘I got a sunburn!’ (Laughter.) That was Thursday evening. And we were joking about it. We really didn’t think it was anything really that bad. It looked like we got a mild sunburn at the seashore. Anything that was exposed. Because we had T-shirts on and right where your arms went, it looked like the way you look like if you were electric welding. You probably don’t know anything about this, but when you electric weld and you don’t have yourself covered up, you’d get burnt, you’d get red. It’s similar. And this is what you look like.

Friday, I was redder. Like you were laying in the sun the first time you go out in the beginning of the year, and you’d get red. That’s what it looked like. Friday morning we were joking. Nobody wanted to say anything. We were getting this hot feeling in the throat. And you were tasting, it tasted like you were burning a galvanized steel with a torch, you know, or welding it. This is the kind of taste you had in your mouth. This is exactly what it tastes like. It made you half sick. Sometime in the afternoon on Thursday we had started tasting it. And it kept getting stronger and stronger. My son-in-law, he came home Friday from Hershey and he says to me, ‘I taste something.’ And my daughter, she was working at the hospital, and when she came home she said she was tasting it, and they lived down the road here. And nobody would really admit what they were feeling, because everybody thought we were imagining it. It was nerves or something like this.

Well, you feel hot down in your chest. Friday morning I got up and I had blisters, little bitty white blisters on my lips and in my nose. And then also I got diarrhea real bad. I had it that weekend real bad. And you felt half sick in your stomach, half nauseated. See, that could have been from nerves too. I mean nerves would do that to you. And from that time on, it would seem like I was having trouble with my bowels up to about…oh, man about two or three months ago, I guess it was. I was having problems. Not as bad as it was then.

(Friday afternoon) while in the process of leaving, the Fairview Township police come down the road and he hollered, ‘Bill, get the hell inside! I mean it. Get inside. Don’t breathe the air! Close your doors and windows!’ So I waved to him, I said, ‘Yeah…keep going!’ (Laughter) ‘I’m getting out of here! I’m not staying!’ So, we kept loading. This is about three o’clock in the afternoon. And this is when, I think, we got the worst of it. So, we left here about four, four-thirty.

When I got up Saturday morning my lips were burnt more. And they were blistered. I couldn’t blow my nose, it was sore. I never had this before.

Sunday morning I was blistered more. You know how you get sunburn blisters. (But) I never got blisters in the sun. I never had blisters on my lips before then. Down in like your throat was really hot. It’s like you couldn’t drink enough. My chest. It was like putting hot towels on you, except the heat came from inside. This is something you can’t explain. It’s just like you were burning up inside. And you just wanted to drink. I don’t know if my getting sick with this heart condition was related to the accident, but that burning feeling in the chest was located right over where that valve went wrong. (Bill had to have a heart operation in December 1980.)

Now, it didn’t affect everybody the way it did me. Now my son, he was like that. My wife stayed in most of the time. She got a little bit. She could taste it, and got a little hot, but she didn’t get like I did.

We were gone seven days. We had a four year old male German shepherd. He was healthy when we left. He knew how to take care of himself because we go to Florida every winter normally, and he would stay in the garage. We had food prepared. We had 200 pounds of Purina Dog Chow separated out in boxes. I had ten five-gallon cans of water that he always used. Same cans he ever used. And, we left a window cracked in the garage, and he had a mattress in the back. When we came back, he was laying on his mattress dead. And his eyes were burnt white. Both eyes burnt white. He didn’t eat no food, hardly any food. He drank a whole five-gallon can of water, and he threw it up all over the garage. He was dead a lot more than a day. We walked in, we were sick. And you could still taste this like burning galvanized steel, metal.”

(Darla, Bill’s wife, said, ”The mobile home was all shut, the windows were shut and everything. When we came home, outside you couldn’t taste it. When we opened the door and walked in, then you could taste it.”)

It made you half sick. We had five cats out in back. And four of them were lying dead with their eyes burnt out, burnt white like they were, just like they were burnt bad, you know. One cat was in the back of the box, in the cat box back in the corner. And her one eye was burnt. She was blind. She lived six months after that, then she died. There might have been more that that. We had kittens. The three kittens. And they were all dead too. We had milk and we had water for the cats, the same as we did for the dog. And it was in a fenced-in area where no other dogs or animals could get in. There was water enough to last them for a month. And there was food enough to last them for a month. It was under a porch where it’s protected from the weather.

I washed the garage out. We washed everything out in the mobile home too. She washed the walls down. And we washed all our clothes.

Right about the second or third week of April, I guess it would be. It could be the last week of April. We were going back to work, and you know, you kind of even forget the whole thing. And I was starting mowing, and I started chopping up birds. All kinds of birds. No one kind in particular. I had that (five foot hydraulic) bucket, I would say a quarter to a half full of dead birds that I dumped down over the bank and covered them up back there before I could cut the grass. And that’s when I got scared. And I was scared ever since.

That summer, the walnut trees were starting to bud, but there was no walnuts on the trees. The leaves left the walnut trees. It looked like winter. That’s how it looked all year with the walnut trees.” (Darla said that the following year, the leaves were maybe twice as big. Those that were four inches were eight inches. Six-inch leaves were nearly a foot.) “They looked like palm trees. Super big.

That whole summer (1979), ‘til about August there were no flies, no mosquitoes, no nothing. You’d be outside eating and there would be no flies. There were just no flies around, and there were no flies, no mosquitoes, no bugs! (Laughter.) It was unreal. Like 4th of July, you’d be eating and there were no flies. You have a barbeque…there were no flies. They came back about August. And there were no birds at the time either. I mean none.

I’ve lived here all these years, I don’t need them kind of statistics. All I know is that I don’t like it when you look out the window and you don’t see… I mean it’s crazy I know…but you don’t see any birds. There’s two birds that come up across here and that’s it. And this used to be loaded with birds, ‘cause we had bird feeders around. You go down the road two miles, you’d see all kinds of birds and pheasants and stuff. You go out to my mother’s in Lemoyne, she got hundreds of them in her backyard. This is what I don’t like. I walk or run a mile a day. Down over here, down there where we walk. It’s a year and a half since we’ve been walking down that road and running, and I haven’t seen a bird, I haven’t seen a pheasant, I haven’t seen anything. No rabbits. There’s one or two little scrawny squirrels. And that’s it.

I had the Audubon Society come over. They were here on Saturday (January 1983) and they just couldn’t believe it. They were out here with their binoculars and looking around. They were out here about two and a half hours. I called them and told them about this. I got tired of it. I wanted to know in my own mind too if I’m over-reacting or something like this…I mean, if everything is all coincidence.

The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) guy was here. He stood here and he said, ‘I was in the center of the plume and the plume was nowhere up near here.’ He says it was down farther down the road. But he was down the road. How does he know it wasn’t up here? Nobody ever checked! He’s telling me that I imagined my lips got blistered. I imagined our dog and cats died, that there was no walnuts on the trees! That this couldn’t have happened. And there were no dead birds up there. He says if it was that kind of a thing, you couldn’t live here now. He says the people around here couldn’t be living here. I say, ‘Well, not too many are living here right now!’ you know. (The cancer rate has been very high since the accident along the road where Bill lives.)

I’d like to know from somebody…I mean, what’s your personal opinion? If you think I’m foolish, if I’m over, overcautious or overdoing the whole thing.”

(Interviewed January 7 & 31, 1983)

I used to believe the media reports that TMI was innocuous and that the government & industry had the public's interests & health at heart. (can't type that without </sarc>, but at one time it was true; I humbly admit it)

Decades ago I truly woke up.

The truth is out there...
God bless to you, too. I pray your eyes open.
32 posted on 03/06/2014 5:32:13 AM PST by logi_cal869
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To: dalereed

A movie 70’s starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmom, and Michael Douglas. Lemmon worked at a nuclear power plant and was a whistle blower about defects in the plant. Fonda and Douglas were of course brave members of the press who were on site during the major event and when Lemmon took over the power plant to draw attention to the issue because the owners were trying to cover it up. The premise was that if a plant melted down the nuclear material would seep down into the core of the earth and cause major catastrophic events.


33 posted on 03/06/2014 5:37:08 AM PST by Resolute Conservative
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To: logi_cal869

You might find people would take you more seriously if you didn’t start your discussion with insults.


34 posted on 03/06/2014 5:44:18 AM PST by thackney (life is fragile, handle with prayer)
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To: logi_cal869

Yeah, OK. leads to 2.05 megabytes of PDF from threemileisland.org. More people died in Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile than from the TMI incident.


35 posted on 03/06/2014 6:33:20 AM PST by JimRed (Excise the cancer before it kills us; feed & water the Tree of Liberty! TERM LIMITS NOW & FOREVER!)
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To: thackney
You might find people would take you more seriously if you didn’t start your discussion with insults.

Your gross misstatements are underwhelming.

fini

36 posted on 03/06/2014 7:20:36 AM PST by logi_cal869
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To: JimRed
More people died in Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile than from the TMI incident.

You're absolutely right.

</sarc>

37 posted on 03/06/2014 7:25:42 AM PST by logi_cal869
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To: soycd

Earth’s core is million of degrees-ALgore said so.

That’ll stop it.


38 posted on 03/06/2014 8:00:05 AM PST by TurboZamboni (Marx smelled bad and lived with his parents .)
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