FOE: “Fix or Ditch’ Pro-Nuke Climate Change Bill
Safe energy vs. nuclear energy is something I know about. When I was a college student in the mid 1970s, I did a school paper on whether nuclear energy was safe. Though I came in with a more-or-less open mind, I was shocked and horrified by what I found. The more I researched, the worse it got.
Among the hundred or so good reasons NOT to use nukes:
Safety of the plants themselves, both during normal operation (radiation releases) and during accidents or terrorist attacks
Net consumption of energy: counting the entire fuel cycle of mining, milling, transporting, processing, transporting again, use, and waste handling, nukes actually consume more energy than they create–so all those other risks don’t even have a benefit
Skewed laws such as the Price-Anderson Act, which insulates the nuclear industry from all but a tiny fraction of the potential liability, and massively subsidizes the premiums for even that minuscule level of insurance
True energy security involves renewable, nonpolluting, decentralized technologies such as solar wind, small-scale hydro, and geothermal–coupled with innovative engineering that slashes our energy consumption, of the sort Amory Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute have been proposing for 30 years. Even here in cloudy, cold New England, I have both solar hot water and solar electric (photovoltaic) systems on the room of my house, which was built in 1743. If we can do it here…
So when I got a mailing from the respected environmental group Friends of the Earth saying that the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill is fatally flawed because it opens the door to new nukes, I wanted to share that message with you.
Tell your Congressional representatives.
