Note: For previous emails in this series, see links given at the base.
To: kenneth mount <kmount93021@yahoo.com>
From: "Russell D. Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
Subject: I've got friends in low places (date corrected+one new line+additional
documentation)
Cc: abuse@yahoo.com
January 11th, 2004 (date corrected+one new line+additional documentation)
Mr. Mount:
When you hit "reply" this time, you owe me an apology. You have
called me disgraceful, ugly things, and now you claim it was all in jest.
Then I've got news for you: You have still libeled me, and that's still a crime
in America.
You called me unAmerican because I've got friends in low-lying countries (Holland).
My father fought in the Army, where he lost half his friends, slogging through
Europe to defeat the Nazis, who used storm-trooper tactics just like you do
to intimidate their political opponents.
What have you gained from your viciousness? Are you proud? I've
seen your sickly-sweet letters to Jack Shannon, how you admire Martin Luther
King (#3 on your list, behind RayGun and Bush II).
I've seen how nice you are to him, because, as you explain, he has military
experience. Does that give you a right to be rude to others? My
father fought for 150 straight days in combat during WWII, and he's been reading
everything that's been written between you and I.
What do you have to say to him?
What do you have to say to him, who took photos of Jews who had been burned
in barns while the Nazis were retreating under my father's barrage, and 100s
of thousands of other soldiers's attacks, which withered the Most Evil Empire
of All, and liberated Europe.
We've talked about you.
What do you have to say to him today, Mr. Mount? Explain to him why Russell
gets no respect from you. What at my web site bothers you. Tell
him exactly how many pages of it you've read.
Those pictures he took of those dead Jews, who died clawing their way out of
the burning building, half in, half out, shaved head showing with a look of
frightened pain (some with a look of horrid resignation), now hang in a museum
in Israel.
He's never seen anything like you and your pro-nuclear buddies who attack me
every couple of weeks, year-in and year-out. Did you threaten me?
That's for a court to decide. I say you did.
I say you painted "JEW" on my windows, and on my walls, and in my
emails, and at my web site. The "Jew" this time is just anyone
who is anti-nuclear.
I am not an unreasonable person. I have been patient with you. But
I will find out who you are, and what makes you so angry at me. I'll get
you to apologize, or get a restraining order against you demanding that you
never contact me, or my wife, or any member of my immediate family (such as
my father) as long as you live. You are a danger to society. You
are a danger to free speech. It's people like you (and I've met hundreds
like you, because of the MILLIONS who visit my web site each year) who make
honest discourse about nuclear power impossible.
If you're willing to talk to me the way you do, and accuse me of being irrational
in any of this (which I have not been), then what do you do to people you have
absolutely no fear of? What else do you pass around the Internet in your
rage? How many different pseudonyms have you used in the past for your
passion of being vulgar and disgusting to other citizens? Or to me?
I have a right to know a lot more about you than I know right now, because your
language is rude and I find it threatening. And threats are in the eye
of the beholder. I feel threatened by you, just as the Jews who had "JEW!"
painted one night on their storefront windows no doubt felt threatened, in Germany
in 1932. You have scrawled "FREAK" and a hundred other vicious
lies throughout mine and other's inboxes. You are not rational.
You have not been rational to me from the very first letter. Yes, you
are threatening me with every letter you write that does not tell me why I should
NOT feel threatened by you, because I do, and I feel violated and libeled, too.
What are you going to do about it?
Sincerely,
Russell Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
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"Wasted" Death: Spent Fuel: What can be done about it?
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At 01:13 AM 1/10/2004 , "mitzi" wrote:
Russell, I tried to open the site below that lists US nukes, but it didn't
work. Could you send it in print to me?
Another question; because nuclear power plants are running out of fuel pool
space, they are storing spent fuel in dry casks like sitting ducks. Some
groups are pressing them to use hardened storage methods. Some are saying
that is a mistaken strategy because it encourages the continuation of
nuclear power and continued production of waste. Some proponents of the
first strategy at Indian Point and some around Millstone in Ct. are more
concerned about terrorist attacks on fuel pools and want them emptied. The
second position is that continued operation will continue to fill the pools
with fresh and more radioactive used fuel rods and that hardened storage
will take years to build. At a recent hearing, questions were asked about
Yucca Mt. in relation to this debate. What is your opinion?
Mitzi
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Mitzi,
Thanks for your email (shown above). Unfortunately, the list of nuclear
power plants does not print very well. It's a large file -- about 3/4ths
of a megabyte, so it can take a long time to download. Please try again,
but be patient, and it might work! I can send you the file by CD or email,
if you like.
As to your questions about the politics of waste management these days, I think
you could say that this is why things like this are called a "quandary".
In my opinion, Dry Casks are far more dangerous than even storing used radioactive
fuel in Spent Fuel Pools. For one reason, because the water in the pools
provides some level of protection against fire or a radioactive release due
to a terrorist attack. In addition, the argument against casks suggested
in your email is valid. Dry Casks DO become an excuse to continue operating
plants and creating more spent fuel, which has to go in the Spent Fuel Pools
first, for about five years at a minimum.
Dry Cask storage is way too dangerous to use, not only because of the terrorist
threat, but also, ANY airliner falling out of the sky could cause a Dry Cask
to breach with extremely deadly consequences. The fact is, while the fuel
is in the Spent Fuel Pools, it is probably the safest overall. NOT "safe",
by any means, but "safer". Safer than in an operating reactor,
and safer than in Dry Casks. That's all.
Let's say something DOES manage to catch a spent fuel storage cask on fire.
A 747 crashing into it would be enough, (a Cessna might be enough -- and I mean
a 172, not a Citation!). For that matter, a spear dropped from a hot air
balloon onto the Dry Cask storage system could be enough to cause a breach and
a deadly fire.
If there is ever a Dry Cask fuel fire, they'll want to put it deep underwater,
but it won't be possible because no one will be able to get near it, and the
Dry Casks aren't even below ground level! It will be horrible. In
a Spent Fuel Pool, however, the fuel is already about 40 feet beneath the surface
of the water. It can be monitored constantly, and if the cladding starts
to fail for any reason, something can be done. And the cladding DOES fail!
There are bits of fuel assemblies in dozens of Spent Fuel Pools around the country,
which sit on the bottom of the pool. In a Dry Cask storage system, those
same bits can gather over time, and eventually they can self-ignite at the bottom
of the cask, and no one will have even noticed there was a problem.
There are no "hardened storage systems" for nuclear waste. Only
deep inside a mountain could possibly qualify, and Yucca Mountain doesn't exist
and won't for a long time, and Yucca Mountain is a sorry excuse for a High Level
Radioactive Waste storage system, anyway.
Yucca Mountain is a bad idea, and the vehemence against it in Nevada is substantial.
Las Vegas's mayor, Oscar Goodman, a former prosecuting attorney, has sworn to
jail anyone trying to ship nuclear waste through his city (indeed, they are
talking about building a multi-billion dollar new rail line basically just to
go around Las Vegas, but it's probably just talk while he is mayor and there
is a brouhaha). Anyway, it's perhaps 20 years away at least, before the
first hot fuel rod is placed at Yucca Mountain. It certainly doesn't solve
our terrorist problems at nuclear power plants today. It doesn't solve
them in the future either, because no matter how much waste is carted away,
more is immediately produced. One day's waste from one nuclear power plant
is about 250 pounds of High Level Radioactive Waste -- enough to render an entire
state unlivable!
What DOES go a long way to solving these problems is closing the nuclear power
plants down completely. A closed nuclear power plant is a much more difficult
target to damage than an operating one, from a terrorist's point of view.
The longer it has been closed, the more difficult a target it is. If hang-gliding,
suicidal terrorists manage to breach the perimeter and take over the control
room of a nuclear reactor, they can then demand things of us, and it will be
impossible to stop a meltdown if they choose to cause one. The terrorists
would need ONLY A SPLIT SECOND to initiate an accident far worse than Chernobyl,
and they would have many ways they could do that.
Any madman in the control room -- and I've met quite a few operators and former
operators of those control rooms, who are quite insane -- can destroy the nuke
plant in a matter of moments if they want to. So the terrorists would
really have us in a very difficult negotiating position if they succeed in taking
over the control room of a nuclear reactor.
They would also have access to lots of monitors throughout the plant, to see
if a counter-strike force is approaching. With a group of, say, 19 terrorists,
they could attack, say, 3 or 4 of our reactors at the exact same minute, and
hold 50% or more of the country in direct threat of immediate catastrophe.
But that's only one reason that closing the nuke plants is the best solution.
That nuclear power doesn't actually produce anything, anyway is another reason
-- there is no net profit for anyone but a few (very rich) owners. The
rest of us all pay. In reality, nuclear energy is bankrupting the country.
Renewable energy would be cheaper -- vastly cheaper -- if we all banded together
and insisted that everyone switch together. Even without that, a concerted
government effort to encourage renewable energy would probably work. When
is THAT going to happen?
Not during the BUSH administration, that's for sure! And it didn't happen
on Clinton's watch, either, and even Kucinich has a few nukes in his state (one
of which is the notorious Davis-Besse), so I wouldn't expect a Democratic president
to change things, either. They might at least hold OPEN energy conferences
instead of the secret ones Cheney held, which were clearly dominated -- NOT
by the fossil fuel companies the press always hints at, but by the nuclear power
companies -- which the press never talks about.
In the government's Yucca Mountain studies, if you look really hard at the documentation,
you can find estimates of "health effects" for things like transportation
accidents. But it turns out that these estimates, though alarming in and
of themselves, are actually based on tiny fractions of the full payload of a
spent fuel transportation cask being damaged, let alone completely incinerated
to particulate matter. Something on the order of .07% of the full load,
and other ridiculous numbers. Unrealistic.
They perform their statistical slight-of-hand in steps. First, of course,
they use already-biased estimates of the dangers of the low-level radiation
for all calculations of the damage from whatever actually is released in their
"theoretical accident scenarios". Second, they somehow conclude
that all equipment will work as designed -- that nothing, for example, is poorly
assembled or is made of cheaper metals which, when exposed to overpressures
from accidents, fires, etc., will fail to hold their contents as designed.
This has been proven unrealistic time and again, but they still do it.
Third, after making all these false calculations, they aggregate thousands of
theoretical accident scenarios mathematically, and so, instead of presenting
a fair estimate of the real dangers when a plane hits a dry cask, they present
the average of perhaps ONE accident scenario where there is a large release
and 1000 or even 10,000 accident scenarios where there is NO release!
And that aggregated value is the ONLY figure they will ever present to the public.
The numbers that are fed into the computer, the so-called "raw data"
are never released. The number of different possibilities that are summed
together is undoubtedly determined "after-the-fact" -- after running
the calculation many times. That is, they will keep adding more and more
minor accidents until the average figure they obtain goes down as low as they
dare make it without the public looking at it and saying "This is not math!
This is lying with statistics!".
Apparently we Americans have a very high tolerance for mathematical shenanigans.
And they know this. They know their complex mathematical analysis are
difficult to follow under the best of circumstances, and since they won't present
the actual input data they use for others to analyze, there's little we can
do about it.
Aside from transport accidents, it's incorrect to think of Yucca Mountain as
a "solution" to the waste problem, anyway. We just plan to bury
the waste there, all together, in a non-retrievable format. So if ANYTHING
does go wrong -- water leaks in, for instance, where we didn't expect it --
there could be a tragic problem which we could do absolutely nothing about.
Furthermore, the figure "10,000 years" is bandied about by numerous
reporters, misled by careful government wording in the Yucca Mountain document
and in their press conferences and in interviews with journalists. It's
utterly bogus -- 250,000 years is more realistic, an absolutely incomprehensible
length of time. 10,000 years is only as far out as their bogus studies project
out to.
Sincerely,
Russell Hoffman
Concerned Citizen
Carlsbad, CA
NO NUKES IN SPACE: (FLASH animation):
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/mx/nasa/columbia/index.swf
or try:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/mx/nasa/columbia/index.html
STOP CASSINI web site:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/index.htm
Internet Glossary of Nuclear Terminology / "The Demon Hot Atom":
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/hotwords/index.htm
List of every nuclear power plant in America, with history, activist orgs,
specs, etc.:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/nukelist.htm
List of ~300 books and videos about nuclear issues in my collection
(donations welcome!):
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/mybooks.htm
Learn about The Effects of Nuclear War here:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/tenw/nuke_war.htm
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Links to additional documents to/from Kenneth Mount:
1st letter:
http://animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cass2004/Kenneth_Mount_20040107.htm
"HE CALLS ME UNAMERICAN" (aka: How the Nuclear Mafia works):
http://animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cass2004/Kenneth_Mount_calls_me_UnAmerican.htm
This letter is posted online here:
http://animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cass2004/Kenneth_Mount_20040111.htm
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