The Precautionary Principle states that if you don't know how much damage something might be able to cause, you should assume the worst.
The Hippocratic Oath states (among other things, some dated), "first, do no harm".
The Smart Gambler knows to "never bet more than you can afford to lose".
Nuclear power, as a solution to our energy needs,
violates all these basic tenets.
The Peter Principle states that an employed person will "rise to their level of incompetence" and remain there.
There appear to be no employees at the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
who are competent at their level of authority.
Murphy's Law, while not scientifically proven, appears to be a sadly accurate "rule of thumb" to live by: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, in the worst possible way, at the worst possible time."
The nuclear power industry believes it will never
suffer a catastrophic sequence of "unlikely" events.
If that is true, they would be unique in the
history of human endeavor.
Another saying is simply this: "Nobody's Perfect".
But the nuclear industry assumes it will be.
So, in violation of many of the most basic "truisms" of human living, the Nuclear Mafia continue to create tons and tons of High Level Radioactive Waste (HLRW) every day. Each nuclear power plant produces, on average, about 50 tons of year of HLRW and more than 150 tons of so-called Low Level Radioactive Waste (LLRW), which is just HLRW with filler added (metal, plastic, cloth, water, etc.). "Filler" which might once have been recyclable material, but now it's not.
The 103 operating nuclear power plants thus produce about 10,000,000 pounds of HLRW per year, and at least 30,000,000 pounds, and a huge physical volume, of LLRW per year. This is a lot of crap. And it doesn't even include the waste created from the rest of the "nuclear fuel cycle".
There are NO safe disposal methods for this waste. Yucca Mountain? Unlikely to ever become a reality on both scientific and political grounds. Transmutation? Only partially effective and incredibly expensive. Vitrification? Doesn't work! Reprocessing? Expensive, dangerous, can create bomb materials along the way, requires transporting the waste all over the country.
What's left? Shoot it into space? Way too dangerous; the Yucca Mountain team considered the idea but it was rejected resoundingly. (NASA does it anyway, calling their nuclear waste missions "deep space probes".)
There's nothing left to do but to stop creating more nuclear waste. There are clean energy solutions! There is no need to burden ourselves and our progeny with ever-increasing mountains of HLRW and LLRW. Wind, wave, tide, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass and other renewable energy solutions are available TODAY and are cost-competitive in the short run and extremely cost-competitive in the long run.
DON'T BUY THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY HYPE!
SHUT 'EM DOWN NOW!!!
rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com