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To: fight_truth_decay
Note: Green Peace has been monitoring the radiation to insure TEPCO is being truthful, and have found they are being accurate.

Yep, Green Peace are hoping to be able to claim at least one death or injury from the nuclear attribute of commercial nuclear power. Chernobyl was/is anything but a commercial plant, having no containment whatsoever. Still, for those for whom quantitative facts mean something, more people died each year after the Chernobyl meltdown from respiratory illness related to the coal replacement, about 200 in each of the ensuing twenty years, than died as a result of the meltdown. The reported numbers are all over the map.

At Chernobyl, two died almost immediately from radiation sickness. Between 16 and 60 died later, from radiation, fire, or other trauma. A suspicious claim is that 1500 or 1600 contracted radiation related leukemia, but 98% of those recovered. It sounds like 1600 people collected disability funds while they coincidentally had no jobs because of the loss of power and the evacuation near the plant, since, sadly, 98% of leukemia victims don't recover.

If facts have any meaning, there has never been a safer electricity generation technology than nuclear power. Countries with a free press have a problem because terror sells, and reporters are lazy. They get their stories fed to them by NRDC, Green Peace, etc. You can tell people that 2300 people fell off their roofs and 700 died working on domestic solar electric installations and that is not news. But the big quiet dome with steam rising seems a much greater threat. Nuclear is threatening to those who think engineers are stupid. Most of those people have never been engineers. Many of them make a living selling fear, like the Sierra Club, Green Peace, Natural Resources Defense Council, ... People pay them money to protect them from the threats the environmental groups have defined. (Never forget the 30 to 40 million African children who died of malaria because our idiot environmental class believed Rachel Carson's completely fabricated diatribe against DDT).

China is building 224 plants over the next 15 years, India about 40, .... These countries will have no use for our environmental lawyers. We will not have the low-cost energy to allow us to compete as a manufacturer (we are still the largest manufacturer, though China will shortly surpass us). China knows it needs to solve its air quality problems and reduce its dependence upon Middle East Oil. Without a gaggle of lawyers soaking taxpayers with civil actions which delay full power operation for decades, China's reactors produce electricity at about the same cost as coal - and China has its own coal.

19 posted on 04/03/2011 7:54:29 PM PDT by Spaulding
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To: Spaulding; RummyChick
An interview with a business owner from Japan said when the nuclear plants were proposed, the business community was promised by the government they would be saving money in energy costs..What they found was nuclear energy has not saved the user money.

So if it's not saving the user money, why bother--oil and gas exploration, in shale ready environment, shallow mines which make up most of the coal mines are old energy but trusted and true energy. Oil/gas is available even in upstate NY, the poorest part of the state where unemployment has consistently been high. Oil still seems the safest way to go and most "cost effective" --if there is such a thing, when regulations via politics, the green influence and lobbyists etc come into play.

20 posted on 04/04/2011 4:15:14 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
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