Wednesday, November 3, 2004

Right back where we started from

Aside from all the obvious issues where this election has just regressed us to in terms of decades of lost hard battles for social justice and environmental awareness in this country, there is another point where we now find ourselves locked in a mind-boggling time warp (and many yet, no doubt, that they have been saving until after the election): nuclear energy as a viable resource.

As part of the Bush administration's effort to boost the nuclear power industry, physics students at Langley High School will become the first in the country to use a new curriculum from the U.S. Department of Energy that promotes nuclear energy.

With memories of the 1979 near-disaster at Three Mile Island fading, federal energy officials said last week they hope the new curriculum will encourage more students to pursue careers in nuclear engineering -- a field energy officials expect to grow.

...federal energy officials are touting nuclear energy as "green" power and the nation's largest source of pollution-free electricity. Unlike fossil fuels such as oil and coal, nuclear energy does not emit sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide or carbon dioxide; sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide create acid rain, while carbon dioxide contributes to global warming.

Critics, however, point out that nuclear power is not truly "clean" because the production process creates radioactive waste that remains potentially dangerous for thousands of years. Currently, a backlog of about 80,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste is being stored at nuclear reactor sites throughout the country.

Despite such concerns, the general public's worries about nuclear energy have begun to lift, Magwood said.

"I think people recognize that since [Three Mile Island], a lot of changes have been made, and we haven't had any significant problems with nuclear power," he said. "We know how to operate plants safely."
  Post-Gazette article

Jesus. We knew how to operate plants safely when Three Mile Island went hellbound. What we didn't know, and what we still don't know, is what the fuck to do with megatons of high-level radioactive nuclear waste.

I swear, the sooner human beings blow themselves to smithereens, the better off the universe will be.

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