Saturday, 16 May 2009

Nuclear Reactor realities...


...From 1968 to 1973, I was an engineering officer aboard U. S. nuclear submarines. The chief engineer would routinely sneak back into the engineering spaces and trip some piece of equipment off the line. These were not computer simulations. The equipment really would be in an emergency condition. We would be sitting in the reactor control room, and suddenly alarms would go off. We would have to figure out what had happened, and recover from it. The equipment is designed to survive such accidents. After many decades of operation under those conditions, the Navy has had zero deaths from nuclear power. You are more likely to drown in your bathtub than to die from operating a nuclear reactor.
A coal-fired electric power generating plant uses 120 railroad cars full of coal every day. A nuclear plant uses one semi truckload of nuclear fuel rods every few years. All the spent fuel from every nuclear reactor in the United States could be stored on one football field, a pile nine feet tall. Recycle it as the French do, and the pile shrinks to three inches. In 500 years it will be less toxic than coal ash...more here...
...While here in "Nuclear Free New Zealand" we remain an international laughing stock, courtesy of the green/left scare machine...

2 comments:

MathewK said...

The greens know that nuclear will further human progress, and nothing irritates the hard left like humanity progressing.

Ayrdale said...

Future generations will laugh, either at our naivete or stupidity, or both, at our anti-nuclear phobia. In the end, it will condemn the greenies to the rubbish tin...