Nuclear
Nuclear materials are extremely hazardous to biological life and can cause cancer, death, loss of hair, and many horrible diseases. Nuclear fission uses nuclear materials and creates nuclear waste that must be contained and enclosed and separated and guarded for up to 240,000 years from mixing with biological life, water sources, air, and soil. 240,000 years is how long it takes for the harzardous nuclear materials to finally break down. There are new technologies that claim to change the amount of time this material is hazardous from 240,000 years to 100 years but these new technologies are not yet fully mature, proven, cost effective, to scale, and ready for production. Therefore, nuclear energy should no longer be produced and instead we really should use less dangerous energy generation methods such as wind power, geothermal, and hydro, in other words, clean, renewable energy. There is a rumor of top secret military or alien technology that can transmute radioactive waste to inert harmless material, but this is so far just a rumor. If a government has such a technology, they owe it to the people to let us know about this instead of wasting tons of peoples' time and lives fighting against nuclear power.
Nuclear accidents and meltdowns can accidentally release nuclear materials into our air, soil, and water and frequently do occur, such as at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukishima. A forest fire at the irradiated remains of Chernobyl could spread this material worldwide. Fukishima still leaks nuclear waste into the Pacific ocean. The effects of this are still occurring and hard to predict, but are severely down-played by most mainstream media sources, but I feel that cannot be trusted, because of organizations like the Nuclear Regulatory Council (NRC) that is known to regularly cover up real data of biological harm. There was a movie in the 1980's about a woman who worked at a nuclear power plant and discovered that they kept two books of health records, a real book documenting workers who regularly came down with cancer and health problems and another book that they showed to inspectors. This woman was then later attacked and eventually it is believed she was murdered to cover up this story.
All of this accumulated nuclear waste needs to be stored and guarded for a very long time. There was a recent story about underground containment of nuclear waste underneath St. Louis that almost caught fire due to a nearby fire and nearly irradiated the entire city of St. Louis. Unforeseen accidents like earthquakes and fires makes it very difficult to predict whether all of this nuclear waste will be able to be kept safe, and accidents at nuclear power plants occur on a regular basis making this whole business an extremely dangerous and reckless enterprise.
Nuclear energy is more expensive than renewable sources like solar and wind so it is definitely not a good alternative. In Illinois, for example, every year Com Ed blackmails the State into subsidizing the aging, non-profitable nuclear power plants by saying if they are not given the money that they will shut down and our cities will be without electricity. What would be better would be to simply not subsidize these nuclear plants and spend the money instead on building renewable energy infrastructure.
Nuclear energy should not be a part of the solution to global warming. Improvements in storage and battery technology are being made every day, such as 10GW of electricity storage capacity world-wide anticipated in 2021. 10GW is 12% of the amount produced by all nuclear power plants in the United States, which according to Wikipedia, is 98GW. So we definitely still need to focus a lot more research there. What is needed is a “managed and just transition” (just means that those areas that have been hurt the most by the damages of nuclear technologies should benefit first from funding for jobs and training) away from nuclear in a way that makes sense. But in order to make the timeline needed demanded by mitigation of global warming, that the UN said has its target date around 2029, less than 10 years from now, we definitely need to escalate the so-called “Climate Emergency” (which should more accurately be named an environmental and sustainability emergency), to the level of a Real Emergency which will require a World War II Style Mobilization and real attention in the public media and all authentic leaders (during World War II, GM transitioned their whole production line from 100% cars and 0% tanks to 0% cars and 100% tanks in 3 years; this type of rapid transformation or mobilization is what is meant when environmentalists talk about a “World War II Style Mobilization” a similar national effort could be made to transition to 100% renewable energy with all sectors cooperating in a global emergency situation).
Part of mitigating the dirty energy climate emergency problem will also be to get the entire global public community aware of the true urgency of the problem and then to really force and tighten people's expectations and commitments to using far less electricity, more efficiently, and even perhaps implementing punishment for really excessive and wasteful uses. This will require a real “Tell the Truth” effort launched by governmental authorities, which is what was attempted (but failed so far) in the Chicagoland area in 2020 with the “Direct Mailer” idea. Unlimited 24/7 uninterrupted electricity is a luxury of the Western world that is not typical of other areas of the world such as India. The Western world needs to realize that such luxuries as 24/7 electricity and airplanes are unsustainable and that is part of the solution to global warming is that we need to cut back on usage of excessive energy use. But Westerners will never adopt more energy conservative practices until these ideas begin to permeate and penetrate into mass culture, into regular television programming, and all aspects of cultural and social life, which starts with a real coming to terms and “outting” of The Truth, which includes the sound warning from the UN and from the representative of future generations Greta Thunberg in her speech “Cathederal Thinking” being echoed, acknowledged, and acted upon unquestionably from governmental authorities.
For more information, and to connect to an organization actively working on this issue, please check out the Nuclear Energy Information Service.
This page last updated on 3/8/2021