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John McCain on Nuclear Energy and Yucca Mountain

Senator John McCain is on the campaign trail in New Hampshire talking about energy and the environment:
A key way to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions, he said, would be to increase the use of nuclear power.

When asked after the forum how he proposed to dispose of high level nuclear waste, McCain said, "My preference is that we store it. I always thought that Yucca Mountain was the right place to do it."

"It's not a problem of technology. It's a problem of political will. We have now the worst of all worlds, because we have nuclear waste sites around every nuclear power plant in America, which provides us with the greatest challenge to our security," he said. "So I would try and resolve it and I would try to go back and revisit the Yucca Mountain issue, but I would do everything in my power to resolve it."
The Senator has been pretty consistent on this issue for some time now:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Dear Sir,
From the first atom bomb in New Mexico 1945, everyone has
man-made isotopes in their DNA. All of us eat, drink and
breath it every day. As long as it pays the bills, you can murder
the whole world. Depleted uranium and nuclear power was the
most lethal mistake mankind made.All we can do now is
stop it from getting worse!

The aim of nuclear power is spent fuel rods (nuclear waste) from
which weapons are made. Atom bombs, easier are dirty bombs,
so-called depleted uranium ordinance, not electricity, That is why
30 sovereign countries have nuclear power.

Dr. John Gofman says there is no safe dose of man-made ionizing
radiation. We should not add to it with new nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power is the most dangerous form of electricity. It is the
heat which makes steam that powers electric generators. Albert
Einstein once said, "Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil
water".

Liability is paid by the tax payer under the Price/Anderson Act.
Electric rate payers subsidize nuclear power and waste disposal.
There is big money and political power in nuclear waste, in killing
people, in a toxic regime. Nuclear power pollutes the environment
and will not stop global warming according to studies.

http://members.cox.net/theroyprocess
http://nuclearwaste-theroyprocess.blogspot.com/

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0308/S00219.htm

The Roy Process is photon transmutation to zero radioactivity.
This includes uranium 238, most of DU before it is exploded
and can create electricity from the heat produced.

In 1979, Roy announced his transmutation process and received international attention. The Roy process does not require storage of radioactive materials. No new equipment is required. In fact, all of the equipment and the chemical separation processes needed are well known.

What`s the basis for the Roy Process? If you examine radioactive elements such as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium 239, you will see that they all have too many neutrons. To put it very simply, the Roy process transmutes these unstable isotopes to stable ones by knocking out the extra neutrons. When a neutron is removed, the resulting isotope has a considerably shorter half-life which then decays to a stable form in a reasonable amount of time.

How do we knock out neutrons? By bombarding them with photons (produced as x-rays) in a high- powered electron linear accelerator. Before this process, the isotopes must be separated by a well-known chemical process.

It is feasible that portable units could be built and transported to hazardous sites for on-site transmutation of nuclear wastes and radioactive wastes.

To give an example, cesium 137 with a half-life of 30.17 years is transformed into cesium 136 with a half-life of 13 days. Plutonium 239 with a half-life of 24,300 years is transformed into plutonium 237 with a half-life of 45.6 days. Subsequent radioactive elements which will be produced from the decay of plutonium 237 can be treated in the same way as above until the stable element is formed.
---------------------------------------------------
Radiation & Public Health
http://www.radiation.org/index.html

RADIATION BIOLOGICAL EFFECT--DR. BERTELL

http://www.ratical.com/radiation/NRBE/NRadBioEffects.html
------------------------------------
"More worrisome is Dr. Abram Petkau’s observation that it takes only 700 millirads of protracted radiation (from external or internal sources) to lyse (break) the cell membrane. By protracted, I mean over a period of time, instead of all at once. In the absence of antioxidant enzyme protection, such as superoxide dismutase and catalase, a mere 10-20 millirads were required to destroy the cell membrane. P.S., we’re all deficient in antioxidant enzymes because there’s much more radiation-induced free radical damage than nature intended, thanks to the nuclear industry. "
--------------------------------------
United States: 215 atmospheric tests + 815 underground tests = 1,030
USSR: 219 atmospheric tests + 496 underground tests = 715
UK: 21 atmospheric tests + 24 underground tests = 45
France: 50 atmospheric tests + 160 underground tests = 210
China: 23 atmospheric tests + 22 underground tests = 45

The grand total of global atmospheric tests = 528

Source: Page 52, "Atomic Audit, the Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear
Weapons Since 1940," Stephen Schwartz, Editor, Brookings Institution Press,
Washington D.C., 1998.
------------------------------------
100+ Free Videos


Here is a one stop, no search page that is organized by subject of all the best
nuclear videos online! (currently over 100)

http://www.energy-net.org/VIDS/VIDEOS.HTM

Carl Sagan - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruvq7uUeOp8

Please be aware that the page is 188K, so if you have a slower dialup connection it will take abit of time to load..

Cell phones are NOT safe!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gb_KUwM-C4
________________

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_7365890
The Salt Lake Tribune
"Exposed" Review


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Atomic testing 'Exposed' lays bare atomic pain, grief The play, ending tonight, gathers downwinders' stories of death, disease By Brandon Griggs
Anonymous said…
The aim of nuclear power is spent fuel rods (nuclear waste) from
which weapons are made. Atom bombs, easier are dirty bombs,
so-called depleted uranium ordinance, not electricity, That is why
40 sovereign countries have nuclear power.

Dr. John Gofman says there is no safe dose of man-made ionizing
radiation. We should not add to it with new nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power is the most dangerous form of electricity. It is the
heat which makes steam that powers electric generators. Albert
Einstein once said, "Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil
water".

Liability is paid by the tax payer under the Price/Anderson Act.
Electric rate payers subsidize nuclear power and waste disposal.
There is big money and political power in nuclear waste, in killing
people, in a toxic regime. Nuclear power pollutes the environment
and will not stop global warming according to studies.

http://members.cox.net/theroyprocess
http://nuclearwaste-theroyprocess.blogspot.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------
"Radiation is like God -- you can't hide from it, and if you don't respect it,
you'll be called to pay for your sins." -- former Nuclear Fuel Services
employee quoted in "A big job for a little town", The Progressive, April 1981.
Anonymous said…
If anything, both of the previous comments display their ignorance of the technology of nuclear energy as well as basic understanding of radiation as it affects humans.

You will get most of your radiation dose in any given year from Radon. Radon comes from the ground, it's not man-made.

You will ingest more radioactive Potassium from bananas (also naturally radioactive) in a year than you would in a lifetime of any man-made radionuclide from weapons.

"Dr. John Gofman says there is no safe dose of man-made ionizing
radiation. We should not add to it with new nuclear power plants."

Well, I suppose we can stop getting X-rays, CAT scans, stress tests, and cancer treatment. In addition, you will get just as much radiation dose living next to a COAL fired power plant that you would next to a nuclear one. Remember that Radon comes from the ground? Guess what happens when you dig up the ground (coal) and burn it? You get radioactive elements coming out of the smokestacks of coal power plants. Please, think before you type.

"mere 10-20 millirads were required to destroy the cell membrane"

How misleading are you attempting to be? Or are you just that uninformed? That's a LOCAL dose to a cell. That's an abnormal amount of energy to impart to a cell, even with radiation. A whole-body dose distributes radiation energy; most cells don't get touched, and those that do see an infintesimal amount of "10-20 mrads", and are unharmed. Our bodies are used to having radiation doses. Natural radioactivity has been on the earth as long as humans have.
Anonymous said…
Nuclear power is perhaps the best energy source in the world. Nuclear fuel is extremely energy dense. A person can get a years worth of electricity from only grams of uranium versus metric tons of coal. The waste can then be recycled in a process that is used in several countries. This recycling process yields much usuable fuel, spent fuel is in fact about 98% still usuable, and the remaining two percent decays away relatively quickly about 300 years, which is signigicantly less than most of your garbage. Not only that, many of the isotopes found in "waste" have very practical medical and industrial uses.

Additionally, nuclear has an incredible safety record. No country has ever used civilian power programs to build a bomb. No one has died from the civilian nuclear energy program in america. No one!

Furthermore, if we had used the subsidies that have been placed into solar, wind, biofuels etc (all of which combined account for less than 1% of our energy consumption) we could have built multiple nuclear reactors instead of coal plants and effectively removed TONS of CO2 from the air.

All said nuclear should be an environmentalists dream come true, somehow they have turned it into a nightmare.
Unknown said…
Dear all,

To say the aim of nuclear power is "spent fuel rods from which weapons are made" demonstrates your finite stupidity on the issue. You are all capable of understanding nuclear power...

Please go study your nuclear physics further, to understand that you cannot generate bombs from a nuclear station designed to generate electricity in an economical way. It is because of people like you that our country is in the midst of an energy crisis.

Ignorance is your enemy, not nuclear power. Pick up a calculus or physics text book, then pick up a quantum physics text book before you start talking about nuclear power. Generate your own opinions on the matter before resorting to misinterpreting the quotations of others with the--meaningless title--of "doctor".

Don’t be your own worst enemy, science is issue here, not how great your passion is about using nuclear or abolishing it's use.

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