Dang, it’s happened again. I recently heard an otherwise intelligent, knowledgeable person say something I see as totally ignorant. Maybe he really doesn’t know. Maybe he just doesn’t realize the full parameters of what he said.
“Okay, Montgomery,” I can almost hear some of you sighing out there as you ask the question you know you’ll likely wish you hadn’t. “What did this poor fellow say that got your tree hugging underwear in a wad?”
To which I would reply: “Gee, I didn’t know underwear could hug trees.” At which point you would glare and I’d get back on track.
What the fellow said was: “Nuclear reactors give off no pollution.” Oh, I wanted to jump on that immediately but was in a public meeting (Not to mention the glare I got from the guy in charge of that meeting).
Now I’m guessing that there are those of you out there who just might agree with this guy. Even I must admit that if you look at it from just the right direction you could say he was absolutely right. A nuclear power plant does NOT give off carbon dioxide, smoke or anything else. All you see coming out is just white billowy steam from the cooling towers.
I heartily disagree that nuclear power plants are non-polluting (pardon my snicker). The first part of the pollution they, and all other fossil fuel powered plants cause is the process of getting that particular fuel, be it coal, oil, gas or uranium. Yes. Uranium is a fossil fuel. It is one of the oldest fossil fuels in fact being left over from the formation of the planet. Yes, there is a good deal of Uranium here in the states. It just happens to reside in formations about half way up some mountains in the North West US that are sacred to the Native Peoples of that area. The most economic way to get at it is to just rip off the tops of the mountains. So what, you may have just shrugged and thought. Let’s put it this way. How would YOU react if, being a Christian, you were told they’d discovered that the material used to build the corner towers on several of those big churches in New York had gold in them and the government was going to let a company rip the tops of those towers off to get at it. Oh, they’d put a roof over what was left and make it all pretty again, sort of, so that should be alright, right? Yeah, I know. You can’t even imagine such a sacrilege. Other than that, out west there would be the complex and really unfixable environmental damage not just from the mining of the uranium but from the refining of it into fuel rods for the power plants.
As I said above there is no nasty Carbon dioxide produced by a nuclear plant but there is a waste product. Waste even by my broad standards (Waste = a product that hasn’t got a use). That waste is the used up fuel rods. Nope they have no real use once used except to be wrangled over about where they will be stored until they stop being radioactive and how to keep them out of the hands of terrorists, etc.
Speaking of radioactivity; what do we do with the old, no longer safe to use, outdated nuclear power plants anyway? There’s all that big area, that huge building that really can’t be used for anything else because, duh, it’s radioactive in a lot of spots.
That’s the pollution we face from nuclear power plants that don’t have any problems. These plants can have problems because they were built poorly. Trouble can come from poorly trained or inept operators. Problems can also come, as we know, from the plant being situated near earthquake zones, placed where it could be hit by tsunami or threatened by wild fire. Add all of that in and we have a whole lot more to worry about.
Nuclear power plants are non-polluting my, ah-hem, tree hugging underpants.
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