Based on the statement: "Canada’s nuclear power industry —uneconomic from the start —has already cost Canadian taxpayers and electricity customers tens of billions in needless costs. It makes no sense to compound the economic harm that this industry has wrought"
On 2011-09-11 6:22 PM, "Jerry Cuttler" <
jerrycuttler@rogers.com> wrote:
> Lawrence really gets it! I must invite him to join EFN-Canada. It seems
> that Energy Probe has really changed in 20 years! I seem to have more in
> common with him than I do with the ...
>
>
>
> Anti-nuke environmentalists are opposed to nuclear energy stations. They
> have been clamouring for decades about the "unsolvable problem" of what to
> do with the "nuclear waste." The nuclear scientists did an enormous amount
> of research to demonstrate that deep geological disposal was technically
> acceptable. However, the Seaborn Panel concluded after ten years of study
> that while the concept was technically safe, social acceptance had not been
> demonstrated.
>
>
>
> Is there a technical solution to a social/political problem? As we see in
> the article below, if we change our assumption about the health effect of
> low level radiation, the unsolvable problem just goes away. The problem has
> been our stubborn refusal to trash the scientifically unsupportable,
> politically-motivated LNT assumption of radiation carcinogenesis. The
> economics of nuclear energy would be much improved if we based our nuclear
> safety models on good radiobiology.
>
>
>
> Jerry
>
>
>
>
>
> "... my reasoning has changed. Twenty years ago, I thought the wastes too
> risky to bury. Today, I think them too safe."
>
>
>
>
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/09/09/lawrence-solomon-just-a-nuclear-> waste/
>
>
>
> Lawrence Solomon: Just a (nuclear) waste
>
> <
http://opinion.financialpost.com/author/lawrencesolomon/> Lawrence Solomon
> Sep 9, 2011 - 10:33 PM ET | Last Updated: Sep 9, 2011 10:48 PM ET
>
>
>
>
http://financialpostopinion.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/bruce.jpg?w=201&h=30
> 0
>
> The pool at Bruce nuclear station in Ontario where thousands of bundles of
> used fuel are stored under water.
>
>
>
> Why spend billions to store used fuel that won't kill anyone?
>
>
>
> Canada's nuclear industry is again plying the back routes of Ontario's
> northlands, looking for a willing host in places like Hornepayne (population
> 1,209) and Ear Falls (population 1,153) for a multi-billion-dollar long-term
> storage facility for the country's nuclear wastes.
>
>
>
> Twenty years ago, the last time the industry made a concerted push to
> convince northern communities to accept radioactive waste, the organization
> I work for, Energy Probe, helped community activists deep-six the plans.
> Today, some of those same activists of a generation ago again oppose plans
> to deposit the country's nuclear waste somewhere in the vast Ontario
> wilderness. I am among them, but my reasoning has changed. Twenty years ago,
> I thought the wastes too risky to bury. Today, I think them too safe.
>
> The wastes are bundles of spent nuclear fuel - more than two million of them
> - that had been powering Canada's nuclear reactors over the last half
> century. To date and until a long-term waste repository is built, the spent
> fuel bundles have been kept at the reactor sites, where they have been
> slowly and safely cooling off in pools of water.
>
> The federal government has long wanted to move the bundles to a massive
> deep-rock facility it would build in the Canadian Shield, to protect
> Canadians from the risk it perceives: "The used fuel will remain a potential
> health risk for many hundreds of thousands of years. For this reason, used
> fuel requires careful management essentially indefinitely," the federal
> government's Nuclear Waste Management Organization explains.
>
> But are those fuel bundles so dangerous that Canadians need a fabulously
> expensive infrastructure project - estimates for the project range between
> $16-billion and $24-billion - to babysit them indefinitely? An increasing
> amount of research into radioactivity has been coming that points to
> benefits - not harms - when humans, as well as other animals and plants, are
> exposed to low levels of radioactivity.
>
> The surprising research comes from top universities and government agencies
> - the University of Nagasaki and the French Academy of Sciences among them -
> and it includes some of the world's top researchers - the University of
> Massachusetts's Edward Calabrese, winner of the Marie Curie Prize, and Johns
> Hopkins University's Mark Mattson, the world's most highly cited
> neuroscientist. Among the studies' findings: Workers at nuclear shipyards in
> the United States live longer and healthier than workers at non-nuclear U.S.
> shipyards and people who live in mountainous regions live longer and
> healthier than those who live at sea level.
>
> Because researchers cannot use humans as guinea pigs in studies of larger
> exposures to radiation than those experienced by the shipyard workers and
> mountain residents, most of the studies of relatively large exposures to
> radiation involved animals, but 10,000 inadvertent human guinea pigs for
> large exposures do exist. These are Taiwanese occupants of 180 apartment
> buildings that had unknowingly been built with recycled steel contaminated
> with radioactive cobalt-60. Because this sizeable population had received
> large doses of radiation over a period of nine to 20 years, the scientists
> who studied them expected to discover a tragedy - the official radiation
> safety models predicted that the occupants should have suffered 302 cancer
> deaths, or 70 more than the 232 cancer deaths that would have befallen a
> like unirradiated population. To their surprise, the occupants suffered but
> seven cancer deaths over the period studied. This irradiated population also
> was spared many birth defects: Just three occurred, rather than the 48
> predicted by the radiation safety models.
>
> What exactly is the scientific basis of the predictions of harm that come
> from existing safety models? Amazingly, there is none. Decades ago,
> scientists decided to base their estimates of death from low radiation doses
> by extrapolating downward from the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused
> by high radiation doses. No study has ever demonstrated that low doses of
> radiation kill. To the contrary, studies demonstrate that high doses kill
> and low doses cure, disproving the extrapolations.
>
> Canada's nuclear power industry - uneconomic from the start - has already
> cost Canadian taxpayers and electricity customers tens of billions in
> needless costs. It makes no sense to compound the economic harm that this
> industry has wrought by continuing a waste-disposal megaproject that has
> neither scientific nor economic justification. The federal government should
> recall its Northern Ontario road show, spare the anti-nuclear activists the
> angst they now feel, and hold a Royal Commission into radiation to bring
> public policy in this area into the 21st century.
>
> Financial Post
>
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com> Lawrence Solomon is executive director of
> <
http://ep.probeinternational.org/> Energy Probe and the author of The
> Deniers.
>
> For more details on studies showing health benefits from low level
> radiation, click
> <
http://www.probeinternational.org/low-dose-NSWS-shipyard.pdf> here,
> <
http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Observatio> ns-on-Chernobyl-21st-Century-1.pdf> here, and
> <
http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/scott.pdf>
> here.
>
>
>
> <
http://opinion.financialpost.com/author/lawrencesolomon/>
>
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