OT-Very OT-Geen Fruitcakes in action

I recommend a little research in publications other than Mother Jones.

Death toll from Chernobyl so far about 41. The death toll from Three Mile Island, 0.

Now compare farming:

Farmers lead healthy lives but, farming is dangerous. Farmers smoke less, drink less, and are more active than most other adults. Their calorie intake and cholesterol percentage is higher but their death rate from coronary artery heart disease is 10% lower than matched contemporaries. Each year, four of every 10,000 agricultural workers (an average of 700 people per year in the United States) are killed and 140,000 disabling accidents occur especially in planting and harvest seasons. Agricultural workers are 8% of the work force but sustain 29% of work fatalities.

Now consider coal: US Coal industry report.)

Fatal accidents in the nation's coal mines dropped to an historic low of 27 in 2002, according to preliminary figures from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Forty-two miners died in chargeable accidents in

2001, MSHA said.

The previous low fatality record for the coal industry was 29, set in 1998, MSHA said. Powered haulage equipment accidents, the leading cause of fatalities in the mines, contributed to seven deaths in coal mines last year.

From:

(the world socialist web site)

Every year, gas explosions, cave-ins and mine flooding kill thousands of miners who are driven by deepening poverty to risk their lives in China's notoriously dangerous coal mining industry. According to China's State Administration of Work Safety, 6,702 died in mining accidents in 2003, but other sources put the number at 7,197.

This is a report that kind of ties it all in together:

"The epidemiological evidence, however, seems fairly clear in indicating that something like 30,000 deaths per year in U.S. result from air pollution due to emissions from fossil fuel burning power plants."

"I suggest you read about three-mile island and Chernobl. I wound rather rather more to a farm and cut my own wood for heat than build a potentail time bomb that could kill the entire world with one accident."

Wow, how paranoid can you get? Here's a link to what actually happened and was the result of the TMI event:

Note that not one single person was either killed or injured as a result, except for the financial injury on the owners of the plant.

Chernobl was quite a different situation, but a rather moot example since the US does not use graphite pile reactors (which can catch fire as Chernobl did) for power production.

"Kill the entire world" -- Get serious! Read some books on the subject. Become educated.

Realize that you're now receiving more ionizing radiation from your local fossil fuel power plant than from all the nuclear power reactors in the world combined. I'm not sure that I should mention the radioactive radon gas you'll be exposing yourself too if you decide to build or farm in any rural area of the US having granite based ledge under your property, because you seem already on the verge of panic! :-)

Harry C.

Cato, Rand, Booze Allen Hamilton and a number of other think/research tanks solely exist to provide the politicians with material to reference in their speeches that happens to correlate with their pre-orchestrated platforms. Just who do you believe is paying salaries of these researchers.

Business does the same thing to dazzle their shareholders and customers, except for the fact that the research firms that they engage deal in a different field than politics. For example, The Gartner Group and D.H. Brown firms supply the computer industry with reports justifying and/or praising any of the product that a particular computer manufacturer wishes to promote (and who happens to be funding the research). Similarly, J.D. Power supplies research reports on 'customer satisfaction' whose results alway support the customer satisfaction superiority of the company funding them at that moment.

I worked in the field for one year, and then couldn't stand it. The firm was heavily funded by IBM, and when I once wrote a research report praising the Silicon Graphics products over those of IBM on the basis of price/performance, I found myself unemployed so I returned to the world of real engineering work.

Getting back to Cato, their researchers and writers know who pays their salary, and report accordingly. Having worked in a similar, but Wall Street related environment, the analysts at Cato are not anxious to halve their salaries and go back to working as the price of honestly expressing what they actually believe, and I can't blame them for this.

I personally could not live with the hypocrisy of writing and promoting ideas/products that I knew not to be true, or that I believed not to be true, just for money.. Still, many people can.

Harry C.

Do it now and remove a big source of ignorance from posting on the net, OK?

OBTW, why hasn't the world ended yet, given the number of nuclear weapons that have been exploded above ground since 1945? Why didn't the world end when Chernobyl did a melt-down?

Pe> I suggest you read about three-mile island and Chernobl.

What was it we used to say? "More people have died in Ted Kennedy's car than in nuclear power plant accidents"?

I guess we have to change it to US nuclear power plant accidents.

Greetings and Salutations...

On 3 May 2005 17:05:04 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@w-sherwood.ih.lucent.com (Chuck Sherwood) wrote:

While this is a great picture and very "headline grabbing", the fact of the matter is that not only was TMI not only the WORST nuclear disaster in the US (That we know of), but, it also proved the basic safety of the reactor design. The reactor got so hot that it turned into a molten ball, and, sat that way for a LONG time...yet...no containment breach occurred. Now...in the years since TMI, reactor design HAS changed, improving the safety and reliability of the whole process. I recall reading about a new "hot pebble" design that, among other things, is designed to fall back to a "idling" state when any problems crop up. There are hazards to power generation, no matter HOW we do it. However, in terms of volume of final waste, and, pollutions produced in comparison with burning fossil fuels, nuclear power comes out WAY ahead. I suspect that part of the problem with nuclear power is that, while everyone understands building a fire and burning some coal, creating heat from invisible fission is hard to grasp. In any case, the question may become moot, in that at some point we are going to burn the last lump of coal, and the last gallon of petroleum, and, at that time, either we will have found a new source of power (nuclear, either fusion or fission, I would guess) or we are going to end up with VERY radical lifestyle changes. By the by...Solar and wind power IS nuclear power... just the fission reactor is located offsite. Regards Dave Mundt

For that matter you could also argue that hydro is solar therefore nuclear, and for that matter fossil fuel would meet the same definition it is only separated by time.

And there in lies another reason for not having nuclear power. Dodgy figures.

Actually, another reason I am againsy my country digging up uranium and selling it overseass is the idea being floated that we whould take the frigging waste back.

Neither plant could be built today, and both were primatives compared to todays safe designs.

Neither plant could "kill the entire world", nor did they.

Id find it rather ironic if your wood heated house burned down because of creosote in the chimney, killing you and your entire family.

Gunner

Liberals - Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own. Benjamin Disraeli

On Tue, 3 May 2005 21:11:01 -0400, the inscrutable "Ed Huntress" spake:

Is the Heritage Foundation as fair and balanced as you think? I looked over the weekend. What first struck me was the picture of the Shrub, then I noticed articles on Bill O'Reilly, Hannity, and "How the President's Plan Benefits Younger Workers". I then had to doublecheck the URL, thinking I'd landed on the Fox News site. ;)

You say you can't blame them, but do you support their deceit? Like Harry, I could neither participate in nor support that kind of lying lifestyle. (ditto advertisement)

Those are "gifts", eh? I expect to see a worldwide backlash from that coming around any time now, don't you? It ain't gonna be purty.

Well, not for lack of trying. I'm not sure, are you certain they don't run graphite moderated reactors in europe anywhere, still?

It's amazing to read the events that surround the chernobyl and TMI screwups. Basically the engineering in the plants was pretty poor (for example, the *one* instrument that would have told the TMI operators what was going on - the pressurizer level gage - was hidden away behind a huge panel full of flashing and sounding alarms) and even though, for example, the TMI event had happened before, they never changed the relief valve design or engineered the problem out of the system.

The chernobyl one was tougher, the operators had been responding to basically what was political pressure to conclude a series of ill-formed tests. In doing so they blew up the plant.

My ultimate point is that while one can attempt to improve the engineering in plants like that, the human factors are probably much more important. So that when they start building new plants in the US again that's the thing to watch.

That, and the spend fuel pools. The spent fuel issue is as of yet unresolved.

Jim

I use to think that until I saw a show on the history channel about TMI.

There was a show on the history channel about TMI recently. It was a very real concern that H2 buildup in the containment dome would blow up and spread radiation over a large area, just like Chernoble. More than 1/2 the core at TMI melted and the reactor building is still comtaminated.

All it takes is one accident to destroy a huge area and make it uninhabitable for 500 years. IMO the risk is too high.

Oh give me a break. I don't believe that for a second. How many people died fighting the fire? How many people are suffering for cancer? How many people were forced to move from their homes?

TMI, The building did what it was designed to and no radiation was released.

Chernobyl, the Soviets built a reactor using a design that the US decided was too dangerous to use in 1946-47! Then they did something stupid under the auspicies of testing their safely procedures. Even if you assumed the pile formed a critical mass (impossible), it wouldn't have been more than a moderate sized nuke.

There are already too many people on this planet for your plan.

Well, since we're not using the Russian design, that would make sense. Horribly unsafe engineering is horribly unsafe, yes. That's why we don't use it. Ever looked at a banana with a geiger counter?

fusion, not fission.

I saw the same special, Chuck. It showed that even with a massive fuckup resulted in a near-zero event.

That is now how the Russian reactor failed.

And yet, the release was nearly insignificant, in sharp contrast to the vast areas in Russia which still can't be visited.

You don't understand the science, and if you got from that special that this was just like Chernobyl, then you weren't watching closely enough. It showed that even when the operators do everything they possibly could do wrong, the design is still recoverable.

So you are not a Democrat?

Gunner

Liberals - Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own. Benjamin Disraeli