[From CounterPunch]
Radioactive Troika: Bush, Nuclear Power Industry and the New York Times
By PETER MONTAGUE
It’s time to dust off your “No Nukes!” button — or grab that old one out of your Mom’s top bureau drawer. You may need it soon.
The “powers that be” have begun a new campaign to convince us that we must have dozens or hundreds — worldwide, thousands — of new nuclear power plants to avert the threat of global warming.
Three groups have teamed up for the campaign: the Cheney-Bush administration, the nuclear power corporations, and most recently the New York Times. The campaign has two official mascots — Christine Todd Whitman, the failed former head of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Patrick Moore, the widely-mistrusted former head of Greenpeace International.
Each of the three campaign partners has a different agenda, but they all want you to believe that building hundreds or thousands of new nuclear power plants is the best way to meet the world’s need for electricity — that nuclear power is safer, cleaner and cheaper than all the many alternatives.
Electricity can be generated by many kinds of machines. Commercial- scale electric plants exist now based on wind turbines, photovoltaic panels that turn sunlight directly into electricity, geothermal plants that draw their heat from the deep earth (one to two miles below ground), turbines powered by natural gas, coal-fired dinosaurs, and nuclear power plants. There are other ways to make electricity but these are the main ones in commercial use today.
Nuclear power plants are by far the most complicated way to make electricity. Nuclear power starts by mining radioactive uranium out of the ground, then “enriching” it in a centrifuge that can make nuclear fuel but can also make fuel for an A-bomb. (Iran’s current plan to operate its own centrifuges is what all the wrangling is about with Tehran.) The enriched uranium is then stuffed into a nuclear power plant where it undergoes a controlled fission reaction, splitting atoms to release tremendous quantities of heat, which is used to boil water to turn a turbine to make electricity.
Continue reading Time to Dust Off That Old “No Nukes!” Button at CounterPunch
Tags: Environment, war, peace <BR/>