Papier Mache'--or Human Survival?... YOU PICK!

There's a papier-mache' mockup of Indian Point, faithful in few details to the real original Indian Point, and it lives in activist's communal psyche as a dependable victim. Write a few words about troubled, aging, ailing, leaking, distressed, woeful, etc., and you've got yourself a story. The story need not be true.It's not even required to leave one's chair to investigate,.... all the needed parameters spring right to hand, out of communal myth and blink on the page, obligingly, for our writer, drawing attention, readership, and the satisfaction of having served up a spicy piece of work. Phish bloggers have even begun to insert the two words "Indian Point" in their blogs, just to attract readership.

The only drawback, is that the evil purple papier mache' model is not the real Indian Point.


The real Indian Point is apparently wearing a cloak of journalistic invisibility, kind of like Harry Potter.Who built the cloaking device? I must state out front, that I don't believe journalists began the deception on their own... (except for one poor schmuck, who was fired for it). The list of perps is short, 2 organizations, and maybe 8 or 10 individuals, but buoyed by internet chumminess, and the active trading of techniques for capturing press attention, they hovered around their phones, and their letters-to-editors keyboards, and carefully applied papier mache',-- bit by bit, slopping on the bogus concern, the overdrawn and bathetic complaints, until the purple model of the domes rose high enough to obscure the real place ,and a journalistic staple, a dependable hot-button brouhaha, was hatched out of thin air, and activist chutzpah.

Not many people are falling for it any more, mainly the very young & gullible, seeking a "radical" rap to spice up their Myspace profile, and a few lost fifty-something loners, hoping to piggy back their confused way into any kind of relevance.

Here is the factual situation:

We need an affordable Hudson Valley. That need, slipping ever so steadily out of our grasp, ought not be forgotten by our oh-so-ethical (they say) new Democratic administration, despite Riverkeeper's 5000 name mailing list,....... 5,000,000 of the rest of us need to hold the line, AND DO THEY CARE? Maybe not... you see, we are not pre-captured for them into a convenient voting bloc, like those 5000.

We need the power that the real Indian Point provides us, and I hear no construction plans coming out of Cuomo junior's lips, or new Governor Spitzer's planning office, so I know they have no plans for new power plants.Tell me--- HOW DO YOU ETHICALLY PROPOSE CLOSING INDIAN POINT WITHOUT BUILDING NEW PLANTS?

Short answer--you don't.

Even the National Academy of Scientists told us just that last year,.... but for Democratic officials, pandering to papier-mache', and an activist mailing list seems much easier than actually DOING SOMETHING , while the real Indian Point hums away quietly, powering the last days of Hudson affordability.

If we stripped away the papier mache'---what would we see? We would see an environmentally proactive Entergy Corporation, remaking, improving, and cleaning up the mess Con Ed left here, gathering their national expertise to provide us what we have almost forgotten that we need, helping our communities with charity, volunteers, and positive interaction, maximizing power, minimizing damage, maximizing security, minimizing hype, maximizing value, minimizing loss..... in short..... doing a lot of the functions local and state government might be doing for us---if they were not blinded by a mailing list, and the need to pander to a small vocal minority that hates so passionately, that they've frightened away good sense on the Hudson for years..

However people are starting to wake up.

It started with Al Gore's admission that only nuclear + wind power could avert global catastrophe. Now more and more are realizing that global warming is here, now, and without Indian Point we are not only screwed, we are possibly doomed to a horrible set of consequences stemming from whatever replaces it.


Tags Indian Point Entergy Green Nuclear Butterfly Riverkeeper Al Gore An Inconvenient Truth Robert F Kennedy jr Solar Nuclear Renaissance

THE HISTORY OF EARTH

The history of planet Earth is well known, and very clear. The reason this planet has life, is because it also has uranium: Read:

Uranium developed naturally as a result of the physical maturation of elements within stars, and it forms the warming power within the earth. Inside the earth's core, is a white hot mix of molten iron, and molten uranium. The devil did not put it there. In point of fact there may not even be a devil. The heat energy occurring naturally within the core of our home planet , comes strictly from U235 fission. The iron by itself would not be warm. It takes the U235 to warm the earth, and thus provide the very cozy environment in which we live.

Without the uranium's warming power, life would probably not have arisen on this planet, and without the uranium, life certainly would not continue, as the oceans would freeze, and earth would be an ice ball.

To survive the human-induced global warming, it will require the massive use of nuclear power generation (along with wind and solar) to enable the human race to survive its self-induced environmental damage, caused by burning coal and oil .

Although nuclear substances have great curing powers in nuclear medicine, it's generally not uranium, usually cobalt or other isotopes, that is used. However, if the dying out of all humanity due to global warming is taken as a "big health issue", then yes, U235 fission power can be considered a "cure". It will cure us of dying out as a race.

Therefore I would call uranium the "Life Stone", the "Survival Stone", "Gaia's Gift", and perhaps even "God's Holy Stone", the one stone that can save 7 billion humans from dying horribly within the next 100 years, as the
earth heats up to 145 degrees farenheit, and civilization grinds to a halt, due to global warming caused by oil use, and coal use, and we choke on our own massive carbon footprint.

This mineral also powers Indian Point, a super clean, environmentally aware and very Green piece of the future, on the Hudson in New York State.

Ask Al Gore

Tags Indian Point Entergy Green Nuclear Butterfly Riverkeeper Al Gore An Inconvenient Truth Robert F Kennedy jr Solar Nuclear Renaissance

Human Survival is at Stake

To the few antinuke stragglers still lost in the 1980's, it seems that a great sellout has occurred--- the old "anti" passion is not around anymore, and a few words to the left-behinds may be in order.

Something very important has happened.The modern world is about to need nuclear generated electricity in a big way, just to survive. Most of the major players, on both sides of the old issue realize this now.....

Even Al Gore........

Wall Street Journal, 3-28-07
By William Tucker

Al Gore recognizes that any solution to global warming is going to require a revival of nuclear power. He was edging toward that in his House of Representatives testimony last week -- yet downplayed the idea on the following grounds: "Nuclear power plants are the costliest to build and they take the longest time and at present they come in only one size -- extra large."

This is a curious notion. At present, the U.S. Navy has 10 giant aircraft carriers and 50 submarines that run on nuclear power; the average reactor generates about 200 megawatts (MW). The French Rubis class of submarines still operates on 48 MW. Although these reactors are enough to provide power for the lifetime of a submarine or drive a 100,000-ton aircraft carrier, they are small by commercial standards.

When Adm. Hyman Rickover "beached" a submarine engine at Shippingport, Pa., in 1957 to create the first country's civilian nuclear reactor, it produced only 60 MW of electricity. Dresden 1, built privately in 1960, was 210 MW and Indian Point 1, built by Con Edison in 1961, produced 275 MW.

Once the technology was established, reactors quickly grew to the 500-1000 MW range for one simple reason -- bigger is better. The principles of thermodynamics dictate that a single 1,200 MW generating station operates much more efficiently than two 600 MW plants. The same thing holds true for coal plants, nuclear power's chief rival in the electricity field. Both coal and nuclear plants are now built to the 1,200-1,500 MW range for economic reasons.

Yet all this hardly suggests that nuclear reactors "come in only one size -- extra large." Many research reactors produce only 5 MW. We've never reached the point where nuclear electricity runs cars or airplanes -- as early dreamers suggested -- but in theory it's possible.

"Mini-reactors" are now being suggested in many remote locations -- just as wind and solar energy are thriving where other power sources are not available. In Galena, Alaska, far up the Yukon River, Toshiba has proposed a 10 MW reactor to replace the town's diesel generators, which now produce electricity at ten times the normal price. The Russians have started building "floating reactors" as small as 3 MW to transport into isolated outposts of Siberia, where weather conditions make construction of power plants impossible. Both Canada and Venezuela are considering small reactors to cook the oil products out of the ground at remote tar sand deposits.

One of the most promising technologies is the "pebble bed modular reactor," in which nuclear material is reposited in tennis ball-sized graphite-coated spheres that sit in the reactor vessel as in a giant gumball machine. Each pebble is a "mini-reactor" with all the necessary components and a collection of them produces enough power. "We've found the optimum size to be around 250 MW," says Prof. Andrew Kadak, who has been working on a design at MIT.

Since balls can be inserted and withdrawn individually, the reactor never has to shut down for refueling. Temperatures do not climb high enough to cause a meltdown and proponents say this eliminates the need for an expensive containment structure -- although environmentalists dispute this. South Africa is scheduled to complete a 200 MW pebble bed reactor by 2012.

In his public testimony Mr. Gore seemed to be convoluting several things, suggesting somehow that nuclear plants are too expensive and take too long to build because they only come "extra-large." This is not true.

Nuclear plants take more time to build and are more expensive than comparative coal plants, but they are not prohibitively expensive. The Japanese are now building reactors in five years at competitive prices. Higher construction costs are more than compensated by lower fuel costs and higher capacity ratings. America's existing nuclear plants are now operating so profitably that Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal recently proposed a windfall profits tax because the state's reactors were making too much money.

And this is all before environmental considerations are factored into the equation. In three years of operation, a 1,500 MW coal plant will spew three million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- the prime source of the world's carbon emissions. An identical nuclear reactor will produce only a few bundles of highly radioactive fuel rods that can be safely stored in a nearby storage pool. Yet coal currently pays for none of these environmental damages. A carbon tax of roughly $10 per ton would level the playing field and make nuclear power far more competitive.

The reason building nuclear plants has been expensive and time-consuming is because of exaggerated popular fears of the technology. The public is now coming around. Seventy percent now consider nuclear plants acceptable, meaning new plants will probably not become bogged down in endless court delays.

The only reasonable scenario for avoiding global warming is to substitute nuclear power for coal as our prime source of base-load electricity, supplementing it with wind and solar electricity for our spinning reserve and peaking-power needs. If Al Gore were to support a nuclear-solar alliance -- a joint effort by the carbon-free technologies to impose a tax on carbon emissions -- we could take giant steps toward solving the problem.

Mr. Tucker is author of "Terrestrial Energy: How a Nuclear-Solar Alliance Can Rescue the Planet," forthcoming by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Tags Indian Point Entergy Green Nuclear Butterfly Riverkeeper Al Gore An Inconvenient Truth Robert F Kennedy jr Solar Nuclear Renaissance