The scenes of horrendous death and destruction continue to dominate our mass news coverage, especially on television. Nuclear radiation could almost be mistaken as the cause. It is not. People in Japan died because of the earthquake and tsunami (tidal wave) that smashed northeastern Japan ten days ago. The radiation from the damaged nuclear plants has killed no one so far.
We hear about our brush with possible nuclear catastrophe at Three Mile Island, PA in 1979 mentioned as comparable to the disaster at Chernobyl in the defunct Soviet Union. The Chernobyl plant did not even have a containment chamber, the massively thick concrete structure designed to prevent nuclear radiation from escaping into the air in the event of a meltdown of the nuclear reactor within it.
The Japanese stored significant amounts of spent nuclear fuel rods on the roofs of its containment chambers. On the ROOFS! This is incomprehensibly stupid. And the Japanese did it, not the Russians.
Lest you think that I endorse nuclear energy in the United States I advocate closing our nuclear plants immediately. There is no way to safely dispose of the spent nuclear fuel rods. No one has found a way to do it, not we Americans, not the French, not the Japanese, obviously.
Every expert I've heard interviewed in recent days states that the U.S. must continue to use nuclear energy, just be really careful. There's no such thing as careful in disposing of the spent nuclear fuel rods. Ask the Japanese.
The explanation is that the U.S. gets 20% of its electricity from "clean" nuclear energy. How about we CONSERVE 20% and close the damn nuclear energy plants? Doesn't that make more sense?
Oh, how ever could we do that? Suppose that those nuclear energy plants stopped functioning. Do you think we could figure it out? Of course. So let's just do it. And while we're at it stop using oil. Same idea. Just stop. That would kick renewable energy into high gear.
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