Rod Adams Whines Again...Tries to Defend Nuclear

Well, seems that our dear Mr. Rod Adams, nuclear industry shill is busting a gut at my response to him here on the blog yesterday...I awoke this morning to find yet another diatribe from him wherein he DEFENDS the record of nuclear industry after first qualifying that producing electric is a dangerous business. He very carefully crafted a set of RED HERRING arguments to prove perhaps to himself that nuclear is safe, or at least safer than other means of energy production such as coal and gas...NOT EXACTLY.

The nuclear industry (both civilian and military) since the beginning have hidden their own accidents, and their own death counts. It was standard operating procedure for both the DOD and DOE to doctor documents, and to spend millions, actually hundreds of millions for attorneys to defend them against any employee that tried to make a claim that blamed their illness on their exposures to radioactive materials in the work place. They justified this practice under the guise that nuclear was necessary for National Defense...in short, humans were simply put, expendable.

We for instance will NEVER know the true deaths caused by, associated with the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, as many of those that were deserving of our nations compassion and financial help never received it. Even now, many former employees of that facility are in a race against their own deaths to get the benefits they are deserving of. That does not count off site deaths that some attribute to the greatly increased CANCER risks associated with living next to a nuclear facility that teams of hired guns try to mitigate...IE, look up what the NRC has to say about strontium-90, a known by product of nuclear reactors...they admit a cancer leak, but associate any elevated risks not to reactors, but instead blame it on old nuclear bomb testing, and Chernobyl.

The Portsmouth plant running at full tilt required NINE electric companies to supply them their electricity...the facility used enough coal generated electricity in just one day to power Los Angeles County for a full year. Even now, the Piketon Plant in Kentucky used one half of one percent of the total electricity generated in America to produce enriched uranium.

The industry further insulates itself from it's own horrid record by having almost all of it's research and develop paid for and completed by the federal government, or universities associated with them. Those are not OUR DEATHS, that work was done by DOE, or MIT, or Lawrence Livermore. They hide their statistics in other ways...if someone who used to work at a nuclear plant has a very rare form of cancer known to be associated with working around all things nuclear conveniently dies of a secondary health issues because of their weakened condition (say a heart attack), the industry celebrates, as that is one less death in their column.

Even now, if people bother doing their research, it is obvious how the nuclear industry and DOE intend to deal with most of the waste streams from nuclear power. They will wave a magic wand, claim a new found technology makes these waste streams future potential use resources, and through reclassification....BINGO, waste problem is gone for away, and the spent fuel rods will sit where they lay until we have a major accident. In short, our government, and those in the industry WANT NUCLEAR AT ALL COSTS, and the humans and communities forced to host these facilities are expendable if God Forbid we see a serious incident at a nuclear facility.

ROD ADAMS COMMENT:

Rod Adams has left a new comment on your post "Rod Adams, Nuclear Entrepreneur Contests Green Nuc...":

Porgie Tirebiter, Royce Penstinger and Pinto Bean: Your edits of my comment left out some important information. 1. Name of Business deleted, Inc. was founded in September 1993. We have been at this for quite some time and did not just recently jump into a business because we thought it was a good way to make a quick buck. 2. While there have certainly been a few incidents in nuclear heated steam plants, there have been a much larger number in coal, oil and gas fired steam plants. I recognize that steam is deadly, but also recognize that producing electricity is never without risk. Nukes simply have a better overall safety record and that is partially because the penalty for maintenance failures is so high.

See, for example: http://www.steamcycle.com/safety_issues_pdf.htm
Just in case you do not follow links - the document provides some rather depressing statistics - "Over a ten- year period (1992 – 2001), there was a combined total of 23,338 accidents, including 127 fatalities and 720 injuries, reported for all power boilers, water and steam heating boilers, and unfired pressure vessels."

The four workers in Japan that you mentioned are much more famous on the web than any of the 127 fatalities mentioned above - it takes some dedicated searching to find any news stories at all about fossil fuel related steam plant deaths. Perhaps that is because they are too common to be considered "news" or perhaps that is because there are plenty of economic reasons for fighting nuclear power developments. BTW - I have learned my lesson about how you treat comments, so I will make a copy of this comment for future reference so that I know exactly which of my words you decide to edit.