Comments on: Outrageous Thought of the Day: Nuclear Hypocrisy

By: Forrest

Forrest — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:36:58 +0000

I feel sorry for us all then. There are plenty of people like you who “don’t get it”. For those who think nuclear energy is a great thing, I hate to burst your bubble. Nuclear energy is not clean; mining the uranium permanently alters the environment. The left over tailings sit around in ponds until some disaster strikes, at which point they are released into the nearest stream bed.. Don’t believe it will happen? It already has. One Churchrock nuclear spill was enough – those uranium tailings are now spread as a fine dust along the bottom of the puerco river and workers in the area are advised to wear masks to prevent inhaling dust off the dry stream bed. I suppose since nobody but the Navajo tribe was affected (the water table was contaminated – it is no longer safe to consume ground water in the Little Colorado region) this is not such a big deal to most… No. It won’t be until Lake Mead is too contaminated for the city of LA to safely drink from it that anyone will really start to care..

Nuclear energy is dirty business… Mining the uranium takes its toll on the environment and makes once beautiful places hazardous to visit. After the fuel is spent the problem remains – what do we do with it? Stick it in a tailing pond with the rest of the useless ore? Bury it in a mountain in a supremely shortsighted move? Can you see a hundred years into the future? Two hundred? It is simply irresponsible to take these kinds of risks – risks which may culminate in a disaster decision makers won’t be alive to witness, but one which our children will thank us for…

By: jake smith

jake smith — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:54:51 +0000

i dont get it

By: Missing the Point

Missing the Point — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:54:46 +0000

The thesis of the article has nothing to do with Yucca Mountain. The author is pointing out the hypocrisy between our foreign policies (our incessant interest in other people’s affairs) and our deep founded lack for self reflection as it relates to our own actions.

These comments are muddied in personal attacks. Stick to the facts.

By: B Mused

B Mused — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:49:02 +0000

I don’t know whether Roger Helbig is a “disinformation shill and a paid liar, ” as Lindorff asserts, but Lindorff is able to weave his own disinformation as regards Yucca Mountain. He suggests great danger and calamity if a future earthquake or other catastrophe were to cause nuclear waste buried at the repository if it is ever built at Yucca. He postulates that the waste would “leak” into the water table. First, he overlooks the fact that the waste is contained in robust metal canisters. Second, the waste itself is a solid form– it is not going to “leak.” Yes, thousands of years from now, if a waste package is breached, some radionuclides could sssssssslowly leach through the rock in which the repository would be built and it could reach the water table. But, the Department of Energy has submitted in its license application computer model results that conclude that the radiation dose levels set by EPA for the facility will not be exceeded. It will be up to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to be convinced that DOE’s forecast meets the law and regulations for this important project.

By: Dave Lindorff

Dave Lindorff — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:30:22 +0000

Lt. Col. Roger Hilberg is a shameless shill for the Pentagon, who hides his identy posing as an ordinary civilian. His point here is a red herring. Sure uranium is a naturally occurring element. So is arsenic and asbestos. Both are deadly and so is uranium. The thing is, the uranium that heats the earth is buried safely hundreds of miles below us. The uranium in DU warheads, however, is blasted into a fine ceramic grit of uranium oxide, which can be inhaled and then stay trapped in the small openings of the lung, where they blast damaging alpha particles at the surrounding tissue until one of the cells goes cancerous. This is why miners who dig uranium ore die in high numbers. And it’s why uranium is so carefully kept stored away from humans after it is taken out of reactors when they are refueled.

It is true uranium is not going to be stored in Yucca Mountain, but that’s not because it’s not dangerous. In fact, it’s so dangerous it’s stored elsewhere, like at Hanford, or reprocessed to make new fuel rods. But a hell of a lot of it is simply sold cheaply to the Pentagon, which then turns it into weapons to be fired off in third world countries, or here in the US in places like the central plain of Hawaii’s Big Island, or at other military target ranges.

Helbig doesn’t address the issue of the danger of uranium oxide, because it is simply terribly toxic and radioactive and carcenogenic, and he knows it. Instead he sets up straw men and then claims to have “exposed” an article.

The important thing to know is that Helbig is part of a Pentagon disinformation campaign to prevent people from challenging the use of depleted uranium as a weapon. His deceitful failure to identify himself as an Air Force Lt. Col. should be enough evidence for readers, but I’ve had more experience with this lying jerk. He went after one of my sources, a Dr. Doug Rokke, who worked on DU issues at the Pentagon and was honored for his work. Helbig lyingly tried to claim Rokke was not a military officer, not a PhD, and never worked on DU during and after the Persian Gulf War. Dr. Rokke proved all those things to me with documents.

Helbig is simply a Pentagon disinformation shill and a paid liar.

Dave Lindorff
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net

By: Roger Helbig

Roger Helbig — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:40:49 +0000

Dave Lindorff has been demonstrating his ignorance of Element 92, Uranium for years now – uranium is not even in the waste that was to be stored at Yucca Mountain. Uranium is not high level radioactive waste. Uranium is a naturally occuring element that occurs everywhere on Earth and is not only in every human, but every animal on the planet. It has been commonly found on the planet ever since the crust formed and rocks began to decompose into soil. The heat from the natural fissioning of uranium in the Earth’s core keeps the core molten and keeps this from being a cold dead rock. Lindorff is a self-promoter – and a very lousy reporter. I bet he will make all sorts of awful claims about me, but none of them are true.