Nuclear is Our Future

Nuclear is Our Future Monthly Newsletter

November 2006 Issue

Go Nuclear Magnet

In This Issue:

1. Introduction
2. November 2006 Archive

1. Introduction

Welcome to our newsletter! Contained here is the November 2006 Nuclear is Our Future weblog archive. Given that it is in plain text format, the HTML has been removed and thus many posts do not look the same as when they were posted. If you want more information, please check the November 2006 online archive at blog.niof.org/2006_11_01_archive.html.

Link: http://blog.niof.org/2006_11_01_archive.html

2. November 2006 Archive

Thursday, November 30, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"First and perhaps foremost, although nuclear plants are cheap to operate once they are up and running, they are by far the most expensive to build."


-Resources for the Future

Because of anti-nuclear lawsuits and delay tactics combined with high interest rates in the early 1980s and bad regulation. There's nothing inherently expensive about nuclear reactors per se. In fact, the actual material initial investment (as opposed to NRC fees) for an Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) may turn out to be lower than a coal plant that meets emissions standards.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:09 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The death toll from a Cassini accident was put by Dr. Ernest Sternglass, professor emeritus of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, at 20 million to 40 million.

And this is not a sky-is-falling story. Of 28 U.S. space missions using plutonium, there have been three accidents, the worst in 1964 in which a plutonium-powered satellite fell back to Earth, breaking up and spreading the toxic radioactive substance widely."


-Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space

Then why haven't there been 60 million to 120 million deaths? And what about the other two "accidents"--which involved accidents in the spacecraft, not the RTG (nuclear battery).

This reminds me of another conspiracy crowd.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 4:00 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"One other key element of the new Bush space policy is the expanded use of nuclear power systems to "enable or significantly enhance space exploration or operational capabilities." What this means is that the aerospace industry wants to establish mining colonies on the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies and they want to power these bases with nuclear reactors. The military has also long been saying they need nuclear reactors in space to provide power for space weapons systems. So the nuclear industry also plans to utilize space as a new market for increasing corporate profits."


-Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space

Look, somebody's going to make money off of providing energy. That could be the nuclear industry (uranium), or it could be the oil industry (kerosene or LH2), or it could be their buddies in the solar panel industry. If you look at a spacecraft design, and see how much is fuel, and how much more could be done with more energy available, it's silly to not include a nuclear reactor.
In short, they're worried that with nuclear reactors, people might actually do something to explore space. And engineers everywhere--especially aerospace and nuclear engineers--should be worried about their jobs. If these people win, your extra education will go toward designing can openers. It's time for engineers--or even engineering students--to wake up, get out from behind their desks and start talking to people!

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:24 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Monday, November 27, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"We know for a fact that large amounts of radioactivity escaped from the Three Mile Island accident. But, the nuclear industry and the government did not collect release estimates for specific isotopes, and to this day, there is no available information about which isotopes escaped nor the actual quantity of radiation that was released."


-Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, p.66

For the umpteenth time, I fail to see how radioactivity can escape--radioactivity is a characteristic of radioactive materials; wherever the material is, the radioactivity is. Or, for that matter, how you can collect (measure) an estimate. But anyway:
How would they have measured it, unless they had a mass spectrometer on the site from the start of the accident? And how could materials other than iodine and noble gases have gotten into the off-gas system to begin with?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:11 PM | 1 comments links to this post

Sunday, November 26, 2006
Gofman Award Nominations Request

Three nominations (for Jim Phelps, Helen Caldicott, and Jan Peczkis) were received in the first few days after the nomination period opened. None have been received since.

Please?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:45 PM | 1 comments links to this post

Conspiracy Flowchart Update

Apparently the Conspiracy Flowchart has been updated and a second version produced (previous post on this issue).

I hadn't heard about the Three-Mile-Island-KFC connection before; the only one I'd heard of was Helen Caldicott's conspiracy theory about Hershey's.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 7:57 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Depleted uranium is a highly toxic and radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process needed in nuclear reactors and the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
...
And, according to independent scientists, "a DU antitank round outside its metal casing can emit as much radiation in one hour as 50 chest X-rays." (5) A tank driver receives a radiation dose of 0.13 rem/hr to his or her head from overhead DU armor (6) which may seem like a very low dose. However, after 32 continuous days, or 64 12-hour days, the amount of radiation a tank driver receives to his head will exceed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's annual standard for public whole-body exposure to man-made sources of radiation."


-Green Parties World Wide

The first sentence is (intentionally?) ambiguous about DU's toxicity. They never say that DU is highly radioactive (it isn't), but it is clearly implied. Plus, enrichment is needed neither for nuclear weapons nor nuclear reactors. A bomb can be made from plutonium, which would be produced from natural uranium in a specialized weapons-production reactor. A civilian reactor may or may not need enriched uranium, depending on the type of reactor. Reactors used in the US and most of the rest of the world do; reactors in Canada (and a few in other places) do not. A connection between uranium bombs (nuclear weapons based on weapons-grade highly-enriched uranium) and American-style reactors (which use low-enriched uranium) is also implied; the only connection is that an enrichment facility that is in use for American-style-reactor fuel production cannot be used for weapons production (i.e., the nuclear power plant poses a negative proliferation risk by requiring that a dual-use facility be used for civilian purposes).

The second statement has a couple of major practical problems. First, DU doesn't emit x-rays, so a comparison between a piece of DU and an x-ray machine is pointless. X-rays penetrate objects; alpha particles from DU do not--they would be blocked by any one of the following: anything covering the DU plating, four inches of air, the tank driver's helmet, or the skin on the tank driver's head. And the allowed whole-body dose to the public is not the occupational allowed dose to part of the body--they're factoring in children and pregnant women, and the calculation is based on weight of the entire body, not the weight of the head (a given intensity of radiation over the whole body involves much more radiation than that same intensity to only the head). The only way to be harmed by DU is to eat it, and even then, the chemical toxicity is much worse than the insignificant radiation produced.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 7:35 PM | 3 comments links to this post

Saturday, November 25, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The Pentagon says DU is relatively harmless, emitting "only" 60% the radiation of nondepleted uranium."


-Green Parties World Wide

Which itself is barely radioactive.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:34 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Friday, November 24, 2006
Friends of the Earth: Rooftop Windmills Don't Work

What a shocker. Yet they will continue to not listen to us...

Link.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:25 AM | 1 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Background radiation was one of the main instigators of evolution, as it induced mutations in the reproductive DNA molecules or genes of plants and animals."


-Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, p.40

Not transcription errors?

It's also sort of interesting how the effect of radiation at those levels is statistically undetectable. Most people agree on this; that was the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences last year. I would argue that if it is not statistically detectable among transcription errors, it's not very significant if it is there at all. It is doubly interesting that the most statistically powerful studies (i.e., ones with few extraneous variables) consistently find either no harm or a small benefit, especially the shipyard study. I would not suggest that background radiation exposure directly produces a health benefit, only that there is quite a lot of statistical noise on both sides of zero.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:03 AM | 1 comments links to this post

Thursday, November 23, 2006
Happy Thanksgiving

I give thanks for the 3,430,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 1,110,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 767,900,000 tons of CO2 which nuclear power plants kept out of the air this year and the lives of the 12,000 people who would have died had nuclear power plants been replaced with coal-fired facilities.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 7:47 PM | 0 comments links to this post

NIOF.org Update #47

Print stylesheets have been added to all the pages on the main site, so they should print without cutting the text off on the right. I'm going to work on ones for this blog and the Nuclear NewsWire.

Update 11:30 PM: This blog now has print stylesheets as well.

There was a minor edit to the history page to correct a typo, and a grammatical error on the home page has been corrected. The link to the home page on the home page has been removed.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 7:46 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Entergy has no business operating Vermont Yankee, even though it is a business."


-Citizens Awareness Network

Pro-nuclear people: this is not how to write a press release. Calling the paper irresponsible (see link) and following up such a statement with a goofy sentence like the above one is not exactly a great way to get in the paper.

And if it isn't a press release, don't put it in the press release section.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 7:36 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Iran effectively did not restart its civilian nuclear power program until 1995 when it signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy to build lightweight [sic] water reactors at Bushehr, under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards."


-Council for a Livable World

What safeguards are necessary with a light-water reactor? A light-water power reactor (i.e., not a submarine engine) neither uses nor produces bomb materials. In any case, no construction or operation of a light-water reactor of any type needs to be subject to safeguards. "Yep, that sure is a really shiny section of pipe..."

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:22 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"General Li [the North Korean Yongbyon bomb factory site commander] had trained in Russia after the "Atoms for Peace" program was announced by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, so I asked why this reactor design was chosen over Russian reactors (whose designs most resembled U.S. plutonium production reactors). He looked at me with a puzzled expression and replied that this simple design [MAGNOX] allowed his country to have an indigenous nuclear power program without relying on Russia or on anyone else."


-Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

First, Atoms for Peace has nothing to do with anything the Russians did.

Also, that's one tremendously successful nuclear power program: five megawatts of intermittent electricity from a bomb factory whose generator was added as an afterthought.
Come to think of it, that's not a nuclear power program.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:25 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Monday, November 20, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"If the [North Korean Yongbyon bomb factory's] reactor ran successfully for a year, about one half of one percent of the 48 tons of uranium fuel would be converted to plutonium 239. When the fuel was used up, the overhead crane would extract the now highly radioactive rods and drop them down a chute into an underground tunnel."


-Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

In order for it to be converted to plutonium-239, the fuel would have to be taken out before it is even remotely used up. Otherwise, it becomes contaminated with impossible-to-separate plutonium-240, which doesn't work in a bomb.

Recall how a nuclear power program tries to optimize fuel efficiency, since they don't have to worry about which specific isotopes are produced.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 4:17 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Sunday, November 19, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"A small replica of a 1950s British nuclear power plant sat in the reactor room [at Yongbyon]. The Yongbyon reactor, which started up in 1986, used graphite as a moderator and was cooled with pressurized carbon dioxide gas. Its fuel consisted of uranium metal encased in an alloy of magnesium and zirconium."


-Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

That's a MAGNOX reactor, which was designed as a bomb factory. They added a generator when they needed to find something to do with the waste heat.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:12 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Saturday, November 18, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"A few of these old-style [MAGNOX] reactors are still operating, mostly in Britain, but they have been effectively abandoned for less troublesome machines."


-Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

All in Britain.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 5:35 PM | 2 comments links to this post

Friday, November 17, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"There was no protective dome or secondary containment over the [Yongbyon] reactor to protect against a catastrophic radiation release, as is usually the case in the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Europe."


-Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Except for some reactors built in Eastern Europe by the Russians, all nuclear power plants in those areas have containment structures.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:50 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Thursday, November 16, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"[August] 6-1945: Nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima"


-Calendar of Nuclear Accidents

I can assure you that the bombing of Hiroshima was no accident.

It also had nothing to do with nuclear power, just like yesterday's quote.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:35 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"[July] 30-1986: Human error causes the nuclear warhead to be knocked off a Pershing rocket (Germany)"


-Calendar of Nuclear Accidents

Yet, still, nothing happened. What a shocker.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:31 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Existing reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels is giving way to an emerging solar economy and society as renewable energy sources record the fastest growth rates in meeting global energy service needs."


-Center for Energy and Environmental Policy

Based on what consumption data?

Solar energy provided nearly 100% of humanity's energy before about 1700. People switched to fossil fuels when solar energy stopped working. How we forget history.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:54 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Monday, November 13, 2006
Gofman Award Nominations Request

To try to ensure more nominations than last year (already done), I might turn this into a weekly occurrence. [Backgrounder]

Please post your nominations here (I apologize for having to require registration first).

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:43 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Then Diablo played a major role in the disasterous deregulation of the state's electric industry capped off by the 2001 Energy Crisis."


-Abalone Alliance

Yep. It provided reliable electricity when gas turbines and windmills were going offline.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:32 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Sunday, November 12, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Hopi prophecy states that World War III will be started by the people who first received the Light -- China, Palestine, India and Africa. When the war comes, the United States will be destroyed by "gourds of ashes" which will fall to the ground, boiling the rivers and burning the earth, where no grass will grow for many years, and causing a disease that no medicine can cure. This can only mean nuclear or atomic bombs; no other weapon causes such effects. Bomb shelters will be useless, for "Those who are at peace in their hearts already are in the Great Shelter of Life. There is no shelter for evil. When the Saquahuh (blue Star) Kachina dances in the plaza and removes his mask, the time of the great trial will be here.""


-Rainbow Family of Living Light

posted by Stewart Peterson at 4:39 PM | 1 comments links to this post

Saturday, November 11, 2006
Election 2006

The Obligatory Election Post (OEP).

Everybody knows what happened on Tuesday: the Democracts took both the House and Senate; Nancy Pelosi will be the Speaker and Harry Reid the Senate Majority Leader. In a less-widely-noticed development, Eliot Spitzer was elected governor of New York. Whether these developments are good or bad is a moot point; we're going to have to work with these people.

First, Spitzer wants to close Indian Point. He appears to want to accomplish this by encouraging the construction of fossil-fueled power plants (especially oil and gas) until Indian Point is no longer necessary, and then legislating a shutdown. This could be done relatively quickly (less than three years) and an Indian Point shutdown is certainly possible. Realistically, pro-nuclear people as a whole are too disorganized to prevent this from happening. I'm inclined to think it probably won't happen, but there is a real and definite danger that it could. We can't do anything about it anyway (other than filing endless lawsuits anti-nuclear-style to try to stop the additional power plants, or their siting permits, or pollutant discharge permits, or pipelines, or transmission lines, etc.), so I'm also inclined to think that we should focus on the future. Instead of going past our resources with campaigns that will go nowhere, establishing DUPIC as a common-ground issue would have the potential to be extremely useful.

DUPIC is useful not as the best solution, but as a workable one and a politically advantageous one. There are plenty of Democrats, including Pelosi and Reid (and Rahm Emanuel, whom I have personally spoken to on this issue), who are willing to reconsider nuclear power but don't want to have to make hard decisions about waste. DUPIC is an easy decision. It's politically advantageous precisely because it's a cop-out. Add a fuel manufacturing facility and a law to accomodate waste-eating reactors in general, and certify the ACR, and it would be possible to double (or more) our use of nuclear power without producing any more waste. Recall how Harry Reid and Orrin Hatch suddenly became fans of decentralized dry-cask storage when it appeared that their states might have to take waste. DUPIC would mean that nobody would have to do anything about the waste issue for the next 40 years at least, and has the advantage over dry-cask storage that it would involve generating more electricity. Plus, it doesn't really involve anything that isn't already being done at fuel fabrication facilities, so it would be a hard sell for an environmental group to say that it's a radical change. We're all going for a full actinide recycle, but that won't happen until the political climate changes. DUPIC could fly right now, getting new reactors built while taking advantage of the current political climate. I am not naive enough to believe that we'll be able to walk up to the Democratic leadership and have them immediately fall in love with DUPIC, but presenting DUPIC as the Democratic alternative to Yucca Mountain might give it a decent chance.
I believe we can do something productive with the next 2-6 years--if we establish concrete, common-ground, workable proposals and a good grassroots network.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:31 PM | 0 comments links to this post

NIOF.org Update #46

1. The news section now has an index, and the mirror on the main site has been deleted.
2. There is a campaign page for DUPIC; the Support DUPIC post has been updated with a link to that page, and the Support DUPIC button code now links to that page.
3. An error on the News Feeds page has been corrected.
4. The Pro-Nuclear Links page has been completely changed and is now a section. There are pages for blogs, groups, the industry, professional organizations, personal pages, scientists and scientific groups, and informational sites.
5. Blogger wants me to switch to Blogger Beta but won't let me (?!). There are also a couple of pretty major bugs in Blogger Beta (FTP publishing problems; impenetrable template code; lack of progress updates; layout problems; in short, everything is buggy), so it's not going to happen any time soon. However, when it does, one of the major features of Blogger Beta that will make this blog and NRCWatch easier to navigate (and the Nuclear NewsWire much easier to navigate) will be labels on posts. Imagine being able to see every news article on the topic of nuclear waste from the past year with a single click, or every NRC press release vs. Federal Register filing, or a list of Anti-Nuclear Quotes of the Day in reverse chronological order (although some months' archive pages approach that point), etc. There will also be news feeds for comments, making it possible to do a "most recent comments" section, as well as news feeds for each post's comments. I've set up two test blogs to test this new service. When it becomes better for readers and when it is allowed (and when it is an acceptable risk to the content that I've built up over the past 15-odd months), I'll switch over.
Josh Baxter at Freedom for Fission has switched the Freedom for Fission blog over to Blogger Beta, and there are no discernable problems with it. However, there are a number of differences between that blog and this one, mainly that this blog is published on an external server instead of BlogSpot and is bigger, which would cause this blog to run into problems. In any event, I don't want to risk it. Not yet.


"Blessed are the early-adopters, for they sacrifice their companies for the sake of the sector."


posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:17 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes has gone to court to stop DOE from reclassifying high-level nuclear wastes at the site as "wastes incidental to reprocessing," thus avoiding more stringent safety controls."


-Concerned Citizens of Cattaraugus County

Isn't that classification kinda correct, though?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:11 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Friday, November 10, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"In light of this NRC finding, it is now time for Con Edison to stop charging its customers for the utility’s mismanagement of the [Indian Point nuclear] plant. Con Edison is passing on to customers the added costs of the power resulting from the shut down of the plant. This must stop."


-Eliot Spitzer

So he wants them to have a financial incentive to start the plant before it's ready?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:11 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Thursday, November 09, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"From the very first chain reaction on nuclear power was closely connected to military aims."


-No Nukes Inforesource

Even though it hadn't been invented yet, and those "military aims" ended up being submarine engines.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:41 AM | 2 comments links to this post

Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The Department of Energy [Turkey] very well knows that it is possible to supply energy for the city using alternative energy sources. Moreover, it can even use Black Sea’s powerful breath to feed the national system."


-TOURISTIC SINOP AGAINST RADIOACTIVE SINOP!

I know it's unfair to quote a translation, but that's just too good to pass up.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:56 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Southern Nuclear Company of Georgia wants to build additional nuclear power plants near Waynesboro. This would increase the negative health impacts on nearby residents and increase the cost of electric power."


-BREDL

1. In order to increase health impacts, there have to be health impacts from the ones that are there. In order for the ones that are there to have health impacts, they must introduce some health-impacting agent into the environment beyond what is already there. They do not.
2. What's the cost of dying from coal fumes?
3. Nuclear power plants do initially increase electric bills because they cost money. Everything does, and everything will initially increase electric bills. However, a gas plant will increase electric bills over the life of the plant, whereas a nuclear plant will increase electric bills initially and then dramatically decrease them (or the margin provided by the nuclear plant will be used to prop up gas plants and windmills, preventing an increase).
The question here is: do we want to think long-term? Or should we pretend that businesses get money from the sky? Paradoxically, allowing utilities to increase electric bills to build plants--perhaps in combination with not allowing them to increase electric bills to buy fuel--will reduce long-term costs.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:23 AM | 10 comments links to this post

Monday, November 06, 2006
NIOF.org Update #45

I finally got around to cleaning up the server after the recent site overhauls. Turns out I missed a few things.

1. The error pages (401, 403, 404, 500) have been reformatted and now extend to the news section.
2. The search function has been slightly modified and reformatted.
3. The about, site admins, contact info, site history, site policies, and legal notices pages have had minor updates and complete reformatting.
4. The contribute-an-article function has been rewritten and reformatted.
5. Major additions and formatting changes have been made to the mailing lists page.
6. Ban the Banana has been reformatted.
7. The humor index has been overhauled.
8. More light bulb jokes have been added, in addition to a new page on knock-knock jokes. Both pages are in the new format.
9. The page about peer review of John Gofman has been reformatted and retitled.
10. The A/V Library has been overhauled to reflect two new podcasts and NEI's use of video.
11. The page on the Gofman Award has been updated and reformatted.
12. The press release index has been updated.
13. The page on books has been replaced.
14. The page on news feeds has also been completely overhauled and moved to the news side of the site.
15. The page about our sole appearance in the press has been reformatted.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:09 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"While it has lost all justification, the French plutonium industry still imposes a network of high risk transport on the entire population."


-UnWISE

Justification? To stop wasting plutonium, perhaps (or rather to waste less of it, given the antiquated technology that they're using)?

Using data from the 1950s (when there was no operating experience), they have rather unsurprisingly come up with a conclusion from la-la land. None of these predictions have ever happened--and in fact, many have been confirmed to be false by observing the effects of actual accidents!

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:08 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Sunday, November 05, 2006
It's That Time of Year Again

It's time to nominate your favorite nut for the Dr. John Gofman Nuclear Pseudoscience Award! To quote the NIOF Awards page,



"The Dr. John Gofman Nuclear Pseudoscience Award is handed out annually to the anti-nuclear person or group that has shown exemplary performance in the areas of statistical fiddling, misrepresentation, bad editing, dimensional inconsistency, crankiness, quotability, misuse or misunderstanding of the scientific method, conspiracy speculation, politicization of science, and general inanity."



Please submit your nominations here.

Here's to more nominations than last year.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:20 PM | 1 comments links to this post

NIOF.org Update #44

1. In response to 350+ spam posts on the discussion board in the past few days, I have disabled guest posting and enabled email verification for new members. The board is also no longer listed on InvisionFree's directory. If anyone disagrees with this decision, please comment here.
2. The newsletters have been reformatted to match the rest of the site and fix a few bugs (featured product picture, time stamp). Apparently there was no featured product for July 2006 and I repeated the Infant Creeper, which I had not realized. Anyway:
3. The hit counter bug described on Friday has been fixed.
4. Regarding the store, I am told there will be 25% off thingamajigs (round and oval) and greeting cards from November 6-19, 20% off calendars from November 20-December 3, and free ground shipping on orders of $50 or more from November 16-December 20. I fixed a couple of typos in the descriptions, discontinued the Women's Junior Ringer T-Shirt (because they won't let me put Go Nuclear on it) and the black cap and license plate frame (because they look awful), and replaced the Go Nuclear Top 10 with Go Nuclear on all items except the tote bag, messenger bag, calendar, mini poster print, and large poster print. The Go Nuclear Top 10 Infant/Toddler T-Shirt now reads "Go Nuclear...For Me" like the bib and infant creeper, several different color options are available on many items, mini buttons (1, 10, and 100 packs) and round magnets (1, 10, and 100 packs) now read "Go Nuclear," full-size buttons (1, 10, and 100 packs) now read "Vote Nuclear," rectangular magnets (1, 10, and 100 packs), the clock, the mugs (small and large) and the journal now read "Go Nuclear," and I've added Go Nuclear women's long-sleeved t-shirts, and black "this is your planet on coal" women's t-shirts, long-sleeved t-shirts, and women's long-sleeved t-shirts. The NIOF web address on the backs of the shirts etc. has been redone in a new font, and all available printing options are offered, as well. Custom postage is out of stock. [deep breath] Eventually, I hope to offer multiple choices on each item and integrate the store into the main site. If time and my lack of Photoshop skills allow, I would try:
-A picture of Chernobyl and a simple question (Magneto font?) along the lines of "since when do nuclear explosions go up to half a building and stop?" followed by "Chernobyl was a steam explosion."
-Increased use of the "Pro-Nuclear Environmentalist" design. A major restriction on this design was the fact that Paint does not allow dragging or resizing past the edge of the screen, so this design is fairly low-resolution. I would have to redo it.
-Using the full potential of the black t-shirt and items such as the bumper sticker and buttons (which can be any color). "Asthmatics for Coal" might be a good parody of the semi-popular "Mutants for Nuclear," and I'd like to put "this is your planet on coal" on more items.
-"No Cokes" buttons and magnets (actually Ruth Sponsler's idea and Jeremy Whitlock's picture. If either have any objections, I won't do this.)
-A picture of a nuclear power plant, ideally from the air, that shows how small the footprint actually is.
-Doing something helpful with the license plate frame.
-Doing something helpful with the clock, such as "time is running out for a clean energy future" or a history of energy.
-A sarcastic t-shirt--for example, "Why do you oppose nuclear power? The lowest accident rate of any industry in history? The zero emissions? Entire pounds of solid waste? Consuming bomb materials? Low cost? Highest reliability of any power source? Independence from foreign oil for electricity?" (perhaps formatted as a fake ballot?), although this might be too confrontational.
-Perhaps a ballot-type formatted shirt on the 1980 Swedish referendum?
-"Nukes: What Are They Good For?" followed by a list. This would probably be best on a poster.
-(Probably on a black t-shirt and probably capitalized as follows) "burning coal is like playing russian roulette with a semiautomatic pistol."
-"Ask Me About Nuclear Power" (probably on clothing).
-"Another Radioactive Environmentalist" (remember Jerry Brown in 1992).
-"got nukes? we do:" followed by a list of countries and US states with nuclear power plants
-Items with Lovins' and Ehrlich's quotes on energy use
-???
[A note to the reader who suggested a blue Pro-Nuclear Environmentalist T-Shirt as a part of Rod Adams' new whole ecology initiative: I'd love to do it, but CafePress doesn't have blue as an option.]

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:17 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"It was not understood for many years exactly how dangerous radioactive waste was and that long-term disposal would be so intractable."


-Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, p.17

It was assumed that they would be allowed to process spent fuel rods to remove the waste instead of treating the entire fuel rod as waste. Since spent fuel rods are only 3% waste, we've used over 30 times more uranium than necessary, with a proportional increase in the "waste problem." If uranium mining were to stop today, and this processing were allowed, the US could generate all of its power for the next 500 years from this "waste."

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:39 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Saturday, November 04, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"We would suggest one small edit [to a Middle Powers Initiative press release] which is to advocate that North Korea (and all members of the nuclear club) become a "non-nuclear state" not just a "non-nuclear weapons state" since, as we know, one thing only leads to another and leaving the commercial technlogy [sic] in place simply leaves a door ajar that needs to be slammed shut."


-Beyond Nuclear

Apparently the distinction between splitting atoms of weapons-grade plutonium instead of making new ones is lost on them, as is the difference between weapons-grade plutonium and the plutonium found in nuclear reactors, or the fact that light-water reactors use enrichment capacity which otherwise could be diverted, or the fact that an IFR is essentially proliferation-proof, or the fact that civilian reprocessing technology (as opposed to converted military-surplus technology) does not separate plutonium, or the fact that no process exists to turn non-weapons-grade plutonium into weapons-grade plutonium, or the fact that a fuel cycle optimized for the extraction of one or two isotopes is inherently different from one that is optimized for electricity, etc.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:28 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Friday, November 03, 2006
NIOF.org Update #43

Some of you may have noticed some changes.

1. The newsletter subscription box at the top right of the blog home page is now a simple box instead of a green rectangle.
2. Everything but the About and Previous sections now appears only on the home page and archive pages.
3. I've transferred the old text-format newsletters into HTML format, and modified the index accordingly. Yes, they will be reformatted, but I have a zillion other things to do as well.
4. There is now a second box in the top right of the blog home page. This is to receive new posts daily via email. (via FeedBlitz, hat tip NEI)
5. "Important: Comment Policy" has been edited down to a simple hyperlink over the word "comment" in the About section.
6. I cleaned up some of the code to make it a bit faster to download.
7. Sidebar buttons added: "BF DIRECTORY," "RSS SUBSCRIBE," email subscriber counter, "+BLOG FLUX."
8. The hit counter has been replaced with better code that allows me to track which pages got the hits and from where (instead of simply how many there were). The hit counter only appears on the home page and archive pages; an invisible version will be on the post pages once I get one last bug out of it (The picture heading the top of the sidebar is moved over about 40-60px to the left on the post pages whenever the combined text and comments extend below the Previous section. Beats me, although the bug is definitely in the hit counter.). Previous site statistics are available at the "archive" link next to the hit counter.
9. There's now a copyright notice on the bottom of each page (identical to that on the main site).

I also wish to repeat my request from October 15th: if anyone has tried to use the Nuclear Advocacy Webring code and not succeeded, please tell me what problems you had with it so that I can correct them. I don't want to distribute code that doesn't work; that doesn't help anyone.

Finally, following Rod Adams' problems with his RapLeaf code, I'd like to just confirm that everything looks right. Please comment (with details!) if something looks strange; again, there's no point doing this if it doesn't work for you.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:28 PM | 0 comments links to this post

October 2006 Newsletter

I have just submitted it. I am told that it will be sent at around 3:00 AM, although I have no control over when it is in fact sent. If you have not subscribed, you can find it on the internet here, and/or subscribe using the box in the top right corner of the blog home page.

The bold text bug from last month is gone. Everything seems to be fine now; please comment here if you find a problem.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:24 PM | 0 comments links to this post

TVA to Attempt Watts Bar 2 Completion

via the Huntsville Times, confirming a commenter from a while back.

Hat tip: NEI.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:23 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"All anyone needs to do is toss a grenade into a Spent Fuel Pool and hundreds of thousands or even MILLIONS could die."


-Russell Hoffman

1. It'd be interesting to see how someone could toss a grenade into a spent fuel pool.
2. It'd be really interesting to see how that grenade could have any effect.
3. It'd be really interesting to see how the spent fuel rods, stored in a rack at the bottom of an ordinary pool of water, would magically grow feet and leave upon the appearance of a grenade.

Many things that people assume about nuclear power are due to a combination of a lack of education and an understandable reluctance to apply common sense to something that sounds exotic. As a consequence, nuclear power gets far too much credit from people on both sides of the debate.
Yes, you can apply common sense to nuclear issues. I beg you to do so.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:15 PM | 1 comments links to this post

Thursday, November 02, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Abolition 2000 UK condemns and deeply regrets the nuclear weapons test conducted yesterday by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). We call upon all states to adhere to the terms of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and upon those states who have not yet ratified the treaty to do so without delay to permit its entry into final legal force. Nuclear tests, whether overground or underground, are intrinsically dangerous, politically destabilising and environmentally destructive. They should cease for ever."


-Abolition 2000 UK

On the other hand, that's one more they can't use on us, South Korea, or Japan. Nuclear tests are politically destabilizing when foreign governments overreact to them, and aren't necessarily environmentally destructive (at least not immediately, and there are a range of effects instead of doom).

They're also a waste of perfectly good plutonium, and the inefficient separation process used to isolate it wastes a lot of uranium, as well as producing liquid nuclear waste.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:06 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"I can't speak to smoking except to say that most cigarrette [sic] smoke contains Polonium-210, an alpha-emitter. I would like to know what percentage part it plays in the lung cancers so pervasive among smokers."


-'aryatara'

I see. Radiation causes lung cancer in smokers. And it causes cancer in people who live in industrial waste cesspools like Ukraine and New Jersey. But it doesn't cause cancer in airline pilots, who get more radiation than anyone else (including nuclear workers).

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:25 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Link: http://blog.niof.org/2006_11_01_archive.html