The song “The Black Seam,” referenced below, is an artistic statement of objection to nuclear power.
Here are a few lines of lyrics:
One day in a nuclear age
They may understand our rage
They build machines that they can’t control
And bury the waste in a great big hole
I just made my hourly visit to the front page of CNN.com and was reminded that a guy named Stewart Brand is stumping for nuclear power. Who is Brand? He was the founder of Coevolutionary Quarterly, which became the Whole Earth Catalogue, which became pioneering internet area The Well, which became Salon.com. He is almost universally regarded as groovy.
Now Brand says things like nuclear power is “as clean as it could be,” and he believes that it’s an important part of the solution to climate change, because it doesn’t involve the burning of carbon.
As clean as could be? This guy needs to switch to crack. He’ll feel better, coming down off of whatever drug he’s on; probably plutonium. Nuclear power is clean — except for the waste. Which can be used for dirty bombs. Except for what happens when a plant leaks or melt down; and they ALL leak, and they can all melt down, I don’t care how good of a design it is. Heck, many are made by GE and Westinghouse, who can barely make an electrical transformer that doesn’t blow up.
Chernobyl’s design was particularly horrendous (there was no containment structure), and as I understand it, we have three of those kinds of graphite-cooled plants in the United States (none of them are commercial plants, however).
Yes, nuclear power is perfect, except: how do you tell people the stuff in that great big hole is toxic in 10,000 years? Most people today can’t even read script written 100 years ago. We think we’re going to be able to warn people off of radioactive waste in 100 centuries?