No, McCain, Don't!

On the right leaning blog, Free Republic, I found an article entitled, McCain On Nukes: Yes We Can. No author is attributed to the piece and the byline reads INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY. The article explains – and I use that term loosely – why nuclear energy is safe and how much efficient energy Americans are missing out on because of nearly thirty years of government leaders refusing to allow many of the procedures involved with the complicated process of nuclear fission. Although the anonymous author never presents their personal expertise in the fields of say, electrical engineering or nuclear chemistry, they are clearly appealing to those constituents who rightly suspect that something about nuclear reactors might be dangerous.
To support his claim of safe nuclear energy, the author quotes Senator John McCain and William Tucker, “author of the just-published book Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Long Energy Odyssey.” The last I heard, John McCain graduated from the bottom of his class at a military institute. This does not qualify him to know anything but what he’s told about nuclear energy. From the ridiculous lies I’ve heard him spout during the presidential debates, the advisors shaping his energy policy never studied any form of science, either.
One example is McCain’s claim that nuclear energy does not produce carbon dioxide emissions. This statement is intentionally misleading and grossly negligent.
In the simplest terms, nuclear power is a really complicated means of boiling water. While nuclear fission does not produce CO2 during the decomposition of notoriously unstable Uranium-238, McCain’s “no carbon footprint” statement conveniently disregards how the U-238 came to be above ground and at the luxurious swimming pool (a.k.a. nuclear reactor) constructed using huge government subsidies. In 2005 alone, the U.S. Congress allocated thirteen billion dollars in subsidies to revive a moribund nuclear power industry. (Those thirteen billion dollars were not funding the construction of new reactors, mind you. It was money to keep the current reactors afloat because nuclear energy is not financially competitive with oil, natural gas, coal, wind, solar, or geothermal energy production. The cost of maintaining safety at a nuclear reactor around the clock is too prohibitive for nuclear to be feasible, economically, without the aforementioned huge government subsidies.)
Helen Caldicott, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and antinuclear activist, contends in her book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, that “large amounts of traditional fossil fuels are required to mine and refine the uranium needed to run nuclear power reactors, to construct the massive concrete reactor buildings, and to transport and store the toxic radioactive waste created by the nuclear process.”
Our mystery author then attempts to debunk Senator Barack Obama’s, former President Jimmy Carter’s, and Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s stances that nuclear energy should not be used “until it’s proved to be ‘safe and clean.’” Citing no other source but Tucker, and failing to give Tucker’s credentials qualifying him to expound on nuclear safety, the author implies that what scientists view as radioactive nuclear waste “means jobs, clean air, energy independence and keeping money here at home.” Caldicott and Dr. Carl H. Snyder argue that the environmental impact of nuclear energy is far reaching. Nuclear waste continues to be radioactive for over five hundred thousand years after it has ceased to be suitable for reactors. The only plan for containment of nuclear waste generated in the United States is burial at Yucca Mountain with the hope that the sealed metal containers will never rust or breach, unleashing the unbridled and insidious force that is Uranium – an element nature intended to live its long, unstable life deep within the crust of the earth and safely removed from living things with skin, DNA, or a digestive tract, just to name a few. (The 500,000 years statistic comes from Dr. Snyder, author of one of my favorite textbooks and available in the ACC Library, The Extraordinary Chemistry of Ordinary Things.)
The author criticizes Sen. Reid, by the way, for repeatedly refusing to store the waste we’ve already generated beneath a mountain in his home state of Nevada. A logical person might wonder why anyone would think to bury metal containers deep in the earth with the intention they would never corrode or leak. The answer is that when the American government uncorked the nuclear genie in the sixties, they assumed that by the time we accumulated enough waste to be of concern to Americans’ safety, science would have already figured out a way to magically de-radioactivate the leftovers a half million years ahead of schedule. We all know what happens when a person assumes. . .
Even though McCain On Nukes is a scant two pages, there is too much disinformation to be addressed in anything but a research paper. The EDUCATED bottom line, folks: When someone starts preaching about the safety of nuclear reactors, be afraid and be very afraid. The author's bottom line: "Let's split atoms and not hairs."