From: Dickey, Michael F (michael_f_dickey@groton.pfizer.com)
Date: Mon Feb 03 2003 - 07:52:34 MST
-----Original Message-----
From: Kai Becker [mailto:kmb@kai-m-becker.de]
> one needs to be skeptical of claims of a golden clean energy age.
Sure. But we have seen, how the massive use of tax money can push even a
technology as uneconomical as nuclear fission into a kind of virtual
profitability.
Kai
--------------------
Approximate Thermal Energy release
Coal - ~6150 kilowatt-hours(kWh)/ton
Uranium - 2 x 10E9 kWh/ton
What, exactly, makes a material with nearly 1 million times as much
energy as coal 'uneconomical' Is uranium 1 million times more difficult to
mine and obtain? I don't think so. Is uranium 1 million times more
expensive to transport, process, and use than coal? Nope again. It is the
regulating and limitations placed on Nuclear power by politicians and scared
ignorant luddite laymen who perpetuate this nonsense, and subsequently
endorse coal power, natural gas power, etc etc which kill far more people
every year than nuclear energy has ever killed in its entire existence.
Coal mining is still (and always has been) the single most dangerous
occupation. Tankers full of LNG have the explosive capacity of a nuclear
bomb, and they sit in ports with single hulled tanks. Natural gas leaks and
fires kill some 1,000 people in the US alone every year. It is estimated
that thousands of people die every year from the inhalitation of air
pollution particulates caused from fossil fuel combustion, the largest
source of which are coal and oil burning power plants. Greens profess that
the CO2 released by such combustion is contributing a human caused global
climate change, which could cause millions of deaths in 3rd world countries
through famine. This luddite propoganda hijacked the natural tendancy of
technological progress to produce safer and more economical energy
production mechanisms and destroyed the growth of a nuclear power based
industry, and has instead forced the most energy intensive nations (which
also produce the majority of the worlds food supply) to rely on oil imports
from corrupt despotic theocratic murderous regimes. So the anti-nuclear
activists not only caused global warming, but directly contributed to the
global instability and rise to power of middle eastern oil controlling
murderers, and subseqnetly set in action the events leading to the Gulf War
and the likely upcoming war with Iraq. Your perpetuation of this
anti-nuclear nonsense contributes to these deaths and is anti-extropian in
the extreme. Your preconcieved idealogy of 'nuclear bad' flies in the face
of reason and logic, and is killing people. More energy is present in the
uranium left over in coal ash than was generated by the burning of the
billions of tons of coal that produced that ash. Not to mention, coal does
not spontaneoulsy combust into CO2 and H20, but Uranium, whether mined or
not, is still going to decay radioactively and produce energy in the
process.
Michael Dickey
"Consequently, the energy content of nuclear fuel released in coal
combustion is more than that of the coal consumed! Clearly, coal-fired power
plants are not only generating electricity but are also releasing nuclear
fuels whose commercial value for electricity production by nuclear power
plants is over $7 trillion, more than the U.S. national debt. This figure is
based on current nuclear utility fuel costs of 7 mils per kWh, which is
about half the cost for coal. Consequently, significant quantities of
nuclear materials are being treated as coal waste, which might become the
cleanup nightmare of the future, and their value is hardly recognized at
all."
http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
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