Letter to the Denver Mayor’s Climate Plan Committee
The inclusion of nuclear power as a part of the Denver Climate Action Plan is ill-advised for the following reasons.
- Nuclear power plants are very expensive to build and cannot be put on line quickly enough to halt the human carbon footprint in time to prevent predicted disaster. The carbon footprint for the construction is never taken into account by the proponents of nuclear power. Neither is the carbon footprint of the production of nuclear fuel, and its transport around the globe or the decomissioning of used up plants at the end of their operation.
- Nuclear power plants are terrorist targets. Every one built creates a new opportunity for them.
- The more nuclear power plants built, the higher probability for a serious accident(s) arise. Two fires in German plants and the earthquake damage to Japan's largest plant occurred recently within a two week period. Chernyobl was not as bad as it can get in terms of accidents. The cost of "insuring" folks subject to massive accidents or other liability is born by the taxpayer under the Price Anderson Act and is never included in the true costs of nuclear power production.
- The waste management of "spent" fuel rods is one issue everyone agrees is problematic, but many toss it aside as a problem nuclear technologists will soon remediate with some cinderella scheme. This has been promised for decades but never achieved. High level, lethal nuclear waste is generated in the refinement and reprocessing of nuclear fuels. In is in liquid, acidic form and currently is "stored" in large metalic containers that have been shown to be leaking into both the Savannah River and the Columbia River. The Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration haven't a clue what to do with this waste from reprocessing in the long or short term. Look no further than the poorly chosen Yucca Mountain storage site to see how feeble are their pool of solutions for any current nuclear fuel rods. And if Yucca were to be opened today, and all the current waste from nuclear power production were to be instantly moved there, it would be full tomorrow. Denver residents should specifically take note of the ways that nuclear waste materials have been handled under the cloak of secrecy for the past 50 years. Just three feet below the surface at Rocky Flats remain lots of dangerous nuclear waste which erosion will eventually expose. The major newsmedia has for whatever reason also covered over the illegal disposal of material dumping from bomb production elsewhere in the Metro Denver area. Many of the long term costs (tens of thousands of years!) of nuclear waste management are not included in price of nuclear power.
- "Spent" fuel rods actually contain material suitable for the production of nuclear bombs. The world is already awash in radioactive bomb making material and the controls for keeping this out of the hands of persons with nefarious goals are weak.
- While the actual production of power is carbon free at nuclear plants, their operation does add considerable heat to the environment that is absorbed in its cooling mechanisms--and added to the general amount of heat in our atmosphere.
- Since nuclear power and nuclear weapons are closely related and therefore managed under a cloak of secrecy and corporate news manipulation, the public is kept ignorant of the actual costs and dangers it presents. At the same time government money is expended to sell it as a "climate change remedy". Secrecy is the death of democracy and of an intelligent search for solutions to problems.
My "authority" for making the above claims is the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability including all those who have been watch-dogging the Department of Energy for decades. Many of them have strong technical and analytical credentials that have kept my eyes as wide open as possible in the fog of secrecy and promotion that shrouds these issues.
Sincerely,
Bob Kinsey
