Re: Alternative Health Risks Thread -Questions for Norman Cohen -Unplug Salem

[RadiumProj@cs.com]

In a message dated 5/1/00 4:58:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
norco@bellatlantic.net writes:

<<  I think the more pertinent point is
 that either we come up with international solutions to energy use and 
production
 or this planet will be in for more wars and famine  >>
==========
Norman:
An important point of agreement. What to do from here?
Back in early 1979 [a month or so before the TMI accident as I recall] all 
the leaders of the world's industrialized nations met for a summit 
conference. I recall that President Vallery Giscard D'Estaing [sp ?] of 
France severely criticized the US for failing to do what it was capable of 
doing to stop sucking up so much of the world's oil supply to the detriment 
of underdeveloped nations that needed it for fuel, fertilizer, and 
peterochemicals. France made a plea that if the US did not do it's share, 
poor nations would be crushed by the massive debt they were accumulating to 
buy whatever oil they
could afford at an inflated price.

France's position was that based on the US technical capabilities and 
infrastructure  on nuclear technology, it could be completing and building 
far more nuclear reactors for its domestic use --reactors that would drive 
down US oil imports by substituting electric energy from the atom for oil 
generated electricity and other uses of oil in our economy.

The US has failed miserably to do what it could have done in this regard.  We 
are importing more oil today than in 1979. We cancelled hundreds of planned 
nuclear reactors from 1974 forward that would have generated enough 
electricity to eliminate all oil imports today. We have squandered many many 
hundreds of billions of dollars. The folks who line up to gawk wide-eyed at 
electric cars on Earth Day celebrations never ask the basic question --Where 
is the electricity going to come from to power these cars if and when they 
can ever make them practical in price and range? It's not going to come from 
landfill methane, chicken manure,  biomass, windmills, etc. etc, etc.

After the TMI accident in 1979 France sent its top nuclear safety specialists 
to study, in detail, what the accident meant to its own plans to greatly 
expand its domestic nuclear capacity. French scientists returned home and 
informed their government that the major impact of the TMI accident was that 
PWR's of western design were safer than anyone had imagined due to inherent 
physical features that limit environmental releases even in the event of a 
core melt due to operator error and shutting off active safety systems.

Accordingly, France accelerated its nuclear power program since 1980 to the 
point where it now has something like  70 reactors operating in a country 
much smaller than the state of Texas. Because of its now installed nuclear 
capacity, France has been able to cut its imports of foreign oil 
dramatically, and is no longer "over the barrel' appeasing Arab oil interests 
to get the oil it formerly required. Before France developed its strong 
nuclear power generating base, it had to buy favor with various Arab nations 
to gain access to crude oil it needed at the time in a tight global market. 
The French sold the Iraqi's the Osirak nuclear reactor in the 1970s to buy 
favor with the Iraqis. The Germans sold the Iraqis the hot cells to extract 
plutonium from the the irradiated fuel the Iraqis planned to extract from the 
reactor and use to make atomic weapons for its planned empire building and to 
carry out its threats against Israel and the West. [If anyone wants to read a 
book which reads like a spy thriller on the events leading up to Israel's 
bombing of Osirak, they should read the book "First Strike" - by a former 
Israeli Chief of Security whose name I forget]. Does anyone think that if 
Israel had not destroyed the Osirak reactor [just before it went critical] in 
1979 or so, that Iraq would not have had nuclear bombs mounted on its 
missiles when it invaded Saudi Arabia --a fact which would have totally 
changed US options at the time and upset the global balance of power.  

France, a compact nations with a strong agricultural industry has found that 
nuclear energy reduces environmental impacts from  SO2, NOx, and  
particulates and has cut its C02 greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.  

If the US had done what France challenged it to do in early 1979 to expand 
its base of nuclear electric generation, the US would be a healthier, and 
strategically more secure nation than it is today. We would also be releasing 
significantly less C02 and would have led the world in reducing total 
greenhouse gas emissions. Numerous environmental groups who sit around at 
conferences and staged media events agonizing  over the steady increase in 
C02 in the atmosphere [or fossil fuel air pollution or varous types] and call 
for it to stop, cannot claim to be anything but deceiving themselves and the 
public if they think their supposed goal can be met without a much greater 
number of nuclear electric generating plants.

Stewart Farber, MS Public Health [Air Pollution Control]
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