ENN news article

["Thomas J Savin " <tjsav@LYCOS.COM>]

Greetings Radsafers



I thought some of you would be interested in this.



Nuclear energy poised for a comeback



Wednesday, April 18, 2001

By John Roach





Vice President Dick Cheney believes that nuclear energy must be a part of the country’s long-term energy strategy. Pictured here, the Salem Unit 2 plant near Wilmington, Delaware. 



Blackouts roll across California. Icebergs calve in the Antarctic Peninsula. Salmon migrate via barges. Water creeps up on island nations. The United States wants energy. The Earth needs to cool down. 

Are nuclear reactors the answer? 



Vice President Dick Cheney thinks so. Cheney has jumped on the nuclear energy bandwagon as an answer to both the U.S.’s energy crisis and the world’s high fever. 



“If you want to do something about carbon dioxide emissions, then you ought to build nuclear power plants. They don’t emit any carbon dioxide. They don’t emit greenhouse gases,” Cheney said recently on MSNBC’s “Hardball” program. 



Cheney believes that greater use of nuclear energy must be a part of the country’s long-term energy strategy. Currently 20 percent of U.S. power is nuclear. If the Bush administration get its way, the figure will rise. 







Vice President Dick Cheney 

The administration touts nuclear energy as emission-free. As such, it is one way President George W. Bush's group can deal with global warming, a major thorn for the administation since it reneged on the Kyoto Protocol in March. 



Emission-free, perhaps, but nuclear energy is as hazardous and controversial today as it was 20 years ago, said Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C. 



“When you get outside of the Beltway and outside of the moneyed interests, there certainly remain concerns about nuclear waste, catastrophic accidents and proliferation of nuclear weapons material from this technology,” he said. 



Resurrection of the nuclear industry, the aim of a bill introduced in March by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, constitutes a resurgence in proliferation of nuclear weapons material, said Gunter. 



“Given that a domestic market won’t [support the industry], they are going to have to sell around the world,” he said. “What this poses is the threat of proliferation in terms of the number of holders of the basic building blocks of nuclear weapons.” 



Storage of nuclear waste is another issue of major concern. The Department of Energy has long studied the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada but hasn't decided if the location is suitable. 



Environmentalists point to the area’s volcanic and seismic activity as evidence against the site.





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Tom Savin





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