Nuclear power, on PBS with Online Newshour, May 22, 2001
MARGARET WARNER: Daniel Hirsch, your view of the president's proposals?
DANIEL HIRSCH: I was shocked. I found that one of the most extreme statements I have heard on nuclear energy -- nuclear is among the most dangerous energies on Earth. The amount of radioactivity in a reactor core is so large that if there were an accident, it could cause hundreds of thousands of casualties. The wastes are so dangerous that they'll be dangerous for half a million years and each reactor produces 10 tons of plutonium over its lifetime when it takes over a few pounds to make a nuclear weapon. In each of those areas the president's proposals would make matters worse.
He wants to relicense aging reactors so that they would operate 60 years - way beyond their designed safety life. I don't know anyone that would get on a airplane that was built in 1941 and even more so true for reactors.
He wants to reprocess and take plutonium out of the spent fuel and create a plutonium economy which could greatly increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, and they want to relax the standard for disposing of the high level waste because they know that the facility isn't safe enough to get licensed so they want to lower the bar to have a chance to be able to license it and that means tens of thousands of generations of people coming down with cancer from the leaking radioactive waste.
[....]
MARGARET WARNER: All right. Mr. Hirsch, a brief reply on just the waste issue and the Bush plan in particular, how it addresses it.
DANIEL HIRSCH: Well, we have heard these promises from the industry over and over again; they said you could dump the radioactive waste in the ocean, that it wouldn't get out of the barrels, but it turned out the barrels imploded before reaching the bottom. They said you could dispose of much of this waste by burying it in the ground and it wouldn't migrate for 10,000 years and all six of the low level waste dumps in the country leaked within a few -
MARGARET WARNER: But let's talk abut the Bush plan.
DANIEL HIRSCH: Under the Bush proposal, he's sending a very clear signal that this facility - Yucca Mountain -- can't meet safety standards and he's directing the government to relax those standards that would permit doses to maximally expose a person ten thousand times higher than the maximum does that is permitted for someone to be able to -
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Also, Don Kosloff provided some interesting insights you may be able to find in Radsafe archives ( see Friday November 03, 2000 12:44 AM, Subject: Re: U.S. "expert" recently showed up Downunder )