by Richard Prudhomme

Created on: October 03, 2008

Nuclear, clean energy?

The on-going crisis in nuclear waste management in safety and in economic costs have severly undermined the industries credibility. The nuclear industry is promoting the claim that as power stations do not emit Carbon Dioxide CO2, the major greenhouse gas producer. The cost of building and maintaining a nuclear power plant is not cheap, case in point, the last nuclear power plat built in Ontario went billions of dollars over budget.

Harvesting Uranium is amoung the most oil-intensive mining operations. Huge operations are undertaking while searching and extracting the fuel from earth. Exploration and mining of Uranium release radioactive substances into the air, water and soil over long distances. Exploration drill holes act as chimeneys to vent Radon gas from deep underground into the air. Dispersal of radon gaz into the atmosphere deposit solid radioactive particles hundred of kilometers downwind from the drill or mine site. Radon released in massive quantities into the air and dissolve in surface waters, is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States according to the U.S. Surgeon General.

Only 1 percent of uranium ore mined is used up as fuel in a nuclear plant. 85 percent ends up as radioactive mine trailings. Another 14 percent becomes nuclear reactor waste, assuming it is used in a nuclear power plants. Mining trailings remain radioactive for thousands of years.

The Serpent river system was contaminated with radium nearly 100 kilometers downstream form abondaoned uranium mines at Elliot Lake in northern Ontario. Fibroses of the lungs, cancer and other lung diseases have taken a huge toll on Uranium miners. Uranium exploration and mining is a dangereous business. Uranium is a highly unstable mineral which continually breaks down or decays, into what is known as decay products. As uranium decays, it emits intense bursts of energy known as atomic radiation, its decay products, which are both solid and gaseous, are also radioactive.

While attempting to act as the planets nuclear watchdogs, the USA and Great Britan have become two of the world's largest cancer causing radiated dust and rusty depleted uranium polluters. Using tanks and planes, the US and British military have fired hundred of tons of radioactive depleted uranium munitions DU while fighting the first Gulf war the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ironically, while firing this nuclear by-product all over Iraq, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia, both Britan and US regularly critized and put finacial or political pressure on Iran, north Korea and Pakinstan for developing nuclear weapons. Expanded DU debris is a permanent terrain contaminant with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. The half-life of a radioactive element is the time it takes for half of it's atoms to decay into something else.

Depleted uranium remains radioactive for literallly billions of years, and over these long periods of time it will continue to produce radioactive decay products, thus depleted uranium actually becomes more radioactive as the centeries and milleniums go by because these decay products accumulate.

There is no concrete aanswer to whether or not a nation should should develop nuclear power as a major energy source. In Canada's case though, there is no reason to develop nuclear power. Around 60 percent of our electricity powered by our vast hydroelectic dams.

Learn more about this author, Richard Prudhomme.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.