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Is nuclear power the answer to global warming?

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Yes
38% 236 votes Total: 627 votes
No
62% 391 votes

by Paul Taylor

Created on: January 15, 2009

Nuke Global Warming

It is high time that the green axis of antagonism stop its obsessive obstructions of future growth and prosperity. Big green nonprofit groups routinely invest massive idle assets in offshore hedge funds and private equity. Green groups grew from 2,000 to over 4,000 during the 1990s. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy in 2007, eco-nonprofits in the US received about $1.5 billion in untaxed revenues to spew global warming propaganda. Environmentalists' fascination with unproven and inadequate alternative energies must give way to massive expansion in nuclear power plants - solar power operates at 25% efficiency on an annual basis, while nuclear power operates at 85% efficiency. Perhaps as many as 150 new nuclear power plants would be built in the US in this century. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /

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The US and other industrialized countries are still using 19th Century electric power generation technologies in the 21st Century. In the US, only 4% of the nation's electricity is generated by oil, compared with 52% by coal, 15% by natural gas, 19% by nuclear reactors and less than 10% by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, hydroelectric, etc. Today, 103 nuclear power plants account for 19% of the US electric power supply. One half of the US uranium that powers those plants comes from recycled Russian nuclear weapons Cold War disarmaments. There are 430 nuclear power plants operating in 31 countries worldwide. The energy from one pound of uranium is equivalent to 1.3 million pounds of coal energy. Nuclear power produces none of the greenhouse gases associated with global warming.

The 1986 nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine spread radioactivity over Europe and despair in the Western world's nuclear industry. However, some countries never lost their enthusiasm for nuclear power. Nuclear provides 80% of French electricity, and some developing countries have continued to build nuclear plants. But elsewhere in the West, Chernobyl, along with the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, sent the industry into a decline. The public got scared. The regulatory environment tightened, raising nuclear power costs. Billions were spent bailing out nuclear power companies. The industry became a metaphor for mendacity, secrecy and profligacy with taxpayer money. For two decades neither governments nor bankers wanted to touch it. Now nuclear power has a second chance. Its

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