Occupy Nukes Day of Action Remembers Hiroshima and Calls for End to Nuclear Power

[bananas]

http://ecowatch.org/2012/occupy-nukes/

Occupy Nukes Day of Action Remembers Hiroshima and Calls for End to Nuclear Power

08-06-2012

Occupy Wall Street Environmental Solidarity Group
Occupy San Francisco
Occupy Santa Fe
(Un)Occupy Albuquerque

Today, Aug. 6, will be a day of solemn remembrance of those who suffered and perished in one of the most horrific and genocidal war crimes ever committed—the dropping of the atomic bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima in 1945, equal only to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki three days later.

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We further recognize that nuclear weapons have a bastard twin—nuclear power.

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Today, people power challenges nuclear power. The Occupy Movement stands in solidarity with those threatened, poisoned and murdered the globe over by the 1%’s nuclear-fueled rule.

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Occupy Nukes demonstrations will be held at:

• 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, New York at 5:30 p.m

• Japanese Consulate at 50 Fremont St., San Francisco at 2 p.m.

• Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, all day.

Groups taking part in Occupy Nukes include: Occupy Wall Street Environmental Solidarity, (Un)Occupy Albuquerque, Occupy Santa Fe, Occupy SF Environmental Justice Working Group, Coalition Against Nukes, No Nukes Action, GreenAction for Health and Environmental Justice, Nuke Free Now!, War Resisters League, Catholic Worker Movement, Shut Down Indian Point Now!, Abolition 2000 NY Metro, Brooklyn for Peace, Pax Christi and Todos Somos Japon.

Visit EcoWatch’s NUCLEAR page for more related news on this topic.

[PamW]

1. ..you forgot the demonstration at LLNL

In addition to a demonstration at Los Alamos; the Occupy San Francisco crowd also demonstrated at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. When they attempted to "foreclose" on LLNL; they got all of 4 people arrested:

http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_21244182/four-arrested-nuclear-weapons-protest-at-livermore-lab

As per usual, there was ZERO effect on the Lab or its operations.

Today, August 8; Lawrence Livermore hosted a visit by President Obama's Science Advisor, John Holdren who addressed the employees and assured them of the Administration's continued support.

Joining Dr. Holdren were Congressmen Pete Stark and Zoe Lofgren expressing their support for the nuclear energy programs under development at LLNL, as they did in this Washington hearing:

PamW

[bananas]

2. The arrests at LLNL were posted in LBN on Monday

Thanks for mentioning them!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014186467

And that video of Holdren is about fusion, not fission - very different.

[Confusious]

3. Somewhat the same thing

Fusion reactions would create a large of amount of high energy neutrons, which would then fly into a blanket of lithium, creating fuel to continue the reaction.

the process creates nuclear waste, so I figure you would be against it.

[bananas]

4. Not even close. nt

[bananas]

5. As wikipedia points out...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Safety_and_the_environment

There is no possibility of a catastrophic accident in a fusion reactor resulting in major release of radioactivity to the environment or injury to non-staff, unlike modern fission reactors. ...

Fusion reactors are extremely safe in this sense, and it makes them favorable over fission reactors ...

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Waste management

The large flux of high-energy neutrons in a reactor will make the structural materials radioactive. The radioactive inventory at shut-down may be comparable to that of a fission reactor, but there are important differences.

The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tend to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly. Unlike fission reactors, whose waste remains radioactive for thousands of years, most of the radioactive material in a fusion reactor would be the reactor core itself, which would be dangerous for about 50 years, and low-level waste another 100. Although this waste will be considerably more radioactive during those 50 years than fission waste, the very short half-life makes the process very attractive, as the waste management is fairly straightforward. By 300 years the material would have the same radioactivity as coal ash.[40]

Additionally, the choice of materials used in a fusion reactor is less constrained than in a fission design, where many materials are required for their specific neutron cross-sections. This allows a fusion reactor to be designed using materials that are selected specifically to be "low activation", materials that do not easily become radioactive. Vanadium, for example, would become much less radioactive than stainless steel. Carbon fiber materials are also low-activation, as well as being strong and light, and are a promising area of study for laser-inertial reactors where a magnetic field is not required.

In general terms, fusion reactors would create far less radioactive material than a fission reactor, the material it would create is less damaging biologically, and the radioactivity "burns off" within a time period that is well within existing engineering capabilities.


Nuclear proliferation

Although fusion power uses nuclear technology, the overlap with nuclear weapons technology is small. Tritium is a component of the trigger of hydrogen bombs, but not a major problem in production. The copious neutrons from a fusion reactor could be used to breed plutonium for an atomic bomb, but not without extensive redesign of the reactor, so that production would be difficult to conceal. The theoretical and computational tools needed for hydrogen bomb design are closely related to those needed for inertial confinement fusion, but have very little in common with the more scientifically developed magnetic confinement fusion.

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[Confusious]

6. Isn't one of your complaints nuclear waste?

And just think, instead of hundreds around the world, there could be thousands, since it's so safe.

Where are we going to store all that waste for 300 years?