Reply #19: Responding to some of the posters who are touting nuclear safety [View All]

[Hekate]

San Luis Obispo has a nuclear power plant...right on a fault line, close to the sea.

It's a hundred miles north of where I live, and as of the last post-911 documentary on PBS that I saw, storage happens in these holding ponds....

None of it sounds too awfully secure to me, nor to anyone else who has ever contemplated an earthquake or small aircraft crash. I have a friend who used to live in SLO and spent a lot of time with other people trying to stop the damn thing from being built in the first place.

The last time I "believed in" nuclear energy was a long, long time ago. It all sounded like such a good idea, until I realized there was waste, a lot of it.

I live in an uncommonly beautiful area, blessed in many ways, but very vulnerable to both Nature and human activity. Fires and earthquakes are a fact of life here, just as floods and tornadoes are in other parts of the country. Then there's that nuclear plant. And we are only about 40 miles away from an Air Force base that turns out to be the hub of the electronics and satellite network for the entire military, plus they shoot off test missiles fairly regularly. Because of these two installations a lot of unmentionable stuff gets shipped up and down US 101 -- only half a mile from my doorstep, as it happens -- and that's not as safe as some seem to think, either. US 101 intermittently gets pinched off here by fire, flood (mudslide), train wreck... Oh yeah, we had a massive oil spill here in 1969, very famous, although that was actually probably not the worst thing the oil companies have done to this region.

I'm just sayin' that over the past 30 years that I've lived here I've had cause to contemplate both the fragility of living in paradise and the cost of energy.

I understand that every type of energy usage results in some form of waste, be it only dead batteries and their toxics. However, some wastes are infinitely worse than others.

We don't "need" to build any more nuclear plants. We already HAVE the technology to create mass quantities of cheap, safe energy from sun and wind. "Cheap" however may be the biggest stumbling block to getting this implemented so that it's affordable to the average homeowner, because there's so much money still to be made from the old ways. The reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt needs to make this a #1 federal government priority, or it will not happen no matter how bad things get.

In my opinion, we don't "need" to build any more nuclear plants. Period.

Hekate