from Mark Robinowitz
www.oilempire.us
and
www.permatopia.com


re: more about thorium


Digging alpha emitting radioisotopes out of the Earth where geology, or God, or Jesus, or the Great Spirit, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (pick one, if you want) put it out of harms way is not a good idea for the long term genetic health of any species.

One of the many decay products of thorium is radium, which becomes radon gas, which can be breathed in very easily where it causes havoc on delicate lung tissue. I recommend reading about the death of Marie Curie (who was poisoned by experimenting with radium and related elements) or perhaps the plight of the Navajo uranium miners to understand what these materials do to biological systems. Alpha particles cannot pass through a sheet of paper or your skin, but if they get into your body they can cause tremendous damage to the cells next to the radioactive materials. Some of the decay products - such as radium - also emit gamma radiation that can go through lots of shielding, although they are less dangerous per unit dose than the alpha emitting isotopes.

All reactors - even thorium powered - create hundreds of new isotopes not found on Earth before the 20th century. There is no such thing as a safe dose of ionizing nuclear radiation. The "background" radiation does has roughly doubled since the nuclear era began, with a nuclear war's worth of radioactive waste still being babysat at reactors and waste storage sites all over the world. There is no way to detoxify nuclear waste to make it harmless, all that can be done is to stabilize it and hope for the best.

If you came home and your bathtub was overflowing, your reaction probably would not be to go to a hardware store to buy another bathtub. The only way to mitigate the nuclear waste problem is to stop making more of it since we have no idea how to cope with what has already been made.

I recommend the writings of:

Dr. John Gofman, Manhattan Project veteran who helped synthesize the first visible quantities of Pu-239. In the 1960s he was made assistant director of the Livermore Labs, and eventually realized that nuclear fission power was a crime against humanity. There's no substantial difference in the fission products of U-235 and Th-233.

Dr. Ernest Sternglass, who worked for Westinghouse until he realized that nuclear reactor pollution was killing people.

Dr. Alice Stewart, first scientist to document the medical effects of x-rays on fetuses. The medical establishment ridiculed her, but years later had to admit she was right (she had done her research properly) and now great care is usually taken to prevent or minimize medical x- rays for pregnant women.

there are many honest scientists others to choose from, but these are a good start.

The nuclear industry has had great motivation to hide the full truth about radiation health impacts, since that would interfere with reactor construction and operation (people might want to shut down their polluting facilities) and also it would expose the lies of a "limited nuclear war" marketed by the Pentagon for decades.

Boiling water with fission to generate electricity is like using a chainsaw to cut butter.

A thorium reactor could still be used to make nuclear weapons material if the reactor core is surrounded by natural uranium (u-238). The neutrons from the fission process could bombard the U-238, starting the transformation into Pu-239. Any government above the complexity level of Zimbabwe is probably capable of weaponizing Pu-239, or perhaps most transnational corporations.

Nuclear reactors require a police state to guard these materials.

The 1975 "Barton Report" from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission admitted that a police state would be needed to safeguard the nuclear materials if "reprocessing" was used to "recycle" nuclear fuels, specifically warning about the use of detention without trial and torture. Nuclear "recycling" is a euphemism for "reprocessing," the most toxic technology ever invented. It involves taking irradiated fuel rods - which are millions of times more radioactive after exposure in a reactor than before use - and dropping them into an acid to chemically separate out the fissionable materials for reuse. The leftover radioactive acids and solvents are the most dangerous materials ever invented. Some of the places unfortunate enough to have hosted this process include Hanford, Washington, Savannah River, South Carolina, La Hague, France, Chelyabinsk, Russia, to cite a few of the most famous (or notorious).

If you like the USA PATRIOT Act you will love the nuclear economy. Welcome to the future.

If we were a planet of peaceful robots nuclear fission might have some more validity, but DNA and ionizing radiation are incompatible and all reactors can give bomb materials to their operators.

As for James Hansen, world renowned climatologist, now supporting nuclear power, that shows the unfortunate situation where experts in one field can show themselves to be painfully limited in their understanding of other issues. Nuclear reactors require enormous fossil fuel inputs to construct, the fuel needs a lot of coal powered electricity to mine, mill, enrich and eventually babysit for centuries or millennia, reactors emit lots of heat that can disrupt local climates, and the "net energy" is negative if all of the externalities are considered. Hansen is right about climate change, but wrong on thinking that fission power to boil water to spin turbines to make electricity will do anything to slow down global warming.

It would be much cheaper to change building code requirements to require passive solar construction, light colored roofs in hot climates, solar panels on roofs and many other efficiency efforts that are well understood yet will take decades or centuries to implement at current rates of adoption.

see www.oilempire.us/nuclear-climate.html

No reactor could operate without being immunized from the impacts on downwinders. Read about the Price Anderson Act, which makes the idea of "free market" nuclear power that would be "too cheap to meter" a cruel hoax.

The only safe nuclear reactor rises in the morning and sets in the evening. It has a 93 million mile evacuation zone.

Ultimately, we will have a society that exists on solar energy, the only question is whether we will have complex technology for turning sunlight and wind and waves into electricity and other uses, or whether we will slide back in our technological simplification to the Bronze or Stone ages, with a global population of garbage pickers as an intermediate step toward "Olduvai Gorge."

There is no way to keep the hyper consumption going forever, oil and coal and uranium are not the only finite resources on our round Earth. Even the mythical "free energy," if real, still can't make soils and forests and fisheries and mineral ores suddenly revive to pre-industrial age levels, we will have to learn to treat the Earth and each other with respect as if we are not planning to be raptured to another planet on either the Star Ship Enterprise or following Jesus at the End of Days. If we can learn to conserve, restore, give back to the Earth, other species and our fellow humans, it might be possible to implement a permaculture type paradigm based on sincere sustainability instead of pretending we are having a planet wide "going out of business" sale. It's certainly worth trying to make this the "central organizing principle of civilization," as Al Gore described it in his 1992 book "Earth in the Balance" (this quote is not an endorsement of Gore's anti-environmental policies while in the White House, it is sad that privately he understands overshoot yet was compelled to promote more overdevelopment while in a position to do something about it).

Admiral Hyman Rickover, the pioneer of the nuclear powered submarine program (which served as a prototype of nuclear power reactors), eventually had second thoughts. He told the Congress in 1982 that

"I think from a long-range standpoint--I'm talking about humanity--the most important thing we could do is start by having an international meeting where we first outlaw nuclear weapons and then we outlaw nuclear reactors, too."Until about two billion years ago it was impossible to have any life on Earth. That is, there was so much radiation on Earth you couldn't have any life … Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system became reduced. That made it possible for some form of life to begin and it started in the seas .... when we use nuclear weapons or nuclear power we are creating something which nature has been eliminating. Now that is the philosophical aspect, whether it's nuclear power or using radiation for medical purposes or whatever. Of course, some radiation is not bad because it doesn't last long or has little effect on the surroundings, but every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it's important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.”
from a hearing held in the Joint Economic Committee, January 28, 1982

No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economical affairs of man as if people did not matter at all.-- E. F. Schumacher “Small is Beautiful”

Dr. Alice Stewart: "single-celled organisms could not exist until background radiation fell to present levels millennia ago. And it requires just as delicate an environment for us to survive. Yet today, in the arrogance of humankind, we are raising the levels of background radiation and setting back the evolutionary clock."