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Path: utzoo!utcsri!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!morrison
From: morrison@ubc-cs.UUCP (Rick Morrison)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: The Safest Way
Message-ID: <4@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Sep-85 15:06:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.4
Posted: Mon Sep 16 15:06:47 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Sep-85 19:42:39 EDT
References: <1386@utcsri.UUCP> <5952@utzoo.UUCP> <820@water.UUCP> <793@lsuc.UUCP> <5960@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: morrison@ubc-cs.UUCP (Rick Morrison)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 43
Summary: 

BEGIN tirade {

In article <5960@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:

>
>At risk of opening an inappropriate debate, 

	... and if it is like similar debates in the past it will
	be rife with such gems of intellectual honesty as:

>I feel compelled to point out that even commercial nuclear power plants 
>are the safest way of generating large amounts of power yet devised.  

	And the Blue Jays are the best team in baseball (really, they are!). 

	It never ceases to amaze me how certain groups manage to reconcile
	the view that, for example, acid rain deserves more study because
	it "really isn't well enough understood," yet dismiss out of
	hand concerns of environmentalists over the effects of
	continuing low-level exposure to radioctive material in the
	air we breath or the foods we eat.

>All power-generation methods kill, by industrial accidents if 
>nothing else, and the deaths/gigawatt-hour value
>is consistently lower for nuclear plants than for anything else.  

	Right. And more people have died in Edward Kennedy's car than
	have ever died as a result of nuclear power.

	What exactly is this wonderful bit of bafflegab supposed to
	mean? Is "deaths/gigawatt-hour" during construction,
	operation, ...? 

	We have difficulty enough in even making the connection between
	such environmental debacles as the Love Canal and the health
	problems observed in local populations. Nuclear power plants
	*can* be expected to leak. We *do not*, at present, have feasible 
	means for long term storage of waste. To spout platitudes about
	the safety of nuclear power versus other methods of generation
	in the name of scientific objectivity is intellectual sleaze
	in the extreme.

} END tirade