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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: The Safest Way
Message-ID: <1682@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Sep-85 17:28:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: dciem.1682
Posted: Tue Sep 17 17:28:39 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Sep-85 20:08:00 EDT
References: <1386@utcsri.UUCP> <5952@utzoo.UUCP> <820@water.UUCP> <793@lsuc.UUCP> <5960@utzoo.UUCP> <4@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: mmt@dciem.UUCP (PUT YOUR NAME HERE)
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 48
Summary: 


>        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.
>
It never ceases to amaze me how certain groups manage to reconcile
the view that it is good to minimize the environmental damage cause
by industrial activity, and yet campaign against nuclear power generation.
By any measure (even radioactivity released to the environment), nuclear
power causes less environmental damage than any of its major competitors.
The only place where a major power generation method is preferable to
nuclear power is in that when a Hydro dam bursts, only the people in the
way are damaged, not their descendants.  All other major sources of
power create mutagens, and mutagenicity is the main reason for fearing
radioactive leakage.
>
>        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.

I find the "tirade" from which this was extracted to be "intellectual
sleaze in the extreme."  The one thing one can say about radioactive
waste is that people care about it and worry about it.  It is highly
concentrated and the worst that is likely to happen is that the concentrated
dumps would be left untended and would slowly leak through local aquifers.
Industrial chemical leakage, like the aforementioned Love Canal (only one
of several hundred such sites in the US alone), is not concentrated,
is not cared about, and is substantially more dangerous when it does
leak.  Such chemical leaks may soon prevent us from drinking the water
of Lake Ontario.  It takes a large stretch of the imagination to say
that Pickering or Darlington could lead to such a problem.

Let's get the problems in balance.  By all means, store radioactive
waste as securely as possible, but let's WORRY about industrial waste
that is distributed through the air, the land, and the water we drink.
-- 

Martin Taylor
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