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Nuclear Power is not a solution to the coming end of cheap oil

At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 large, 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical. Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power, there would only be enough economically viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years.
The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted for. The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government. The true cost of the industry's liability in the case of an accident in the US is estimated to be $US560billion ($726billion), but the industry pays only $US9.1billion - 98per cent of the insurance liability is covered by the US federal government. The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear reactors is estimated to be $US33billion. These costs - plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a quarter of a million years - are not now included in the economic assessments of nuclear electricity.
It is said that nuclear power is emission-free. The truth is very different.
In the US, where much of the world's uranium is enriched, including Australia's, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50per cent of global warming.
Also, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, release from leaky pipes 93per cent of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted yearly in the US. The production and release of CFC gas is now banned internationally by the Montreal Protocol because it is the main culprit responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global warmer, 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages - the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste.
To make matters worse, a study released last week by the National Academy of Sciences shows that the cooling pools at nuclear reactors, which store 10 to 30 times more radioactive material than that contained in the reactor core, are subject to catastrophic attacks by terrorists, which could unleash an inferno and release massive quantities of deadly radiation - significantly worse than the radiation released by Chernobyl, according to some scientists.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/041405EB.shtml



Negroponte

Jack R. Binns, who was recalled to Washington in the fall of 1981 to make way for Negroponte, is striking. Before departing, Binns sent several cables to Washington warning of possible "death squad" activity linked to Honduran strongman Gen. Gustavo Alvarez.
The cables show that Negroponte and Gen. Gustavo Alvarez typically met once a week, and sometimes several times a week.
The day after the House voted to halt all aid to rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John D. Negroponte urged the president's national security adviser and the CIA director to hang tough.
The thrust of the envoy's "back channel" July 1983 message to the men running the contra war against Nicaragua was contained in a single cryptic sentence: "Hondurans believe special project is as important as ever."
"Special project" was code for the secret arming of contra rebels from bases in Honduras
He used a back-channel system of communication through the CIA to send messages to Casey and others that he did not want widely distributed, offering advice on how to sell the "special project" to an increasingly suspicious and skeptical Congress.

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Comment: back-channel system of communication means basically sending a fax'd classified message directly to Casey.
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He occasionally berated colleagues for their lack of discretion and worked hard to maintain the fiction that Honduras was not serving as the logistical base for as many as 15,000 anti-Sandinista rebels known as the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, or FDN.
"We request that Department no longer clear out cables for Codels [Congressional Delegations] which of late almost invariably have included 'meet with FDN' or 'visit contra camps,' as one of the desired schedule items," Negroponte cabled then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz in July 1984
The ambassador kept a separate file documenting his efforts to combat the negative press coverage, and he fired off letters to editors and newspaper owners to complain about their correspondents' reporting.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/041205Z.shtml



University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education by Jennifer Washburn


Funding bias in science, economic and policy research is becoming agrave problem.Numerous studies now show that when research is industry funded it ismore likely to reach conclusions that favor the sponsor's commercialinterests.

Take these examples from Washburn's book:

In 2003, Stanford University signed a $225 million, 10-year contract tostudy global climate change, which allows Exxon and other corporatesponsors to select which research projects will receive funding,
Syngenta, the company that manufacturers atrazine, one of the mostwidely used weed killers in the United States, attempted to silenceTyrone B. Hayes, a biologist at UC Berkeley after he conducted researchshowing that exposure to this chemical, in very small doses, causedfrogs to develop both female and male sex organs. The company hiredscientists at another university to discredit his research, and tried toconvince the Environmental Protection Agency to disregard his findings.In another case, the Immune Research Corporation hit an AIDS researcherat UC San Francisco with a $7 million lawsuit after his researchconcluded that the company's drug was no more effective than a sugar pill.Another UC biology professor, Ignacio Chapela, was denied tenureallegedly because he was a vocal critic of a November 1998 deal betweenUC and Novartis.Here's the story, according to Washburn: Novartis gave UC Berkeley $25million over five years for basic research in the Department of Plantand Microbiology.In exchange, Berkeley gave Novartis first rights to negotiate licenseson roughly one third of the department's discoveries. It also gave thecompany two of five seats on the department's research committee --which determined how the money was to be spent.In the fall of 2001, Chapela, perhaps naive, published an article inNature reporting that foreign DNA material from genetically modifiedplants was showing up in native varieties of corn in Mexico.Chapela's paper was immediately attacked by the Berkeley/Novartis' plantdepartment.When Chapela came up for tenure, the College of Natural Sciences voted32-to-1 in his favor, but that vote was overturned by the university'sbudget committee. Chapela is now in litigation against the university.Washburn says there is little doubt that Chapela was denied tenurebecause his paper displeased his corporate masters at Berkeley.
http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2005/000203.html


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