Comment: Stop the threat of nuke plants being built all over America! Utah does not want nuke plants and most people in Virginia do not want nuke plants! We also do not want uranium mining anywhere in America or the world. The world can have enough power with solar, windmills, tidal or waterpower! No Nuke Plant, No Uranium Mining!
Keep power plant out of Utah
Tribune Editorial
Salt Lake Tribune
Updated:
Gov. Gary Herbert supports a full palette of energy options for Utah. The clean greens: solar, geothermal, wind. The dirty browns: coal, oil, natural gas. And the chameleon of electricity production, nuclear fission, which provides clean power but carries its own environmental and safety baggage.
Nuclear power plants were popular until a near meltdown of a reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979 shocked the nation to its senses. There hasn't been a domestic plant built since.
But in the rush to curb climate change, well-founded fears have been forgotten and a nuclear revival is underway. Nuclear power plants emit only water vapor and produce enough power to replace fossil fuels as a base-load provider of electricity. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received applications for 26 new reactors and more are expected, including paperwork for a proposed plant near Green River in Emery County, which would be Utah's first.
We understand the need to continue to develop and utilize fossil fuels, where appropriate, while we transition to renewable energy sources. But Herbert strayed off base in his embrace of nuclear power for Utah, where hydrology, seismology and history suggest that we not mess around with the atom.
Despite some positive attributes, nuclear power is not the answer to climate change concerns and our nation's growing energy appetite.
And it's certainly not the energy solution for Utah, where downwinders were poisoned by the fallout from years of nuclear weapons testing, where the landscape is scarred by uranium mining and underlain by faults, and where low-level nuclear waste is already buried.
Utahns have a healthy fear of all things radioactive, and nuclear reactors should be no exception. The plants are expensive to build and consumers pay the tab. They consume copious amounts of water, a dwindling resource in the Colorado River Basin.
An accident at a nuclear power plant could kill thousands and render large swaths of land uninhabitable.
The mining and milling of uranium ore poses its own set of environmental and health hazards. And the presence of a plant creates security concerns: Fuel could fall into the wrong hands. The plants are potential terrorist targets.
Plus, a power plant is a two-for-one deal. Because the U.S. lacks a permanent disposal facility, lethal spent fuel would be stored on site, the same sort of spent fuel the state spent millions of dollars to keep off the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation.
Conservation and rapid utilization of renewable energy sources,continue to be the nation's, and
Utah's, safest and best bets for clean energy security.
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_13226081
Keep power plant out of Utah
Tribune Editorial
Salt Lake Tribune
Updated:
Gov. Gary Herbert supports a full palette of energy options for Utah. The clean greens: solar, geothermal, wind. The dirty browns: coal, oil, natural gas. And the chameleon of electricity production, nuclear fission, which provides clean power but carries its own environmental and safety baggage.
Nuclear power plants were popular until a near meltdown of a reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979 shocked the nation to its senses. There hasn't been a domestic plant built since.
But in the rush to curb climate change, well-founded fears have been forgotten and a nuclear revival is underway. Nuclear power plants emit only water vapor and produce enough power to replace fossil fuels as a base-load provider of electricity. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received applications for 26 new reactors and more are expected, including paperwork for a proposed plant near Green River in Emery County, which would be Utah's first.
We understand the need to continue to develop and utilize fossil fuels, where appropriate, while we transition to renewable energy sources. But Herbert strayed off base in his embrace of nuclear power for Utah, where hydrology, seismology and history suggest that we not mess around with the atom.
Despite some positive attributes, nuclear power is not the answer to climate change concerns and our nation's growing energy appetite.
And it's certainly not the energy solution for Utah, where downwinders were poisoned by the fallout from years of nuclear weapons testing, where the landscape is scarred by uranium mining and underlain by faults, and where low-level nuclear waste is already buried.
Utahns have a healthy fear of all things radioactive, and nuclear reactors should be no exception. The plants are expensive to build and consumers pay the tab. They consume copious amounts of water, a dwindling resource in the Colorado River Basin.
An accident at a nuclear power plant could kill thousands and render large swaths of land uninhabitable.
The mining and milling of uranium ore poses its own set of environmental and health hazards. And the presence of a plant creates security concerns: Fuel could fall into the wrong hands. The plants are potential terrorist targets.
Plus, a power plant is a two-for-one deal. Because the U.S. lacks a permanent disposal facility, lethal spent fuel would be stored on site, the same sort of spent fuel the state spent millions of dollars to keep off the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation.
Conservation and rapid utilization of renewable energy sources,continue to be the nation's, and
Utah's, safest and best bets for clean energy security.
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_13226081
No comments:
Post a Comment