Former EPA leader: ‘Irresponsible’ for US to halt nuclear power

[RobertEarl]

13. Solar and wind

Too cheap to meter. Or tax, or create huge profits for wall street. That's why we don't get much electricity from solar and wind.

And Carol Browner could have lead the way when she was in office and we'd be cutting way back on greenhouse emissions today. Instead we have browner skies. Now she's brown-nosing nukes. What a waste.

She is no environmentalist. She's a hack, and nuclear power is the deadliest source of energy humans have ever produced. And it isn't just today's pollution, it's the fact that the nuke waste lasts for as long as a thousand years. In fifty years, once we have solar and wind power, all the excess co2 will be gone.

Long-lived radionuclides such as Cesium-137 are something new to us as a species. They did not exist on Earth in any appreciable quantities during the entire evolution of complex life. Co2 did. Although they are invisible to our senses they are millions of times more poisonous than most of the common poisons we are familiar with. They cause cancer, leukemia, genetic mutations, birth defects, malformations, and abortions at concentrations almost below human recognition and comprehension. They are lethal at the atomic or molecular level.

They emit radiation, invisible forms of matter and energy that we might compare to fire, because radiation burns and destroys human tissue. But unlike the fire of fossil fuels, the nuclear fire that issues forth from radioactive elements cannot be extinguished. It is not a fire that can be
scattered or suffocated because it burns at the atomic level—it comes from the disintegration of single atoms.