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| Thanks for watching. | |
| It's simply a pause in the global warming trend. | |
| They need to pretend that there is some kind of a correlation between CO2 and global warming so that they can force humans to pay a global regime for the use of any energy. | |
| And it isn't just carbon taxes and global regulation that they're pushing. | |
| They're also trying to shut down most power plants and prevent new ones from being built. | |
| Obama loves the nuclear industry as much as he hates the coal industry. | |
| In the first part of this report, we're going to look at the issues of nuclear safety and nuclear waste disposal. | |
| In the wake of Typhoon Manyi, the Fukushima nuclear power plant dumped 1130 tons of contaminated water into the ocean. | |
| Now the reported levels were below what the Japanese government considers to be safe. | |
| But we learned just in the last couple of weeks that previously reported radiation levels were actually 18 times higher than reported. | |
| And that 300 tons of radioactive water leak into the ocean every day. | |
| And dangerously high levels of radiation have been discovered in groundwater. | |
| The highly radioactive groundwater contamination is due to leaking storage vessels that are holding the water that was used in the original disaster. | |
| Maintaining the ice wall will use enough energy to power thousands of homes, even if it works. | |
| Spent reactor fuel, containing roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than was released at Chernobyl, still sits in pools that are vulnerable to earthquakes. | |
| Several of these pools are 100 feet above ground. | |
| These pools could possibly topple or collapse from structural damage coupled with another powerful earthquake. | |
| And the loss of water exposing the spent fuel could cause fire that could deposit large amounts of radioactive material over hundreds if not thousands of miles. | |
| But what about nuclear plants within the United States? | |
| Dr. Yaxo, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission member for seven years and former NRC chairman, said in April of 2013 that all 104 nuclear reactors have safety problems that can't be fixed and should be shut down. | |
| Noting the potential to have more failures like Fukushima, he said, continuing to put Band-Aid on Band-Aid is not going to fix the problem. | |
| Of course, there are many ways that nuclear plants can fail, but in this particular mode, there are 23 reactors in the U.S. | |
| that use the same technology as Fukushima, 12 in seismically active areas. | |
| Manufacturers like GE Hitachi will tell you there's nothing to worry about, but evidently they're worried enough about it that they got releases from governments like Japan and Canada. | |
| Releasing them for liability that will be borne by the taxpayers like this half billion dollar ice wall. | |
| Public concern has focused on catastrophic reactor events like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but as we saw in Fukushima, pools of spent fuel represented great danger as well. | |
| Spent nuclear fuel is extraordinarily radioactive and must be handled with great care. | |
| An unprotected person just a foot away from a recently removed fuel assembly could receive a lethal dosage in just a matter of seconds. | |
| As one of the most dangerous materials on the planet, spent reactor fuel requires permanent geological isolation to protect humans for thousands of years. | |
| And, of course, politics and money are driving decisions more than safety. | |
| Plans to move spent fuel to remote, sparsely populated areas like Yucca Mountain have been overruled by powerful politicians like Harry Reid. | |
| As a result, the largest storage pools in the country are located in a heavily populated area at a reactor complex, Sharon Harris, just outside Raleigh, North Carolina, transported from other reactors by rail through high population centers on the East Coast. | |
| Scientists at MIT and Princeton warned that spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly and catch fire. | |
| The fire could spread to older fuel, and the long-term contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than Chernobyl. | |
| In Part 2 of this report, we'll look at the health and economic costs involved in decommissioning old nuclear power plants. | |
| And we'll look at the love affair that many environmentalists have with nuclear power. |
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