Next to its safety, perhaps the greatest advantage of nuclear over fossil-fired power is the ease and safety of its-waste disposal. You read right: the ease and safety of its waste disposal. Readers of the New York Times and its sham-environmentalist G1adwin Hill will find that hard to believe, but then, anti-environmentalist Hill never compares the disposal of nuclear and coal wastes. (After the anti-nuclear initiatives had been defeated 2 : 1 by 20% of the US electorate, Hill's headline, stretching over three NYT: columns read: NUCLEAR POWER: NO GREEN LIGHT AT THE POLLS.)
To which might be added the recycling of nuclear wastes, virtually absent for fossil-fired wastes. (An excellent article on the former appeared in the Dec. 76 Scientific American.)
But the present winter has revealed yet another advantage of nuclear power: It's on line in any kind of weather. In the eastern US, coal piles froze into uselessness; barges carrying coal and oil, lay paralyzed in river ice; some of the oil intended for power plants ended up in oil slicks; gas was running out; and the hydroelectric plants of drought-stricken Oregon, Washington and California began to show their parched bottoms.
Only nuclear power could be relied on to power the Naderite presses.
A 1,000 MW coa1-fired plant devours over one hundred rail cars of coal a day; a 1,000 MW nuclear plant is refueled once a year, and a few trucks will do the job, which can wait until it's nice and sunny.
Nothing is perfect, of course, and a nuclear plant in Surrey, Virginia, was temporarily knocked out by the cold, because ice from the James River had clogged its cooling water intake.
And that was the only one - out of the 64 operable US nuclear plants.
|
|
Vol. 4, No. 7
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 4 Issue/No.: Vol. 4, No. 7 Date: March 01, 1977 01:07 PM Title: The Lessons of Winter
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
|