Why Environmentalist hate nuclear power.

While speaking with a student recently, I broached the subject of the positive aspects of nuclear power. He immediately asked what we would do with all of the nuclear waste? I asked him “all of what waste”? This is essentially the rejoinder most people should be asked when they mention nuclear waste. It shocked the young man when I told him that all the nuclear waste generated in the U.S. for the next 100 years could fit in the hole left by one days coal mining. This is but one of many facts that show the environmental movement for who they are; more on that point later. Nuclear power has so many environmental advantages over all other sources of energy it is no longer deniable by the more self-effacing honest people in the environmental movement. Unfortunately fear mongering and the politics of environmentalism have held the facts about nuclear energy hostage. It is a fact that burning any coal will release more radioactive particles into the atmosphere than all the U.S. nuclear plants put together. It is also true that one pound of nuclear fuel releases the same amount of energy as nearly three hundred tons of coal. It is also a fact that the electric generating plants in the U.S. produce over two billion pounds of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) every day as well as oxides of nitrogen, sulfur, mercury, carbon monoxide as well as radioactive particulate. These and other carcinogenic (cancer causing) and mutagenic (can change your gene structure and affect you offspring as well as you) compounds are released into the atmosphere daily. http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html While nuclear power plants emit essentially none of these compounds in their power generating tasks. The environmental impact of the afore mention emissions should be enough to make any thinking person clamor for nuclear power. The only argument remaining is safety especially as it pertains to melt-down as is what happened at Chirnobyl. New pebble bed reactors now make meltdown impossible.

Given this, one is left to wonder why the bulk of the environmental movement cannot get behind this seemingly perfect solution to our energy needs. But there-in lies part of the answer. Some in the environmental movement are actually jealous leftists who despise and abhor the American lifestyle even though they live like the majority of the people in the country and not anything like H.D. Thoreau asthey would like you to believe. The second major pillar to their opposition is that in this country private companies would build and operate these plants. These leftists have violent reaction to the phrase “privately operated nuclear power plant”. For that matter they have a violent reaction to anything privately held. Lastly, so many people are misinformed about nuclear energy that public opinion has been with the environmental left for over thirty years. It is my hope that their duplicity show through to at least you the reader and those you can now inform. As it seems for all their talk about the environmental, they would rather subject the rest of us to asthma, radiation, silicosis, mercury and greenhouse gases than allow the building of any more nuclear power plants. This anti-humanitarian position gives them no credibility in the public discourse and it is up to us, those who are truley environmentalist, to show them for who they are.