[Milsurplus] Re: GB> OT: Chernobyl Bike Ride, nuclear plants

[David Stinson]

Hue Miller wrote:

 > The former Soviet Union is a kind of historical treasure chest in 
some ways.  Tons
 > of war detritus being unearthed. I understand there is an unseemly 
cottage industry
 > in mining German burials for medals etc.,


You don't have to dig-up graves.
According to the book "Aftermath: The Landscape of War"
by Donovan Webster (great read, by the way),
if you visit the plains around Stalingrad,
there are places were piles of bones make the ground look white
all year round.
Hundreds of thousands of German dead *still* lie unburied.
Only in the last few years have the Russians
put the brakes on scavenging and allowed the Germans to come
and set up a few graveyards.  Hard feelings, you think?

 > As for nuclear power, as was pointed out,

 > we have much better safety measures here, and

 > have not had a really deadly incident.

Amen.  The hysterical, ignorant fear of *American engineered* nuclear
power has directly impacted global warming and the global economy.
The Three-Mile Island release was a joke- a stupid media circus.

 > The wastes, why we'll just encase them in a deep rock cave in the dry 
southwest.

I've been to Yucca Mountain and helped provide water to the project.
I worked underground in Nevada in rad-environments for a long time.
The biggest buried nuclear waste dump on the planet is next door
to Yucca.  Why would you want to make *two* high level dumps?
Doubles the chances for trouble.

The wastes next door are not contained in super-excelsior jumped-up
containers.  No one has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars rendering
it into little glass balls or doing all the other stupid things
our hysterical public and pandering politicians demand.
Leakage and water seepage have been monitored at these sites
for nearly forty years.  With the exception of one abandoned
tunnel which was not properly sealed (corrected years ago),
there has never been a serious leakage or contamination incident
at one of these sites.
Not one.  Ever.  Radionucleides are heavy and chemically active
(with the exception of harmless amounts of inert noble gases).
They bind where they are and stay there.

The French have had cheap electric power and cleaner skies
because they embraced nuclear power in the 1950s.
They laugh at our uninformed,
self-defeating anti-nuclear environmental policies.
And they should.

Dave S.