[Stealth Hunter]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

No No No.... you guys have not been properly reprogrammed.... uh indoctrinated... uhm brainwashed....no, educated? - yea thats it- educated!

Hey, if you say so friend.

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

We all need to start doing away will those horrible things of technology and return to a simpler life,

If it's simpler but better for us all and the place we inhabit in the long run, then I'm totally for it.

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

where people compost their own waste, ride their bikes to work, and go to sleep when its dark.

Ok... what exactly is bad about doing this kind of stuff? I mean, composting is a good way to recycle organic/biological materials, getting more people to ride bikes would eventually lead to better general health amongst the population and reduce somewhat the number of overweight people outright, and well... going to sleep when it's dark is kind of rhetorical.

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

This is how we will save mother earth from our excessive gluttony.

It's certainly a good start.

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

If you try - you can already feel the love Mother Earth has for us all when we do things like this.

Well if you want to be spiritual about it yeah. Or you could just stand back and look at it all falling into place, with the knowledge and satisfaction that the species is no longer overpopulating and polluting the only place in this entire universe we CAN inhabit right now...

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

It never ceases to amaze me how people are comfortable with thousands of deaths per year due to coal mining, oil transport accidents, and the like -

Actually there's only about 50-70 deaths on average per year in the coal mining industry related to accidents, not thousands as it was well over a hundred years ago.

http://www.msha.gov/MSHAINFO/FactSheets/MSHAFCT2.HTM

And as far as oil transport accidents go, there are far less killed than the coal mining statistic.

http://www.offshore-environment.com/accidents.html

Originally Posted by Platapus

I would like to hear from the anti-nuke people how nuclear power is not safe for the environment. Seems to me that we have had more environmental disasters with non-nuclear industries than we have had with nuclear industries.

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

but mention nuclear power and they start to rage.

Really there's a better alternative to both nuclear power and non-renewable energy resources (coal, oil, natural gas, etc.): sustainable energy. Investing in synthetic, biological, natural/renewable fuels (i.e. biological matter, solar energy, wind energy, hydro energy, geothermal energy).

While you can gain more energy from nuclear fission methods, the waste they produce is very difficult to dispose of properly, and the facilities themselves are far more dangerous. This is atomic energy you are toying with here. Radioactive elements, massive explosions, nuclear fallout, etc.

Originally Posted by Platapus

The US nuclear reactor safety record is pretty good.

Somewhat true, but the more facilities you build, the greater the risk something will go wrong in one of them. The United States really doesn't have the most nuclear reactors in the world compared to contemporary Western nations. The thing about nuclear energy is that, anytime you have a problem, it's serious. It's a race against the clock until something melts down, And when the problem elevates to disaster- it's huge. It's ALWAYS global. With Chernobyl, radioactive materials were spread all over the world, nevermind the surrounding blast area. It's really not any different with an atomic weapon explosion: the nasty stuff is spread everywhere.

http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/glbrad.html

Messing with atomic physics like this is dangerous. There's no need to increase the number of reactors from what we already have. Move to sustainable energy, maintain the current number of nuclear reactors, invest in nuclear fusion energy-generating methods.

Originally Posted by Platapus

We really need to build more nuclear reactors that are smaller, more efficient, and safer than the current old reactors we have today.

That's obvious. People have been saying this for decades now. The problem is that it's not that simple. Again, nuclear physics is a very dangerous and complicated field- not even touching upon research that has to be done into the elements to be used for fuel, the particle studies, etc.

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone,

There were actually quite a few cancer deaths later on, not considering the environmental effects of 13 million curies of radioactive gases being leaked into the atmosphere and radioisotopes.

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

and Chernobyl only happened b/c of a bad reactor design that IIRC has never been used in the US.

Actually Chernobyl's reactor melted down because the operators failed to carry through with an inexcusable number of rules and regulations in place to prevent exactly this kind of disaster from occurring and because the ECCS was shut off (the coolant system reactors use)- which led to an increase in steam formation and therefore temperature, slowing down the effectiveness of the control rods. With that said, exactly such a disaster is a possibility, of a higher quantity with the more reactors you construct, not only with human error being a possibility but also mechanical failure in the reactor itself. Chernobyl alone caused over 4,000 deaths in a remote area of Russia; imagine how many would have died if it had been in an urban area- nevermind Russia but what it would be like in the United States. And the environmental effects are still being felt today.

http://environmentalchemistry.com/yo...hernobyl2.html