Mr. Paul's Pro-Nuclear Position is Ill Advised

Did you know that CA has a "mini star", which burns spent nuclear waste? Nuclear energy is everywhere in CA, and that includes ships and subs docked at our ports.

It seems to me, that the biggest problem with nuclear energy was ridding ourselves of the waste, and now, with mini stars and research, there is hope for nuclear power.

The issue of nuclear power brings to my mind the image of cave men, and some have learned to carry fire from place to place, or figuring flint rock can produce a fire for them, and others of the tribes or clans have very practical arguments why they should not. But, people do evolve, otherwise we would all be in caves, and for us, nuclear power is part of OUR world and it's future. We can not go backwards, we must go forward WITH nuclear power and eliminating it's waste for the good of the planet, it's people/fauna and flora.

I wouldnt neccesarily tag him as "Pro-Nuclear." I don't view Dr Paul as "Pro-" anything except liberty and private property. If a company, devoid of government subsidies, purchases land, they have the right to build whatever they please on that land. And if that company believes they can build a profitable nuclear/coal/natural gas power plant, then so be it. In the same strain of the company's liberties and property rights, they do not have the right to pollute or damage other people property including but not limited to their drinking water, their air, their land(soil, crops, etc.), their livestock, or their own person. The issues today are

1. the idea of the "Common Good",
2. government subsidies holding back innovation,
3. and the fact that the plants lease the land and the reservoirs from local, state, and fed governments as opposed to owning the land or renting it from a private owner and actually having to be good stewards of it.

Now if a natural disaster or other catastrophic incident were to occur, and it was determined that a company did not have an acceptable level of safeguards in place, that company would be held financially, and possibly legally, liable.

Saying that, my father is a r&d engineer for a utilities company and worked at a nuclear power plant for many years designing and testing containment building and reactor safety systems. From what he's told me, every single reactor in the US is at least many times safer than the Fukushima reactor, and that Fukushima would have passed minimum DOE and NRC regulations.

I feel I should post here. I actually work in a nuke power plant. Nuclear power IS NOT dangerous provided you have the proper safeguards in place. The power needs to be respected, not feared. Fukishima was a perfect example of mismanagement, what you had in that situation was the higher-ups at the plant not wanting to dump seawater into the core immediately, they wanted to save the plant and the money it would cost to re-build it, in the end because of their hesitation they lost the plant and evacuated the town as well. Another thing....with all those news stories on Fukishima not ONCE did they actually give milliseivert or millirem numbers for the contamination levels. I am willing to bet that the actual contamination reaching the town was minimal, probably hardly above background level. Alpha rays are blocked by clothing, beta rays are blocked by thin plastic, gamma rays are blocked by lead and nuetron rays are blocked by water and concrete...all reactor cores are housed in a pool surrounded by concrete walls, once they did dump seawater into the pool it cooled the fuel enough that it was no longer producing neutron rays(those are the most dangerous ones) in effect shutting down the reactor. If they had done this immediately most of the rest of the problems would never have happened. I am also betting the evacuation of the town wasn't strictly necessary, that was just the government having to be seen doing something

included as one of the factors in the Free Market of Ideas, when we - the general population and policy-makers - decide on the future of our energy policy.

Fair enough :-)

Fukushima is hardly a fair example. It was built on top of the "ring of fire", right beside the ocean. It was a disaster waiting to happen. I think nuclear power is safe if all relevant precautions are taken.

it could actually be a lot safer, alot faster.

Dept of Energy was created to give the elite the power of government to usher in the nuclear industry with shortcuts.

Guess who owns more uranium than anyone in the world?

The queen of England!

There are some who say no nuclear no way.

But it has proven to be useful in hundreds of applications.

Government corruption makes the nuclear industry dangerous and expensive.

I currently have my Senior Reactor Operator License and it should be noteworthy that the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill killed 11 people and caused millions of dollars of damage to property as well.

The Japan Earthquake and Tsunami killed over 15,000 people while only 2 people were hospitalized for radiation burns from the Fukushima disaster.

Putting things into perspective is important. Certainly, property rights are important and must be preserved in a free society, but to stop all progress in any scientific field because of past failures is never the solution. I can tell you that the Nuclear Industry takes lessons learned from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima very seriously and incorporates them into the training of its operators.

For a better analysis than mine, see Penn and Teller (Pre-Fukushima :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP2oG0n4NLc

Your analysis makes no sense, are you saying that the energy PER MASS is a million times greater? Or the energy DENSITY?

In any case, you are wrong in saying that humans can't control nuclear power, humans can and are successfully using it every single day. Just because uranium contains such a large amount of energy per mass doesn't mean we have to be afraid of using nuclear power. By controlling the rate of the reaction, we are able to siphon off energy at the rate we choose, sort of like emptying bathtubs a teaspoon at a time, the size of the bathtubs doesn't really matter.

Nuclear reactors work by boiling water to turn steam turbines, just like coal reactors. Nothing frightening or mysterious. The threat of a meltdown is admittedly present, as in the case of Fukashima however modern reactors using embedded uranium pellets will most likely put an end to this.

The concepts behind nuclear power are extremely fundamental to our understanding of physics, and at this point are as simple and basic as the transistor radio. There is no excuse for people living in this day and age shun such an easy and efficient power source. Furthermore, innovations in nuclear technology are extremely promising, and may one day even get us humans up off this rock once and for all.

the next president will be pro nuclear power.

the difference between Dr. Paul and Obama is that Ron would prefer the use of hemp.

“Why do we subsidize domestic corn ethanol production and then have a tariff on much cheaper sugarcane ethanol from Brazil? But there happens to be a better source of ethanol, and that is Hemp!"
Dr. Ron Paul

Dr. Paul's opinion of nuclear may not be relevant since he's a libertarian. I think he would leave it up to the courts to decide if nuclear power plants violate private property rights. I think a strong argument could be made that these plants pose a huge risk and should be illegal, but that's up to the opposing sides to prove in court.

Here's an article I found about a worst case scenario involving a Solar flare causing a nuclear holocaust.

http://www.naturalnews.com/033564_solar_flares_nuclear_power...

set in a narrow scope in time.. the economic rules of the land used to be that there is no such thing as "limited liability".. if you fail at business or cause economic disasters beyond the scope of your company assets, you can be personally gone after and ripped of everything you ever have. this should get a lot of people thinking twice before they make decisions that put other people in jeopardy, and this is only a starter, as i said, this is only a framework, but on this exceptionally critical factor, there is already a huge difference.

arguing on the grounds of a lot of preexisting notion or prejudice of how a controlled economy works and how more important tasks that require heavier responsibility do not function under this environment, when the framework itself is the problem and can be challenged--and mind you, this is what we're doing--to get the perspective wrong and argue things in the wrong context, is simply misguided.