BykarlsiePublished: April 8, 2011
Posted in: Headline, News
By Karla Fetrow
Searching Safe Energy
The world is in a quandary. Never before has it been so acutely aware of its energy needs and the environmental consequences for supplying them. While Japan continues to battle with radiation leaks spreading into the sea and polluting the air, Germany forms anti-nuclear protests. While the Gulf of Mexico continues to produce a dead zone for marine life, U.S. President Obama maintains off shore drilling is both vital to the economy and necessary as a means of transition to the use of low-environmental impact, renewable energy resources. The problem, many people suspect, is not with the energy usage as much as with the companies themselves.
Japan’s inability to contain its nuclear reactors once they had been damaged and deadly radiation began to escape, illustrated clearly the dangers of nuclear power.
The lesson learned was though they had built a plant strong enough to withstand an earthquake, it could not withstand a tsunami.
This has caused cities with nuclear power plants built along coastlines to be more uneasy about their placement and to openly criticize the judgment that placed them there, but have not yet confronted the biggest problem; there is still no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste.
Nor does the development of nuclear power plants come cheaply. In economic terms, it costs an estimated two-three billion dollars to build one.
In environmental terms, it means uranium mining.
In the nineteen seventies, radiation poisoning was found in the bellies of dead sheep kept on Navajo land close to the mines. By the late nineteen eighties, most of these mines had been closed, but no clean up had been done and the mines still emit a health hazard for the inhabitants. Despite this irresponsibility in protecting the eco-system, the Crownpoint Uranium Project, applied for and received a permit to begin mining once more for uranium on Navajo land in 2010. The Navajo people along with the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, who have outlawed uranium mining since 2005, are understandably very unhappy about the decision.
Radiation fears carry more impact.
Radiation enters the air, the water, the food and has immediate long term effects on our health.
Because we can’t see it or taste it, we can only guess at how much damage radiation has done to us unless we’re in direct circumference with radioactive emissions, and produce primary symptoms such as burns, rashes, nausea and unusual bleeding. EPA guidelines, like its reports on carbon emissions, is entirely dependent on a norm associated with urbanized living conditions, and not with actual detail on how much or how little is harmful.
Read more:
http://subversify.com/2011/04/08/obama%E2%80%99s-energy-plan%E2%80%99s-dirty-secrets/
