Green Options

“We all remember this time last year,” said Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Monday. “We were in the midst of an energy crisis, paying $4 for a gallon of gasoline, and Americans were seeing their utility bills skyrocketing.” Since then, he went on to say, the energy problems haven’t disappeared and no changes in policy have been made.

Here’s a scary revelation: while climate change has, for the first time in recorded history, opened up the Northwest Passage and sparked a new land/fossil fuel/resource rush in the Arctic, it might also increase the risk of nuclear contamination in the region. A report in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs notes that, “Between 1958 and 1992, Russia dumped 18 nuclear reactors [...]

How much do we really know about the damage done to lives and property by more than 50 years of uranium mining and milling in the Navajo and Hopi Indian Nations? I didn’t know very much until I read three articles by Marilyn Berlin Snell in the Sierra Club Magazine.

Marilyn was chief editor when she wrote the stories, Power Hungry, Gathering Clouds and Frontier Justice-in a Good Way. Wanting to know more, I picked up the phone and was honored with a few moments of her time.

Amid increased activity signaling a possible resurgence of interest in nuclear power facilities, comes word from Nevada that isn’t at all surprising.

Ward Sproat, shown in the Las Vegas Review-Journal photo at the left, is director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, and announced Tuesday that Yucca Mountain in Nevada is still a long way from receiving any spent nuclear fuel. Sproat told Nevada’s Legislative Committee on High-Level Nuclear Waste, that lack of funding will result in significant worker layoffs at the facility. He is quoted as saying, “They’re going to come in waves”.

Podcast, if you’d rather listen:

I never thought I’d consider nuclear power a desirable solution to climate change until I read James Lovelock’s latest book, “The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity” (see my previous post on the issue here).

Though I’m still not 100-percent convinced, Lovelock’s arguments are factual, rational and highly persuasive. So

[...]