Green light for R17bn nuclear plant

“Nuclear waste is not something that you just dump and turn your back on”

By Thabiso Thakali Controversy and lack of support may have delayed it for almost three years - but the hi-tech nuclear reactor that will produce South Africa's electricity is forging ahead. via Daily News

[bushwacker]

YES BUT IS IT FOOL PROOF??

HI-TECH IN A COUNTRY WHO'S DEPT.OF HOME AFFAIRS STRUGGLES WITH PAPER WORK??
WHAT'S WRONG WITH SOLAR POWER IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE SUN SHINES EVERY DAY??
AND DON'T FORGET THE NUT WHO LEFT A BOLT IN THE KOEBERG REACTOR...OOPS THAT WAS CLOSE..

Criticisms of the reactor design
The most common criticism of pebble bed reactors is that encasing the fuel in potentially combustible graphite poses a hazard. Were the graphite to burn, fuel material could potentially be carried away in smoke from the fire. Since burning graphite requires oxygen, the fuel pebbles are coated with an impermeable layer of silicon carbide, and the reaction vessel is purged of oxygen. While silicon carbide is strong in abrasion and compression applications, it does not have the same strength against expansion and shear forces. Some fission products such as xenon-133 have a limited absorbance in carbon, and some fuel pebbles could accumulate enough gas to rupture the silicon carbide layer. Even a cracked pebble will not burn without oxygen, but the fuel pebble may not be rotated out and inspected for months, leaving a window of vulnerability.

There is also significantly less experience with production scale Pebble Bed Reactors than Light Water Reactors. As such, claims made by both proponents and detractors are more theory-based than based on practical experience.

Since the fuel is contained in graphite pebbles, the volume of radioactive waste is much greater, but contains about the same radioactivity when measured in becquerels per kilowatt-hour. The waste tends to be less hazardous and simpler to handle. Current US legislation requires all waste to be safely contained, therefore pebble bed reactors would increase existing storage problems. Defects in the production of pebbles may also cause problems. The radioactive waste must either be safely stored for many human generations, reprocessed, transmuted in a different type of reactor, or disposed of by a method yet to be devised. The graphite pebbles are more difficult to reprocess due to their construction, which is not true of the fuel from other types of reactors. Proponents point out that this is a plus, as it is difficult to re-use pebble bed reactor waste for nuclear weapons.

Critics also often point out an accident in Germany in 1986, which involved a jammed pebble damaged by the reactor operators when they were attempting to dislodge it from a feeder tube. This accident released radiation into the surrounding area, and led to a shutdown of the research program by the West German government.

[Joffan]

"WHAT'S WRONG WITH SOLAR POWER" - expense and variability. It's the most expensive form of electricity generation, 4-5 times nuclear per kWh. The variability aspect is not as severe as wind but still introduces more variability in matching supply and demand, into a grid system that really needs less.

Also, the diffuse nature of solar energy means that toxic solar waste is produced from the manufacture process on a significant scale.

This is not to rule out solar power. It has good applications also - but not as a mainstay of the electrical grid.

Meanwhile, relying on German advice on matters nuclear is like asking a vertigo-sufferer to design a skyscraper.

[vasbyt]

Don't worry. It's in the good hands of Erwin. If it goes wrong we can always blame saboteurs.

[bushwacker]

What's Wrong With the Modular Pebble Bed Reactor?
The pebble bed reactor is being touted as nearly "accident proof." It is being hailed as the savior of the nuclear industry. Three Mile Island Alert opposes this reactor design because of its inherent dangerous safety defects.
The United States has criticized Soviet reactor designs for not having containment buildings. It is the last line of defense for containing a radiological release.
Furthermore, the lack of a containment building leaves the reactor(s) wide open to a terrorist attack.
The uranium is covered by a layer of graphite. The graphite is covered by several other layers of materials including a silicon carbide. The graphite could burn if defects in the fuel defeat the outer coverings. The industry acknowledges that there is approximately 1 defect per pebble associated with these layers. There are approximately 370,000 pebbles in a pebble bed reactor. One tennis ball sized pebble comes out the bottom of the reactor every 30 seconds. It can be returned to the top of the reactor for additional use.
The 1957 Windscale accident and the 1986 Chernobyl accident both involved burning graphite. The burning graphite dispersed radioactivity. At Chernobyl, the burning graphite released radiation for ten days.
Although the volume by "configuration for long term storage" is lower than current design, the actual amount of high level waste by weight is higher. The pebbles are less radioactive than conventional fuel assemblies and more pebbles are required to produce the needed heat inside the reactor. There will be many more truck and railroad transports needed to remove the wastes. This will increase the numbers of vehicle accidents and the odds of another radiological accident involving these vehicles traveling across the country.
Creating even more nuclear waste without a final depository plan is unconscianable.
The industry acknowledges that "fuel pebble manufacturing defects are the most significant source of fission product release." Recent history shows that some companies have falsified fuel quality. In fact, there have been instances of fuel sabotage and tampering over the last few decades. Germany and Japan have shut down plants or refused fuel shipments once the problems were discovered. The industry can't produce "defect-free" fuel and therefore it is a certainty that a pebble bed reactor will experience an accident. The industry acknowledges that there is approximately 1 defect per pebble associated with these layers.
There was a pebble bed reactor accident at Hamm-Uentrop West Germany nine days after the Chernobyl accident. On May 4 1986, a pebble became lodged in a feeder tube. Operators subsequently caused damage to the fuel during attempts to free the pebble. Radiation was released to the environs. The West German government closed down the research program because they found the reactor design unsafe.
The nuclear industry has been subsidized an average of $3 billion dollars per year. The industry was also just bailed out nearly $100 billion dollars by rate payers . The proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site is now approaching $100 billion dollars. If we use just a portion of that money for renewables (solar, wind, fuel cells etc.) we'd have plenty of electricity and very little wastes. Using the "yard stick" of economic feasibility, the nuclear industry is a complete failure.
Anyone whom recommends a "nuclear revival" has not reconciled the costs.
SCARY JOFFAN VERY SCARY. But then this is not about to take place in your back yard now is it.
PS The inventor of the pebble reactor was a German!! Perhaps Germans have more of a conscience about what they leave behind for future generations, unlike the worldwide pro-nuclear fatcats. Nice one mate.

[Joffan]

German science research can be as good as any in the world and better than most. German energy politics, nuclear regulation, and entrenched environmental dogma is where the plot goes wrong. The closure of the PBMR program is a classic example.

Nuclear power does require tight regulation. It isn't a field in which cowboys and amateurs can thrive, nor should that be allowed. It's not unique in that respect. That's part of the cost of doing business in the field, and I would never argue for anything else. I would argue for appropriate regulation; there are undoubtedly some current examples of overregulation and underregulation.

I'd be interested to see any justification for your random large numbers there. They rarely stand up to scrutiny or critical thinking. For example, you have tossed out a random number of $100billion on Yucca Mountain. I've not seen an estimate that high, but even so. The Nuclear Waste Fund is money collected as part of the value of the electricity delivered from nuclear power. This isn't a "subsidy" and it isn't "ratepayer's money", just as the money I paid for vegetables last week is no longer "my money".

OH RIGHT CAPTIAL LETTERS ARE SO SCARY

As for back yards: I hope it's going to take place in my back yard. And soon.

[bushwacker]

CAPITAL LETTERS SCARY? HUH?
How about TUNNEL VISION and GREED??
And while we're on the subject of vegetables:
a friends', grown in the shadow of the nuclear power station in our backyard didn't make it to the organic market due to.....CONTAMINATION!!
And then we haven't even begun to talk about the obscenely high rate of CANCER right here where I live.
Perhaps a power station in your backyard will provide employment for the likes of you and the Homer Simpsons of this world.
By the way, when last were you in Africa??

[Joffan]

bushwacker wrote:

And while we're on the subject of vegetables:
a friends', grown in the shadow of the nuclear power station in our backyard didn't make it to the organic market due to.....CONTAMINATION!!

Proving nothing. IF they were contaminated, it wasn't from the power station. IF they were denied organic status on the grounds of the proximity of the nuclear station, it was due to hysteria and/or lies.

bushwacker wrote:

By the way, when last were you in Africa??

Oddly enough, I don't know whether or not I've been to Africa. I visited the Sinai peninsula in the 70s - is that Africa or Asia? Does it make any difference that it was Israeli at the time?

[bushwacker]

The Sinai peninsula remains in the Middle East, whether under Israeli, Egyptian or Martian rule.
South Africa is in Africa.
A nuclear power station in (South) Africa is scary.
SCARY ok!!!

[Joffan]

Since they already have two nuclear reactors, I'm not sure why South African nuclear power is so scary.

[bushwacker]

The damage to the Koeberg nuclear plant was deliberate and not accidental, Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin said on Tuesday.

"Let me be very clear on this. The bolt that caused the generator's destruction did not get there by accident," Erwin said.

One of two of Koeberg generators has been down since December, causing major power outages in the Western Cape over the past two months.

Erwin said the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and the police were investigating.

"The investigation is ongoing and we will bring criminal charges against individuals soon," Erwin said.

The police were also looking at other power outages which could have been caused by sabotage.

"These events curiously coincide with an important process in the democratic calendar of the country," Minister of Minerals and Energy Lindiwe Hendricks said in reference to Wednesday's local government election.

"It has become clear that the recent event cannot just be linked to inadequate transmission or generation capacity. Clearly other forces are at play here," she said.

[bushwacker]

Cape Town - Environmental NGO Earthlife Africa has threatened a legal challenge to what it says is SA's "hasty and ill-informed" draft nuclear policy.

The threat was made in a submission on Earthlife's behalf by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) on the policy document, released by the department of minerals and energy in August.

The LRC said the draft failed to make public a number of issues which should have been taken into account in drafting it.

Nor were reasons given for deviating from a process outlined in the 1998 white paper on energy, which called for a national energy expansion plan, with projections on demand and cost for various options, before going into the detail of a nuclear policy.

The LRC said it was not clear whether the nuclear option had been properly compared with other alternatives.

"The draft nuclear policy is a hasty and ill-informed document replete with sweeping unsupported statements as to the appropriateness of nuclear power as an energy option," the LRC said.

It noted that in February this year the United Kingdom's High Court declared that the British government's decision to back the construction of new nuclear power plants was unlawful.

The judge overseeing the case, brought by Greenpeace, had declared that the consultation process was seriously flawed and the process "manifestly inadequate and unfair".

This was because the government had not made enough information available for people to make an intelligent response.

'Challenge the lawfulness'

"It is submitted that the (South African) draft nuclear policy suffers from the same deficiencies and should not form the basis of government policy," the LRC said.

HUGE FINANCE INVOLVED FROM WASHINGTON AND FRANCE. SAY NO MORE....

[bushwacker]

March 27, 2008

Three Mile Island 29 Years Later: Nuclear Safety Problems Still Unresolved
Adding New Plants to Aging Fleet Will Increase Risk Without Safety Reform, Science Group Says

Nuclear Reactor Security
Walking A Nuclear TightropeWASHINGTON (March 27, 2008)—
The partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant began on March 28, 1979. Since the accident, not a single new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the United States. Indeed, 74 plants under construction at the time of the accident were cancelled. But in just the past year, the nuclear industry has stepped up its efforts to secure government funding for a new fleet of nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, over the last three decades, neither plant owners nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have adequately addressed the basic flaws in U.S. nuclear safety that led to the Three Mile Island accident, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

"Three Mile Island was almost 30 years ago so perhaps the industry and the NRC have forgotten about it," said Dave Lochbaum, the director of UCS's Nuclear Safety Project. "But you can bet that even the people who welcome new plants in their communities will want to know if what happened at Three Mile Island could happen to them. As of right now, the industry and the NRC haven't done enough to ensure them it won't."

The Three Mile Island accident was triggered by a loss of reactor cooling water. Before the accident, the plant's cooling system valves had broken down 10 times over the preceding year. Instead of replacing the faulty valves, workers opened them manually to keep the plant operating. When other equipment problems occurred during the eleventh valve failure in March 1979, control room operators were overwhelmed and the plant suffered a partial meltdown.

Since then, the NRC and plant owners have focused more on keeping nuclear plants running over the short-term than ensuring their safety, Lochbaum said. That strategy has allowed a number of safety problems at plants to build up over time. When the accumulated problems cause enough interruptions to harm a plant's profitability, owners shut them down for extensive safety overhauls. Since Three Mile Island, utilities have had to shut down 41 plants for a year or more, a total of 51 times.

Nuclear accidents are most likely to occur at the beginning or end of a plant's operating lifetime, Lochbaum pointed out. When a plant first goes on line, workers have to acclimate to new equipment that has not been tested in real-world situations. Meanwhile, at the end of a plant's life, workers have to compensate for increasingly degraded hardware. Three Mile Island and other major nuclear accidents, including ones at Chernobyl, Browns Ferry in Alabama and Fermi near Detroit, occurred shortly after the plants started operating. Now most of the 104 currently operating U.S. nuclear power plants are entering the high-risk period at the end of their originally intended 40-year lifespans.

If the nuclear industry constructs a new fleet of power plants, Lochbaum said, there will be at a higher risk for a nuclear accident because nearly all of the plants in the United States will be either very new or very old.

"If the industry wants to build a new generation of nuclear plants, it first should prove that it can safely operate the ones currently in operation," he said. "And before the NRC approves any new plants, the agency should make sure the industry isn't as careless with its new plants as it was with its old ones."

[Booner]

bushwacker wrote:

March 27, 2008
Three Mile Island 29 Years Later: Nuclear Safety Problems Still Unresolved
Adding New Plants to Aging Fleet Will Increase Risk Without Safety Reform, Science Group Says
Nuclear Reactor Security
Walking A Nuclear TightropeWASHINGTON (March 27, 2008)—
The partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant began on March 28, 1979......Unfortunately, over the last three decades, neither plant owners nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have adequately addressed the basic flaws in U.S. nuclear safety that led to the Three Mile Island accident, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
"Three Mile Island was almost 30 years ago so perhaps the industry and the NRC have forgotten about it," said Dave Lochbaum, the director of UCS's Nuclear Safety Project.........Since then, the NRC and plant owners have focused more on keeping nuclear plants running over the short-term than ensuring their safety, Lochbaum said. That strategy has allowed a number of safety problems at plants to build up over time.....[yadda, yadda, and more false claims by Lochbaum].... "And before the NRC approves any new plants, the agency should make sure the industry isn't as careless with its new plants as it was with its old ones."

The “science group” quoted is the Union of Concerned Scientists, an avowed anti-nuclear group with an anti-prosperity political foundation. Furthermore their lead attack dog, David Lochbaum, is no more of a scientist than all Three Stooges put together. Lochbaum’s most recent press release is a new low in lies and deceit which can be refuted on every point. For openers, his claim that the flaws leading to the reactor damage at Three Mile Island have been ignored is hopelessly out of line with the facts. To the extreme contrary, Three Mile Island re-wrote the book on new regulations, design changes and operating practices which have virtually buried the issues of the 1970s.

Like no other industry in all of history, the nukes have faced their problems openly and transparently in dealing with problems and finding solutions. The safety of nuclear operations has increased 10-fold since the early years while the MW-hrs of electricity which nukes provide have nearly doubled, and that is without adding significant new nuclear generating capacity. There is NO other generating source which can claim capacity factors in the 90%-tiles and the reason behind it is a thorough maturing of operating experience. It was a hard lesson, but nukes have learned that the key to long run-times is intelligent and safe operation within the framework of intelligent regulation.

The new reactor designs lay the previous issues to rest as well. For example, the main bugaboo, the requirement for large emergency pumping systems dependent upon a large electrical power supply to save the core is eliminated by passive fail-proof gravity systems to add emergency cooling water. The elimination of entire families of previous safety systems means greater economy in O&M without compromising safety and fewer forced outages of a compliance-related nature.

This latest scurrilous attack by the UCS should only serve to expose their lack of honesty in attempting to close down the only true alternative to coal-electric power generation. Fearmongering against nuclear power is a relic of the last century which can and should be exposed at every turn.

[bushwacker]

Terry Macalister The Guardian, Thursday October 11 2007

The official cost of cleaning up 20 of Britain's nuclear facilities will be more than £73bn, 16% higher than estimated last year, according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority yesterday. The latest rise in clean-up costs came as the government completed consultation on whether to proceed with a new generation of atomic plants, with one potential operator arguing there was a "moral imperative" to allow more to be built.

The NDA blamed the soaring cost estimates for clean-up on obtaining more detailed estimates for dismantling buildings and clearing sites from individual operators managing locations such as Sellafield in Cumbria for the state-owned agency.

Greenpeace claimed last night that the cost of nuclear clean-up would be closer to £100bn because there would be a £10bn bill for the disposal of legacy waste, a further £9bn for getting rid of uranium, plutonium and spent fuel plus £5bn from the costs of dismantling British Energy plants.

The NDA says the £73bn in its accounts is less relevant than the "discounted" figure of £37bn which takes account of inflation and other factors, though it admits even that number has increased by 22% since it was calculated a year ago.

[Booner]

bushwacker wrote:

Terry Macalister The Guardian, Thursday October 11 2007
The official cost of cleaning up 20 of Britain's nuclear facilities will be more than £73bn, 16% higher than estimated last year, according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority yesterday. The latest rise in clean-up costs came as the government completed consultation on whether to proceed with a new generation of atomic plants, with one potential operator arguing there was a "moral imperative" to allow more to be built.
The NDA blamed the soaring cost estimates for clean-up on obtaining more detailed estimates for dismantling buildings and clearing sites from individual operators managing locations such as Sellafield in Cumbria for the state-owned agency.
Greenpeace claimed last night that the cost of nuclear clean-up would be closer to £100bn because there would be a £10bn bill for the disposal of legacy waste, a further £9bn for getting rid of uranium, plutonium and spent fuel plus £5bn from the costs of dismantling British Energy plants.
The NDA says the £73bn in its accounts is less relevant than the "discounted" figure of £37bn which takes account of inflation and other factors, though it admits even that number has increased by 22% since it was calculated a year ago.

Greenpeace is more or less in the same league as the Union of Concerned Scientists. Seeking truth and making the world safer are not on their agenda. Both entities lie so why should we believe anything they say?

[bushwacker]

No Nukes Is Good Nukes
An interview with longtime anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott
By Gregory Dicum
03 May 2005

In 1971, Helen Caldicott had an epiphany: all life on earth could end at any moment, simply because a few pig-headed people imagined they could "win" a nuclear war. A decade later, she had given up her promising medical career to devote her life to nothing short of saving the world.

Her urgent Australian twang became a sane voice in a world gone mad. In 1985, the Caldicott-inspired International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won the Nobel Peace Prize. The organization beat out Caldicott herself, who had been nominated by Linus Pauling, the renowned chemist, anti-nuclear activist, and 1962 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Today, with a renewed push to develop nuclear weapons in the U.S. and other countries and nuclear energy slithering back onto the table, the threat is as present as ever, as she writes in The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex.

With her latest endeavor, the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, Caldicott seeks to counter the media offensives of the nuclear industry. Meanwhile, she's working on a new book -- her sixth -- about the psychopathologies of nuclear decision makers.

Grist met with Caldicott in San Francisco, where she was planning a fund-raiser around the release of Helen's War, a sobering film about her initial efforts to get NPRI off the ground in the midst of post-9/11 groupthink.

There's a concerted effort right now to rehabilitate the image of nuclear power. Proponents argue that fossil fuels are more damaging to the environment, as well as being in short supply, and that nuclear is the [best option going forward]. What's going on here?

The people saying these things are not biologists, they're not geneticists, they're not physicians. In other words, they don't know what they're talking about. And that makes me very annoyed. First of all, every reactor produces about [20 to 30] tons of highly radioactive waste a year. The majority of it is very long-lived and will have to be isolated from the ecosphere for hundreds of thousands of years ... As it leaks into the environment, it will bio-concentrate by orders of magnitude at each step of the food chain: algae, crustaceans, little fish, big fish, us.

It takes a single mutation in a single gene in a single cell to kill you.[The most common plutonium isotope] has a half-life of 24,400 years. Every male in the Northern Hemisphere has a small load of plutonium in his gonads. What that means to future generations God only knows -- and we're not the only species with testicles. What we're doing is degrading evolution, and not many people understand that.

Yet as society begins to recognize that we do have to get away from the petroleum economy, there's a lot of enthusiasm amongst environmentalists for hydrogen -- enthusiasm that's shared by the nuclear industry.

Well, of course, they'll do anything. I've been dealing with them for 30 years and they lie -- they frighten me. I can debate with generals about nuclear war and feel much more comfortable because they know that what I'm talking about is true. The nuclear industry just lies its way through the whole thing.

[bushwacker]

Nuclear power is no answer, says Caldicott.They say nuclear power is the answer to global warming. Well ... the [Department of Energy] and the EPA [will tell you] that, at the moment, the process of uranium enrichment for fuel for nuclear power releases huge quantities of CO2. And that does not include releases from decommissioning of the reactor and transportation and long-term storage of the waste.
Meanwhile, the enrichment of uranium is responsible for [over 90 percent] of the CFC-114 gas released into the air in the U.S. Now, CFC is banned internationally under the Montreal Protocol because it destroys the ozone layer, one. Two, CFC gas is 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent as a global warmer and heat trapper than CO2. So the nuclear industry is lying. And advocates for nuclear power have fallen for the nuclear industry's lies. Not propaganda, but lies.
Of course we've got to stop burning oil and coal. Those grotesque vehicles that get 10 miles to the gallon should be banned! Americans have no idea about conservation. Europeans have the same standard of living as you and they use 50 percent less energy because they turn their lights off and they conserve. We are actively killing the earth by the way we live.
But some European countries derive more of their power from nuclear energy than the U.S.
Many countries in Europe are starting to realize that what they've done with nuclear power is ridiculous and immoral. Belgium, Germany, and Sweden have now passed laws to close down the reactors. So they're learning, but a little too late. Where are they going to put the waste?
Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we're going in the other direction, talking about new nuclear plants and even new nuclear weapons. Why now?
Because the nuclear scientists in the labs keep pushing and pushing. They like building and testing their nuclear weapons. They get a lot of money for it, and they're addicted to it.
The generals like their missiles too. One general basically said, "If you threaten our missiles and our early-warning systems, baby, that's threatening the family jewels." Got it? That's the reason they're still there. Missiles are an extension of their sexuality. There's a deep psychosexual pathology inherent in the brains of these men. "Missile erections," "deep penetrations" -- even the language they use is sexual. I've thought, in my more light-hearted times, that maybe they should all be given Viagra, and then they wouldn't need their missiles.

[bushwacker]

Most of the nuclear-policy focus lately has been on the various dangerous, unpredictable regimes that are busily acquiring nuclear weapons. Why does yours continue to be on the United States?
The most dangerous regime in the world at the moment is this regime. The country with the largest number of weapons of mass destruction is America. Of the nearly 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world, Russia and America own 95 percent. No one else can destroy all life on earth except Russia and America. The two rogue nations in the world are Russia and America, holding the world at nuclear ransom. Period.
We got to within 10 seconds of nuclear war in 1995 when Yeltsin made a mistake. On 9/11, America was on the second- or third-highest state of nuclear alert, ready to launch. Weapons are still on hair-trigger alert. They go off, Putin and Bush get minutes to decide whether or not to press their buttons, the nuclear "exchange" is over in an hour, and that's the end of most life on earth.
And to look at North Korea, who may have two or eight bombs, or none -- that's a form of displacement activity. If you put rats in a cage and threaten them with a lethal situation, they run around doing something irrelevant to that which threatens them. That's what people are doing by looking at North Korea and not looking at the main issue at hand, which is about to blow us all up. I mean, the whole thing's insane.

Yet today, in spite of this well-documented danger, the issue's not at the forefront of many people's awareness. There's a great deal of complacency.

Well, ignorance. I don't think anyone's shocking people into facing reality right now. I'm trying and it's not so easy because I don't get access to the media. It's hard to get on a lot of stupid shows and talk the truth. They don't want the truth. They want theater.

I founded NPRI as a way to get this access. So that I, and others, can get on to debate these awful right-wing characters from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and American Enterprise Institute. We need equal time, and that's difficult to come by. But it's starting to happen where we're developing a fair bit of credibility.

Have you tried to meet with George W. Bush?
No... And I also don't think he's very bright. Reagan was intelligent in an intuitive way. There was someone at home there you could actually connect with. I'd certainly see George Bush and try to talk to him, but I wouldn't want any of his neo-conservative people around him. I'd have to work pretty hard, I think, to get to his core.
Do you think there's anybody else -- some other avenue into the administration?
No, I don't think there's anyone there at the moment who is really worth talking to. I think they're terribly blocked and terribly dangerous. They practice psychic numbing -- that's the medical terminology -- to block out what they're doing. They're doing evil and not looking at it....Everyone can be extraordinarily effective, they just have to not be self-indulgent or narcissistic or greedy..
Read The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex -- there's enough information in that so you could debate Rumsfeld at any time and beat him on television. And at the back of that book there's a huge list of anti-nuclear groups all around the country and the world, and you can look up all the people making the weapons and where they live and how you can contact them.

[old vet]

bushwacker wrote:

No Nukes Is Good Nukes
An interview with longtime anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott

Helen Caldicott is not a liar because she is insane.

[bushwacker]

and sitting on a time bomb of our own making
IS NOT INSANE???