All this talk about President Bush’s energy policy, and outrage at Iran and North Korea for their nuclear ambitions, is perplexingly misplaced. Oil man Bush has been quoted as having one of his main goals for term II the pushing of nuclear power — see Ron Suskind’s ‘Without A Doubt.’ [NY Times Sunday Oct 14 2004]

Of course, we should be making a grand investment in wind and solar and hydrogen power (not generated by nuclear power, as Mr. Bush intends). Germany already has the equivalent of 14 nuclear power plants’ worth of windpower built and working in that country, that is phasing out nuclear power.

This is a letter to the editor in response to a NY Times
Op Ed by Thomas Friedman on Feb 13 2005

Dear Mr. Friedman and the NY Times,

All this talk about President Bush’s energy policy, and outrage at Iran and North Korea for their nuclear ambitions, is perplexingly misplaced. Oil man Bush has been quoted as having one of his main goals for term II the pushing of nuclear power — see Ron Suskind’s ‘Without A Doubt.’ [NY Times Sunday Oct 14 2004]

Of course, we should be making a grand investment in wind and solar and hydrogen power (not generated by nuclear power, as Mr. Bush intends). Germany already has the equivalent of 14 nuclear power plants’ worth of windpower built and working in that country, that is phasing out nuclear power.

But we live in an informational hole that allows most Americans to not know this.
Remember these basic facts: what we know as nuclear power plants were originally made to produce plutonium for our nuclear weapons. Each 1000 megawatt nuclear power plant produces between 500-1000 pounds of plutonium per year. We have 103 nuclear plants in the USA, in various stages of efficiency and deficiency. One microgram of plutonium is the cancer causing dose to produce lung cancer. That is one millionth of a gram. (There are 454 grams in one pound.)

If you do the math, twenty pounds of plutonium is theoretically enough to give every human being on Earth lung cancer, if an accident might occur in ANY nuclear plant in ANY country to produce particles of 2-4 microns that would fit into our lung alveoli.

Twenty pounds of plutonium is also the sufficient amount to produce a nuclear bomb of the strength of those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan to end World War II in 1945.

It all means that any country or state that has a nuclear power plant can produce enough plutonium to do what we all fear. Yet, the Bush administration wants to build more nuclear power plants in America, and sell them to whatever countries will buy them. Think CHINA! Vice President Cheney went to China last April to help sell maybe fifty General Electric or Westinghouse nuclear plants there.

Why shouldn’t any country that has a nuclear plant be able to what it wants with its with its energy technology?

A better question would be: Why don’t we finally phase out nuclear power everywhere on Earth, and especially in the USA where it supplies about twenty percent of our electricity at present? We still cannot store the waste safely for the hundreds of thousands of years elements like plutonium remain hazardous. (Hazardous life for plutonium is 240,000 years.) Each nuclear plant is a target for terrorists, as would each shipment of nuclear waste to some earthquake-fault-ridden depository, like the one scientists have declaimed at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. And then there is the worry of dirty bombs and the sale of plutonium and other radionuclides on the black market, to make these. Not to mention the idea to build 1000 food irradiation plants in America and ship radioactive cobalt or cesium back and forth across our roads and rails to stock these.

We raise our hands in horror that ‘axis of evil’ nations might usurp our ethnocentric rules
of behavior, while we allow an economic/environmental profligate like George Bush to lead us into possible nuclear contamination right here at home, or anywhere else his policy tailings might reach in this shrinking world.

We have to be aware of President Bush’s fervent goal to push nuclear power, and wonder if he has any knowledge of plutonium’s toxicity in his Russian Roulette game he is playing with America and the rest of the world.

Conrad Miller M.D.
Author:
‘The Most Important Issues Americans THINK They Know Enough About…Part I’