Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 594 Editor's Choice: 8
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Notorbitboy...
[Read the article: Nuclear bomb]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]read more history. A lot more history.
The hot-water reactor technology built and sold by American firms like Babcock & Wilcox in the 1970s for reactors like 3 Mile Island is inherently unstable- and, in fact, the same basic design that led to the meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986.
I think dogmatic opposition to any form of atomic power is misguided, and it's commonly the case that the opponents have flaws in their erudition (and unfortunately, some of the ones I've encountered even exult in their ignorance.)
But impetus for the the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s wasn't completely unfounded. It was the low-ball designs, slipshod construction and sketchy maintenance record of firms like Kerr-McGee and Babcock & Wilcox that gave nuclear power its bad name in this country, more than anti-technological environmentalism. They lost the public trust- which is a difficult thing for an industry or an institution to rebuild.
As for your trite rabbit punching of "liberals"- spare me the cornballs. Not all topics are primarily about politics (thankfully). I recommend that in such cases, you try to write a post without including a reference to ideology- a piece of my pontifical advice that goes out to the readership in general, fwiw, not just you.
The same goes for the cliched jibes at "lawyers"- a meaningless cheap shot if there ever was one. My God, how many times have I heard Republican lawyers lashing out with high moral dudgeon at "lawyers"...how gullible do you have to be, to go for that one?
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@Amity
[Read the article: Nuclear bomb]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Pebble-bed reactors don't reuse spent fuel.
True, but if the technology works as described, it obviates a lot of problems, and makes the other ones much more amenable to solution. And to my mind, that is Nobel-praiseworthy (not that I'm overly in awe of such awards...)
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@Rambling Rose
[Read the article: Nuclear bomb]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The pebble-bed nuclear technology uses helium to power its turbines, not water.
Hot water is, of course, a common discharge from fossil fuel power plants, as well as light-water nuclear reactors.
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that pesky career track!
[Read the article: Women trade dead-end relationships for dead-end careers?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What I don't understand is why more women don't pursue jobs in the highly rewarding field of Ice Road Trucking.
I mean, the jobs are out there.
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@Gulliver
[Read the article: Nuclear bomb]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thanks for the corrections. I obviously was harboring misconceptions from my well-intended but haphazard attempts at self-education. Reading threads like this one makes it clear to me how much I have to learn.
If only I could get rid of the partisanship, and actually find something like a round table forum that addresses the questions and controversies about nuclear power so that engineers and specialists in radioactive physics and chemistry could engage life scientists and physicians in a common spirit of honest inquiry, and dispensing with territorial snarling or name-calling when differences of opinion break out.
I've witnessed all too much in the way of "debate" that consists of assumption of ulterior motives, and/or the hunt for them...propounding opinions/caricatures/fantasies on those topics simply isn't responsive to the matters in dispute. Critical decisions about how to deal with the future of resources and energy on this planet deserve to be considered intelligently and objectively. In fact, they desperately need such consideration.
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@tgreer08, simonetta
[Read the article: The real consequences when America is at war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]tgreer08- listen to you, lecturing Chris Hedges:
"Friend- tell us something we dont know. You want to talk about brutality, look at 9/11. Watch the Nick Berg tape. Look at pictures of the countless attacks that took place both prior and during the post 9/11- ON US. Look at the countless pictures and read the stories of the brutality of the Hussein regime. Or maybe you dont have the stomach to do that."
tgreer, have a glimpse an Chris Hedges' resume:
"...I began covering the insurgencies in El Salvador where I spent five years. Then I went to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank in Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia and finally to Kosovo.
I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held prisoner for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by MIG-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers and shelled for days on end in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments..."
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/events/honors/morris/HEDGES-Morris.html
[URL link at my sig]
Go on, tgreer. Give him your hard-nose briefing on the realities of warfare.
And Simonetta, waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 to exhort Americans to "kill a thousand for every one that they killed of our people", in the course of delivering your illiterate crank-lab political analysis- you sound like some overfed plutocrat in a VIP box at the Roman Coliseum, cheering on your favorite team of gladiators. You sicken me.
Both of you have more to answer for than the combat troops on the ground, who you helped to throw into that quagmire.