Your Questions About Sustainable Energy Fund

admin answers:

Sorry but high gas prices are here to stay until such a time exists that demand significantly decreases due to other options. The US produces about 3% of the oil on the market and we use about 25% of what is consumed worldwide. Today, China and India have a growing demand for cars and gas. Gas prices are about $9 a gallon in Europe so we really don’t have much room to complain. Both McCain and Obama will have their work cut out for them. Drilling off-shore will have no effect on gas prices for a long, long time other than some sort of immediate feel good sensation that our leaders are doing something. It will take 10 years before off-shore drilling will yield a drop. The best solution is for you and I to reduce our individual consumption and then support policies through your voting habits that fund alternative energy, conservation and sustainable living. The way I do that is to consolidate my car trips and my husband and I ride our bicycles to work. We thought about mileage when we purchased our vehicle 2 years ago, knowing that gas prices would go up (how could you not know???? I’ve known since I the oil embargo of 1973 and I was only 11!!!!) We live in the mountain southwest where it snows heavily in winter so we need an SUV and got a Honda Element, which is very fuel efficient. We voted to increase our sales tax locally to expand city bus service. The initiative passed and we hope to take the bus to work by next summer. The bottom line is that American lifestyles are going to have to change. Some people might tell you that such changes will set us down the road to a socialist way of life similar to Europe. Well I have traveled in Europe extensively and I don’t see them complaining about riding bicycles on municipally maintained bike paths and lanes or using public transit, which is fantastic. My travels suggest to me that middle class Europeans manage pretty well, despite having to pay $9 a gallon and use buses and trains to get to work and school. This is not outrageous, this is the real world.

admin answers:

A very important question due to the fact that the current method of dealing with high level radioactive waste is to safely contain it or isolate it from the human environment.

In fact to date, there is still no long term solution on how to safely dispose of radioactive nuclear waste.

What the governments don’t want us to know is:

1) Nuclear power is not as clean as they portray it to be.
2) Governments spend ten of millions of our tax dollars annually to promote nuclear energy as “clean”.
3) Tritium a by-product from nuclear power plants is routinely released into the air and water as a gas,; no filtering is economically feasible.
(Tritium is a carcinogen, causes radiogenic cancers, birth defects and genetic mutations)
4) Nuclear power is not sustainable technology.
5) Greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation due to uranium mining, milling and enrichment, transportation to power plants and storage facilities and storage maintenance is poisoning life on earth.
6) In the United States alone, geological data confirms that there are over 4,000 open pit and underground uranium mines, generating approximately 3 billion metric tons of toxic waste.
7) There is no safe storage or disposal solutions for the radioactive nuclear waste we produce on a daily basis.
8) Nuclear waste from spent fuel rods will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years!
9) Nuclear power facilities worldwide are at risk of being attacked and or sabotaged as they make the perfect deadly weapon.
10) The term “Isolation” from the environment is relative due to the fact that radiation from the spent fuel will eventually be released into the biosphere over time.

The extreme longevity of nuclear waste is the one reason why we should not be producing it at all.
Until we discover a way to dispose of it safely or illiminate the waste completely a moratorium on the building of any more nuclear power facilities should be enforced.

Much research and funding has gone into the finding a viable solution to the nuclear waste problem.
Some of the proposals which have been very controversial and opposed have been;
Disposal of the radioactive waste deep below the earths surface in mined repositories deemed geologically sound.
This is the actual legal designated form of disposal to date, though it has not been demonstrated to be technically safe or infallable.
There have been other proposals in the past such as, shooting it up into space and burying it up underneath the polar ice caps.

One of the most troubling and insane ideas has been to bury it underneath the bedrock on the oceans floor. It would be almost impossible to monitor and it would take only one mistake to release and poison the earths oceans for millions of years.

Nuclear waste has been kept out of the publics mind and out of sight for the most part. This is done intentionally to avoid any opposition or public “watchdog” reviews.
It is the future of the planet that we are choosing to ignore when we let government and corporations take control of such an important issue. The nuclear power industry has only one objective, to make money! To promote their industry.
The more nuclear power plants built, the more radioactive waste the earth is going to be contaminated with.
Our future generations will be burdened with monitoring the millions of storage facilities littering the face of the earth.