john from ojai:
How many deaths have been attributed to nulear energy production in the US?

The world has been running reactors for over sixty years and we’ve had ONE major (Chernobyl)and ONE minor (TMI) accident.

How much air pollution does a nuke emit?

How much water pollution?

I say, shut down all the coal mines, build nukes in coal mining regions and put the displaced coal workers to work for the nukes. I’d be willing to bet a coal miner would jump at the chance to work at a nuke plant.

Finally somebody had the guts to aknowledge that “clean coal” is just pure bullshit, just like almost any other attempt by “planet saviors” to save the Earth.

TREACHERY IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING

The TVA plant burns 14,000 tons of coal
per day to make ten billion kilowatt
hours of juice to operate 670,000 people’s
hair dryers, washers, TVs, lights and computers.

Now here’s a new Appalachian folktale:
A slurry of fly ash with chemicals escapes
its dump and slides downhill into rivers.
Running through valleys, bubbling in the sun,

it swamps species even the Creator-god
has not yet had time to admire –-
larkspur, blazing star, Canada lily, aster,
honeysuckle shading nests of woodland

creatures, ant holes, spider webs, bat caves.
Pie-eyed fish float sidewise, breathless.
People take money that allows this waste
to be dumped on them from Tennessee,

trainloads trundling to Alabama — three million
dollars — big money to jobless people
whose bodies, being stronger than plants
and animals, more slowly absorb the poisons.

How much is three million for slow death
day in, day out, drinking and washing in water
laced with mercury, arsenic and lead, but you cnn’t
see it so it must not be there, right? Harmless?

Wondering, they sit on their front porches
in their straight-backed chairs, misinformed,
wanting cash money instead of welfare,
even as their shut-eyed store-fronts

drowse in listlessness and boredom..
All too soon they start to hate the freight cars
screeching under the weight of smelly silt…
Some of them wonder if their own ashes

might one day escape to somewhere else
far away from here. Corporate CEOs
in Knoxville smile boardroom smiles
behind closed doors, planning to bewitch

the next small-town mayor where poverty
lowers his sky and the shoes of wishful
thinking stick out from under his bed.
Of course the XYX Clean Coal Company

will do a complete “beneficiation” later.
That’s the new technological fix for disasters.
When people start inventing words like “beneficiation” and talk about accidents
    as “anomalies”, watch your back!