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Renaissance for nuclear plants may be nearing
For the anti-nuke crowd, the storage pool's ghostly appearance hints at potential catastrophic fallout from reliance on an energy source with a waste stream so toxic it must be guarded for centuries. ...The nation's tolerance for atomic power is about to be tested by an industry intent on welcoming a new wave of nuclear plants and drowning memories of accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Legions of activists will surface to obstruct the flow of this nuclear gambit. The exchange is likely to spark a relapse into polarizing environmental, political and regulatory debates that dominated nuclear power's emergence at Wolf Creek and plants carrying the names Copper Station, Turkey Point, Vermont Yankee, Peach Bottoms, Beaver Valley, Comanche Peak and Grand Gulf. ...Stuart Lowry, a Topeka lawyer who works with power cooperatives and serves on the Kansas Energy Council, said he didn't need surveys to grasp that nuclear power had to play a larger role in the nation's energy future.
October 28, 2007
by Tim Carpenter
in Topeka Capital Journal
BURLINGTON - Uranium fuel assemblies withdrawn from Wolf Creek's nuclear reactor trigger a weird and wonderful royal blue light show in a 40-foot-deep stainless steel storage pool.
This brilliant consequence of radiation absorption in water offers a glimpse of what nuclear power advocates mean when they speak of scientific virtuosity required to tame atoms for electricity production. Even the researcher who explained the blue-glow phenomenon won a Nobel Prize.
For the anti-nuke crowd, the storage pool's ghostly appearance hints at potential catastrophic fallout from reliance on an energy source with a waste stream so toxic it must be guarded for... [continue via Web link]
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