popular logistics

This Letter to the Editor, written by Larry, was published in the Asbury Park Press, Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 (Click Here). The full text is reproduced below.

Nuclear power too dangerous.

Nuclear power is not green or cheap. It is a security nightmare.

When you look at mining, milling and transporting nuclear fuel, nuclear power emits four to five times as much carbon dioxide as wind and solar. The fuel cycle also creates massive amounts of radioactive waste — 100,000 metric tons per plant per year. Thermal pollution from Oyster Creek kills fish, shellfish and amphibians. And radioactive wastes must be isolated from the environment for a long time.

No new nuclear power plants were built in the United States after electricity was deregulated. That’s not because of the Three Mile Island accident or the Chernobyl disaster, and not because of the protests against nuclear power or rational fears of the technology, but because of the time and expense to build new nuclear power plants. When you look at the capital costs of building nuclear plants, and add the costs of insurance, evacuation plans, security systems and government regulation, nuclear power becomes too expensive to compete.

So in 2005, the federal government mandated $125 million in tax breaks for each new nuclear power plant and provided loan guarantees of 80 percent of a plant’s cost, including overruns. Taxpayers pay for those tax breaks and loan guarantees. That does not make it cost-effective; it just shifts the burden.

Nuclear power is a security nightmare. If the Sept. 11 killers had crashed one of the hijacked planes into Oyster Creek rather than the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, much of the Jersey Shore would be like the area around Chernobyl — condemned, abandoned and uninhabitable.

If we were smart, we would move forward quickly on offshore wind, photovoltaic solar, geothermal, ocean current turbines and conservation.

Larry Furman

Harvard School of Public Health research concludes that airport security isn’t helping. Reuters, or Yahoo News.

The researchers could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks.

They found no evidence to suggest that making passengers take off their shoes and confiscating small items prevented any incidents.

The researchers conclude that it would be “interesting” to apply medical standards to airport security. Screening programs for illnesses like cancer are usually not broadly instituted unless they have been shown to work.

The TSA response:

The Transportation Security Administration defended its measures by reporting that more than 13 million prohibited items were intercepted in one year. … Most of these illegal items were lighters.”

The TSA needs to think things through and implement security protocols that work to stop terrorists, rather than those that work to inconvenience passengers, confiscate lighters, water, homemade pies, and toothpaste.

Bruce Schneier, in his blog on Security and Security Technology, sums it up well:

The goal isn’t to confiscate prohibited items. The goal is to prevent terrorism on airplanes. When the TSA confiscates millions of lighters from innocent people, that’s a security failure. The TSA is reacting to non-threats. The TSA is reacting to false alarms. Now you can argue that this level of failures is necessary to make people safer, but it’s certainly not evidence that people are safer.

So today, 6 years after Sept. 11, Airport Security, to put it mildly, is a work in progress. Or, as Schneier puts it, “the TSA has it completely backwards.“

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) (Click Here) or (Here)

“A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction.”
- James Madison, the Federalist papers. (Click Here)

“With the radical Right, we have a political faction disguised as a religious sect and the president of the United States is heading it. Bush uses a religious blind faith to hide what is actually an extremist political philosophy with a disdain for social justice that is anything but pious by the standards of any respected faith tradition.”
- Al Gore, The Assault On Reason. (Click Here)

The Point-by-Point blog has this interesting chart:

Alice at Point-by-Point, in an update, notes that the hypothesis of Abu Ghraib knowledge as causal event is vulnerable. We agree that it can’t be proved - but anecdotal evidence suggests that the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (and “black site”) disclosures have strengthened the rhetorical positions of terrorist cheerleaders and recruiters.