What am I for and what I know
I’m for the selection of the safest spot for DGRs based upon facts including all the risks for long term storage of nuclear waste. It’s too important an issue to be derailed.
Further, I don’t care where it goes as long as it is the best site geologically and strategically with risk minimized. There are no scientific breakthroughs required.
by Mike Sterling
From time to time people send me links to articles and sources about Nuclear Safety. Many of them are bogus, but the senders think it’s the other side of the coin or the rest of the story.. For example, one was sent heavily linked to German language sites.
I had to pass a graduate school test in German comprehension of scientific sources. It loomed in my mind as a terrible ordeal. I was asked to translate for an hour from a book that I had never seen, but ah!
It so happened that the book was one that I had read cover to cover in English. It was full of subtle mathematical jargon that I knew well. The exam monitor had never read it and could not, if he tried. It was too technical for him. What luck! We had a Kabuki dance going.
The person was in fact more ignorant in science and math than I was in German, so I was rated as an expert in German translations of scientific works. Hog wash! I was and am illiterate in German and I don’t want to chance commenting about an article that used so many German language sources. So why send it to me in the first place? Who knows?
Others have sent me articles from Canadian papers written by reporters who quote people whose last physics class was probably their first.
Many of them are just reporting on what they think was said or written. One touted Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley as leading the charge against DGRs and calling for an international debate on them. Great …. what stadium will he rent? This is the same Bradley that focused on the shipments of steam generators.
He is quoted as saying “It just amazes me “Forty million Canadians and Americans take their water from there, and we continue to treat it like it’s a toilet bowl.” I guess he said that, who knows because the reporter is reporting on what somebody said he said.
Sarnia’s Mayor better look to his own environment before he talks about the nature of toilet bowls. A few years ago a shipwreck was discovered near the bridge in Sarnia. I talked to the head archaeologist about it and she said they had to build a platform above it for her to observe. It was too toxic for her to touch from the petro-chemical industry that did in fact use the river as a place to put toxic materials. Stay home Mayor Bradley, you have lots to work on there.
That whole controversy about transporting the steam turbines to Sweden was a great example of how messed up these things can be. The shipment went through all the checks and balances that the Canadian Nuclear Safety organization usually goes through, but it raised a hew and cry that eventually forced the boilers to be stored out at the Bruce until further notice. Let’s look at this in some detail.
