I have posted a number of blog entries about nuclear weapons held by different countries including estimates of how many each has. The problem with these estimates is that the exact number of nuclear warheads possessed by each nuclear power is a closely held military secret. Nonetheless, I will try to present a good estimate of global totals in this post.

           The world inventory of operational strategic nuclear weapons such as intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach any spot on the globe in minutes is currently around 4000 warheads. About half of these are on high alert, ready for use at any time on short notice. These have been the main focus of arms reduction talks. The U.S. and Russia are dismantling strategic warheads but the Chinese are manufacturing more and deploying new delivery vehicles.

           Nonstrategic nuclear weapons are shorter range delivery vehicles for smaller nuclear warheads such as artillery; short-, medium-, and long-range ballistic missiles; cruise missiles; and gravity bombs. It is estimated that there are about two hundred such warheads that are operational. They have been deployed in Europe by the United States. Russia no operational warheads deployed but has several thousand retired warheads awaiting disassembly.

           In the category of Reserve/nondeployed combines both strategic and non strategic weapons are being held in reserve or being overhauled. There are about six thousand of these warheads around the world.

           Military stockpiles of warheads in storage, some of which are awaiting decommissioning, contain around ten thousand warheads.

           In addition to the number of warheads in the United States – around eight thousand, there are fifteen thousand plutonium cores stored at the Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 Plant in Tennessee. In Russia, there are around eight thousand five hundred warheads with several thousand warheads awaiting disassembly.

           So the estimated global inventory of all nuclear warheads of all type is around twenty thousand as of December 3012. These numbers are compiled by the Federation of American Scientists from the Nuclear Yearbook of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the appendix of the SIPRI Yearbook and the FAS Strategic Security Blog. The best estimates are for the United States and the worst estimates are for North Korea with the rest of the nuclear nations, Russia, United Kingdom, France, Israel, Pakistan and India somewhere in between.

            Despite reduction of nuclear arsenals from Cold War levels, all the nuclear states seem to be committed to updating their warheads and delivery systems. None seem to be inclined to consider the elimination of their nuclear military capability. International tensions wax and wane. Some countries that were enemies are now allies. But it is still assumed that the possession of nuclear weapons is a strong deterrent to attack from an enemy.

Graphic from nucleardarkness.org. Visit their website to find out how you can contribute to reducing the prospect of nuclear war.

              We have come to the last major subject in the concern about nuclear energy. Nuclear waste may be the end of our list but the big problem is that some of it does not end for millions of years. Waste is generated at every stage of nuclear energy as well as nuclear weapons production. There are high level nuclear wastes that will kill with direct exposure and lower level wastes that may lead to poisoning and cancer. The half life of the radioactive isotopes in nuclear waste can vary from hours to more than a million years with some types of wastes being dangerous for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. It is estimated that there are currently around 250,000 tons of nuclear waste around the world.

             First, there is the problem of the waste tailings left after uranium has been removed for processing.  This waste product is almost as radioactive as the uranium that has been removed. We have already mentioned this under uranium mining. If not properly dealt with it can pollute the air, water and soil posing a threat to human and animal health.

             Processing separates isotopes in order to create a higher ratio around twenty percent of the highly radioactive U-235 to the U-238 which constitutes most of the naturally occurring uranium. This enrichment process produces U-238 as waste which is radioactive and must be disposed of properly.  Nuclear weapons production has to raise the ratio of U-235 to U-238 as high as ninety percent which produces a great deal of waste U-238.

             After the nuclear fuel rods are depleted, they are removed from the reactors and temporarily stored in the spent fuel pool at the reactor. These pools are often outside the containment vessel and more vulnerable to accidents or terrorists. If the coolant in these pools drops below the level of the rods, they can burst into flame spontaneously spewing radioactive particulates into the atmosphere.

            The spent fuel pools in the United States are going to be full in five years. The intent was to have a permanent nuclear waste disposal site built to take spent fuel rods by 1999. Since the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository, there is not even a plan for a U.S. waste repository. The fuel rods will have to be stored onsite or offsite in temporary storage casks. These should be safe storage for decades but may still be threatened by accidents or terrorists.

            Most plans for permanent waste disposal focus on digging a deep hole or using an existing hole like a mine. Searches go on for extremely stable geological formation with little movement of groundwater and no fault lines that may cause earthquakes. There are ten waste depositories around the world.  Yucca Mountain in the U.S. turned out not to be so safe after reconsideration. Germany had to shut down a waste depository because there was unexpected leach of waste products by groundwater. If a waste depository is opened, then nuclear waste must be transported by truck, rail and/or ship which will increase the risk of accidents that will spill radioactive materials into the environment.

           Other methods have been suggested for disposing of waste such are processing in reactors, shooting into space, drilling extremely deep wells and other schemes. All of these ideas are untried and will be expensive and difficult to test and verify.

           Nuclear waste is a threat to humanity and a good reason to end the use of nuclear energy for power.

            I have covered some of the problems with nuclear weapons, uranium mining and uranium processing in previous posts. Today I am going to briefly list some of the major problems with nuclear reactors used for power generation. This list is not meant to be exhaustive but if there were no other problems with nuclear power, these alone would be enough to justify shutting it down.

            Many minor accidents with a variety of causes have plagued the nuclear power industry. Though low in probability major nuclear accidents do happen and can threaten the health of millions and large areas of the natural environment. Chernobyl and Fukushima are dramatic examples of what can happen.

            Calculations of the cost of nuclear power often don’t include the governmental subsidies, the wildly fluctuating cost of uranium, environmental degradation, the health costs of accidents, the problem of nuclear waste and the cost of decommissioning nuclear power plants. When everything is taken into account, nuclear power is not cheaper than renewable alternative energy which don’t have the dangers.

            When mining, processing, transport, construction, waste handling and decommissioning are taken into account; nuclear power is not as beneficial to reducing carbon dioxide emissions as has been advertised.

            Huge amounts of water are needed to cool nuclear power plants. Some of the rivers that supply water to cool power plants have insufficient flows to allow plants to operate at peak power all the time and the situation will just get worst. Recently the rising temperature of the ocean due to global warming caused the shutdown of a nuclear power plant that drew cooling water from the ocean.

            The big corporations that run the nuclear power plants are often guilty of incompetence or callous disregard in following proper procedures in the construction of power plants, their regular and safe operation and response to emergencies.

            Government agencies that are supposed to inspect and regulate nuclear power plants and to punish infractions by plant operators are often guilty of incompetence or even deliberately ignoring infractions and handing out light punishment when infractions are recognized.

            The spent fuel pools of nuclear reactors are filling up with spent fuel rods and, without permanent nuclear waste disposal facilities, when these pools are full, reactors will have to be shut down until sufficient temporary storage can be constructed.

            Most of the currently operating reactors are approaching the end of their intended lifespan. Either they will have to be shut down, decommissioned and replaced with new reactors with all the attendant costs and problems or they will have to be relicensed and continue to operate as they age and deteriorate, increasing the danger of a major accident.

           Because the construction and operation of new reactors has been slowing in recent decades, interested in jobs in the industry has been declining as well. There is a shortage of nuclear engineers in the world today to replace the current aging operators at nuclear power plants.

            One of the problems that does not get enough attention is the fact that the nuclear industry is complex and global. Uranium is mined in one country and processed in another country. Reactors are constructed by global companies that source their parts from different countries. Waste may be moved to different countries for processing or disposal. As countries drop the use of nuclear power and companies rethink whether they want to stay in the business of supplying reactors and reactor components, the construction of new reactors and the fueling and maintenance of reactors will become more expensive and meet growing public resistance. One of two more major accidents could seriously impact the global nuclear industry and make further use of nuclear power much more difficult and expensive if not impossible.

            Once uranium is mined, it has to be transported and refined for use in nuclear weapons or reactors. As with mining, there are major problems involved in such activities.

           Once uranium is leached from crushed ore, it is precipitated from solution and washed to produce a coarse powder which is around 80% uranium oxide. The powder has a strong order and cannot be dissolved in water. Although this powder is referred to as ‘yellow cake’ because of early ore extraction techniques, today most of the ‘yellow cake’ is brown or black.

            The yellow cake is transported in sealed containers via rail or truck to plants where uranium fuel rods are manufactured. If the seal is maintained, the main dangers are from dust escaping from loading and unloading the containers. However, if there is a train derailment or a truck accident, a container could be broken open, spilling yellow cake out into the environment where wind and water could carry it away from the location of the accident.

         When the yellow cake reaches the purification facility, it is smelted into uranium metal which is then combined with fluorine and subjected to isotopic separation where the level of highly radioactive U-235 is increased. Twenty percent U-235 is use to create uranium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods while highly enriched uranium with more than ninety percent U-235 is use to create nuclear weapons.

           As with any complex industrial process, there is the potential for a number of problems. If the staff is not well trained and conscientious, such incompetence may lead to exposure of workers to radioactive materials or release of such materials into the environment.  The company operating the facility may not be conscientious in providing properly functioning equipment and enforcing rigorous safety standards. And, finally, the government agencies tasked with overseeing uranium enrichment may fail to inspect and hold enrichment facilities responsible for breaches in following regulatory guidelines..

          If the dangerous materials such as yellow cake or any of the products of intermediate stages of uranium enrichment as well as the finished fuel pellets and rods are not properly handled because of any of the problems mentioned above, workers can be exposed to radiation and radioactive materials may escape into the environment.

          Highly toxic chemicals are used in enrichment such as fluorine gas. Fluorine bursts into flame when it comes into contact with ammonia, ceramics, copper wire and many organic and inorganic compounds. It changes to hydrofluoric acid when it comes in contact with moisture. It is highly damaging to the tissue of the respiratory tract. The gas formed when uranium interacts with fluorine is even more dangerous because it contains a heavy metal and is radioactive. Fluorine and uranium hexafluoride gas would be a serious health hazard if released into the environment.

         Individual enrichment facilities around the world have been criticized for one or more of the above problems prompting protests aimed and redressing the problem and/or closing the facility.

             I have covered uranium mining in previous posts and mentioned some of the protests and resistance actions against it. In this post, I am going to recap some of the issues with uranium mining.

              The best deposits of uranium ore have only one percent uranium so a huge amount of ore must be mined in order to obtain a small amount of uranium. In the U.S., with a quarter of a percent uranium ore, a ton of ore needs to be dug up in order to get five pounds of uranium. If the mine is the open-pit variety, it is usually necessary to remove a surface layer to get to the uranium ore. The ore that is left after the uranium is removed is almost as radioactive as the uranium and should be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years in order not to be a health hazard.

              Mining produces vast amounts of radioactive dust, much of which escapes the mining site, especially in open pit mines, and pollutes the environment. Mine workers are exposed to the dust even with protective clothing and dust masks.

              Uranium decays in a complex process that goes through fourteen stages before it finally become non-radioactive lead. Radon gas is produced in during one of the decay steps and enters the atmosphere where it can travel for miles. Miners need to wear special gas masks in order to be protected from the radon gas.

              One of the extraction processes is call leaching where the ore is piled in a trench and caustic toxic chemicals are poured over the ore. The uranium is leached from the ore and accumulated at the bottom of the trench. However, some of the leaching solution often escapes into the environment pollutes the soil, ground water and/or surface water. The fumes create air pollutions.

              In another extraction process, the ore is finely ground to extract the uranium. Radioactive dust from the grinding process can escape and pollute air, water and soil near the extraction plants.

              Uranium and other elements that are found in the ore are heavy metals. Even if not radioactive, these heavy metals escape into the environment and pollute the soil and water, posing a severe health hazard to humans, plants and animals.

              Uranium mining is a very dirty process that pollutes the environment near the mine with radioactive dust, radon gas, heavy metal and toxic chemicals. There is really no efficient way to remove the pollution of uranium mining from the air, water and soil around the mine. The mines render the areas around them dangerous and useless for any other purpose. Over time, the pollution from a mine spreads beyond the local area over a much wider area.

             When the cost of nuclear power is advertised by the nuclear industry, I don’t believe that they are including the environmental degradation and the health hazards from the mining of uranium.

Ranger Uranium Mine in Australia:

              I have done a whole series of posts on nuclear weapons but I have neglected one type that I mentioned in a recent post; the neutron bomb. One of the problems that I covered in that post was that nuclear weapons are so incredibly destructive that they destroy infrastructure in cities such as factories and equipment that might be useful to the attacker. The neutron bomb was dreamed up to help deal with this problem. The basic idea is to explode a nuclear device in the atmosphere that will not destroy all the buildings and equipment but that will create a sleet of neutrons that will kill all the people and animals in the area.

             The neutron bomb was designed in 1958 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and tested underground in Nevada in 1963. The neutron bomb is also called the Enhanced Radiation Weapons (ERW). It is based on a hydrogen bomb that is designed to generate much higher levels of lethal radiation than conventional hydrogen bombs. The fast neutrons from such bombs could penetrate heavy shielding and cause maximum casualties. Although there is still a powerful destructive atomic explosion from such a bomb, its main use is for killing people.

              In an ordinary hydrogen bomb, the casing is made from uranium or lead in order to absorb a great deal of the neutrons generated by the explosion. In a neutron bomb, the casing is made from chromium or nickel which do not absorb the fast neutrons generated. Around an ounce of tritium is also used in making neutron bombs. Neutron bombs release about fifty percent of their energy in a burst of radiation as compared to a five percent radiation release from a fission bomb of the same kiloton or megaton yield. The energy of the neutrons released by a neutron is about ten times that of the neutrons released by an equivalent fission bomb.

             Neutron bombs were originally developed as tactical weapons. The United States feared a massive Soviet invasion of Europe and felt that neutron bombs could be usefully deployed on the battle field against the troops, tanks and other armored vehicles of a Soviet invasion without doing as much damage to the infrastructure of the invaded countries. Their destructive potential would be a deterrent against the Soviets who would be able to roll over conventional defending forces. The heat from the blast of a 1 kiloton neutron bomb would kill unshielded human beings out to about 1600 feet. Unprotected people would die in days from the radiation out to about 3000 feet and half the people within a 4500 foot radius would die within weeks. If a 1 kiloton bomb was exploded more than 1600 feet above the ground, infrastructure damage would be minimize while people would die in an approximately 4000 foot radius under the blast.

            Neutron bombs were slated for deployment in Europe during the late 1970s. After a halt in development caused by protests, development was resumed under President Reagan. There was a brief deployment of a neutron warhead for the Sprint anti-missile system in 1975. Neutron warheads were also developed for short range tactical missiles and for artillery shells. President George H.W. Bush cancelled the neutron bomb program in 1992 but it took until 2003 for all the neutron warheads to be disassembled.

            Neutron bombs are no longer considered to be more effective against tanks that any other explosive because modern tanks are heavily shielded and would not be affected by the radiation of a neutron bomb alone.

             It may seem obvious why the vast majority of the people on Earth are opposed to nuclear weapons. They are insanely powerful and destructive. They could vaporize big cities in a blinding flash of light and heat. That being said, there are other reasons that nuclear weapons are being opposed.

           From a strictly military point of view, the strategic ballistic missiles and huge bombs may be useful for deterrence but they lack the discrimination of a good tactical weapon. Powerful explosives are an important part of any military arsenal but in a sense, nuclear bombs are too powerful. There have been attempts to make smaller nuclear weapons such as mortar shells that could be used on a battle field or against specific military targets but there are still problems with their manufacture, deployment and use which make them less attractive. And there is the problem of the bright red line of non-nuclear war versus nuclear war. If one party starts lobbing tactical nuclear weapons around, the other party will be motivated to consider the use of strategic megaton warheads in response.

            Usually the intent of warfare is to defeat an enemy by destroying their military capacity. Wiping out civilians has been a secondary and somewhat frowned upon goal. There have been famous instances where a conquering army has completely destroyed their opponents’ cities and, in the instance of Rome and Carthage, rendered their land uninhabitable for generations. These are the exceptions rather than the rule. Generally, the conquerors have wanted to exploit the citizenry and physical resources of their defeated enemies. There have been efforts to create a ‘neutron’ bomb which would wipe out people but leave buildings intact but that still leaves an empty city with no workers. Strategic nuclear weapons are just too destructive.

          Nuclear blasts throw huge amounts of dust and debris into the atmosphere including radioactive particles. This material, called fallout, falls back to the ground over time. The area surrounding the destruction caused by the explosion itself can be rendered uninhabitable by fallout. Depending on the size of the blast and the location, fallout can be caught up in high air currents such as the jet stream and carried for thousands of miles, even circling the planet. So, regardless of where an explosion occurs, entire hemispheres of the Earth can be threatened by the fallout. If either India or Pakistan attacked the other, the prevailing winds would carry fallout back to the land of the attacker. If a nuclear exchange of one hundred big warheads took place, enough dust and smoke would be injected into the atmosphere to cut sunlight down to the point where agriculture would be threatened. This is called a nuclear winter and millions if not billions would starve.

          There has been much work on treaties to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the few countries who possess them. However, the fact that a country without nuclear weapons feels threatened by a country with nuclear weapons is a very strong motivation to acquire them. The world has been lucky so far that some insane leader of a country with nuclear weapons has not attacked an enemy but it could happen. There are politically unstable countries that possess nuclear weapons, such as Pakistan, that could disintegrate into chaos leaving the world wonder who is going to wind up with the nukes. If a non-state player such as a terrorist group got their hands on a nuclear bomb, they could take out a big city. These are just some of the political problems of nuclear weapons.

          In the end, nuclear weapons are a very bad idea for a number of reasons, military, political, climatic, environmental and health.  The whole world would suffer in a nuclear war broke out anywhere. For all these and more reasons, nuclear weapons should be eliminated as soon and as completely as possible.

Peace symbol made by combining the semaphore flag positions for ‘n’ and ‘d’, standing for nuclear disarmament:

              There are two major intertwined streams that are the basis of the Atomic age; nuclear power and nuclear weapons. They were born together in the early 1940s in the midst of war. Nuclear weapons helped to end World War II in the Pacific. During the Cold War, the race to build and deploy nuclear weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain terrified the world in the 1950s. At the same time, commercial nuclear power reactors were built in Russia, England and the United States to utilize the vast potential locked in the uranium atom and demonstrate that nuclear chain reactions could have an important peaceful application.

             Reacting to the horror and devastation of the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan and the growing arsenals of nuclear weapons, major protests against nuclear weapons began with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s first Aldermaston March in England in 1958, the Women Strike for Peace marches in sixty U.S. cities in 1961 and the Australian Peace Marches in 1964. While nuclear weapons could be deployed against military targets, their enormous destructive power was a threat to major population centers. Millions of civilians could be killed and huge areas rendered uninhabitable by nuclear war. The major strategy of the time relied on the fear of such devastation to both sides in a nuclear war was called mutually assured destruction or MAD.

              Nuclear power held great promise but there were concerns that its implementation would not be as free from problems as had been promised. Issues with uranium mining, reactor safety and the disposal of nuclear waste sparked a backlash against all the positive advertising by governments and industry. These concerns prompted major protests against nuclear power in France and Germany in 1971. Hundreds of thousands of people marched against nuclear power in France and Germany during the late 1970s. The U.S. Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the U.S.S.R. Chernobyl accident in 1986 each spurred huge protests against nuclear power by proving that the concerns of the nuclear power critics were valid.

               During the 1970s, there were movements in the direction of winding down the tensions of the Cold War and reducing the nuclear weapons inventories. Unfortunately, with the election of the belligerent anti-communist Ronald Reagan, the Cold War thaw disappeared and once again the threat of nuclear rose to terrify the world. Arsenals were expanded and insane talk of a winnable nuclear war emanated from Washington, D.C. In reaction, anti-nuclear protests spread across the world once again. There was some work on nuclear disarmament during the Reagan Presidency which continues up to the present. However, massive protests still occur demanding the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

              The Japanese Fukushima accident in 2011 resulted in massive protests against nuclear power generation worldwide. The Unit 4 reactor at Fukushima was severely damaged and a pool full of nuclear fuel rods may collapse and burn at any time which would threaten the entire northern hemisphere and our global civilization. Despite continued support by some governments and huge lobbying and advertising efforts on the part of the nuclear industry, worldwide support for the use of nuclear energy for weapons and power generation is waning and the Atomic Age may be drawing to a close.

               One of the biggest security issues that the U.S. has to deal with is asymmetrical warfare. Our focus was on nation state fighting nation state in the last century but in the last few decades we have been dealing with attacks by organizations or lone individuals. This makes responding to attacks more difficult because we don’t necessarily have a readily identifiable foe in a known geographic location to counter attack. We are constantly debating proper ways of dealing with such attacks and one big problem is matching our response to the level of attack. If the attackers are dug in in civilian areas, there is a big problem of collateral damage and the death of bystanders if we use the full power of our military.

              Evolution of weaponry has also aggravated the problem. With the development of every more powerful weapons we are now at a point where a single person can bring down a passenger plane or blow up a building. High capacity magazines in assault rifles allow individuals to kill dozens of people in minutes. Chemical weapons deployed by individuals could threaten thousands and biological weapons could threaten millions.

             Perhaps the most serious scenario is one in which a single individual obtains and detonates a nuclear bomb. I have spent a lot of time in this blog discussing big nuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles. However, a lot of research and development has been done on tactical nuclear weapons in the kiloton range that could be deployed by small teams or even single soldiers on a battle field. A series of small nuclear missiles as well as nuclear mortar shells have been designed and, in cases built.

            Some work has been done on what have been called suitcase nukes. This would be a nuclear bomb small enough for one person to carry. The U.S. and Soviet Union develop nuclear bombs that one person could carry in a special backpack. There are reports that Israel has created nuclear bombs that could fit into a suitcase. This type of nuclear weapon has been popular in movies, television and novels because it would be so difficult if not impossible to defend against. What we have is the prospect that one person could bring such a bomb into a densely populated area and kill hundreds of thousands of people. This is scenario is perhaps the culmination of asymmetrical warfare.

           I have never been a fan of Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia. Although touted as a brilliant legal scholar by the Bush administration, I find his grasp of the Constitution weak, his legal reasoning confused and his recall of history often mistaken. On the bench and in his written opinions he is arrogant, sarcastic, and vicious against those who disagree with him. The reason that I mention Scalia is that in a recent discussion of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, he said that obviously it was referring to personal weapons and did not extend to such things as cannons, mortars and artillery pieces. Then he said, on the other hand, there are shoulder fired rocket launchers that could bring down planes. They did fall into the category of personal weapons and would have to considered and debated. Not sure if he was serious or just thinking out loud. However, in the current debate over the Second Amendment, some of the extremists admit that they want to own enough power weapons and ammunition to take on the U.S. Federal government. I am afraid that some of them would love to get their hands on a suitcase nuke.

(BTW, I feature suitcase nukes in the novel that I am currently writing – Tripod of Saints.)

Container to carry the U.S. Mk-54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition:

              I have been a fan of science and technology since I was a child. Many years ago I worked on projecting technological development and anticipated a lot of what has come to pass with computers and the Internet. I have always believed that science and technology could solve the problems confronting humanity if used with proper foresight and caution. Unfortunately, there are often unforeseen consequences following the adoption of a new technology. While this may be true of nuclear energy, sadly, many of the problems were clear from the beginning and were ignored.

              I recently published a series of books on sociology that I have been editing for over ten years. They are available on Amazon under the name of Stuart C. Dodd. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Washington for many years. His pursuit of an understanding of human society took him far beyond the bounds of his discipline. He tried to develop a model of the universe that included all the physical and social sciences. When we first met, we discovered a mutual interest in understanding things from a global perspective. This is the perspective that I bring to nuclear energy.

              Thinking about the human race and the use of various fuels down through history in a global perspective takes you beyond the usual concerns of what it costs to obtain, how you use it and what pollution/waste does it generate. There have been other periods of history in which the use of a particular fuel that allowed a particular society to flourish wound up destroying their environment to the point where the civilization collapsed. Most people would agree that the environment is important but don’t perhaps fully realize that nuclear accidents that release massive amounts of radiation could conceivably spell the end of our civilization.

             There are interesting connections between the type of facility needed to utilize a form of energy and social factors such as politics. Some types of fuel, such as uranium, are  expensive and scarce and require special massive equipment to generate power. This leads to centralization of power generation with attendant problems of distribution and disruption of huge populations if one plant fails. Massive investments are required for such energy sources which in turn depend on large pools of capital which restrict their use to certain types of economic and political systems. In contrast, other types of fuel and sources of energy are highly distributed and can be utilized at a local level without centralization of equipment, investment and control. These distributed systems might allow for a more decentralized type of economy and political system than we currently have in the U.S.

             In situations where environmental degradation, waste disposal and centralization are ignored, massive power stations such as nuclear power generators provide seemingly cheap energy. The availability of large amounts of inexpensive electrical power encourages energy use and discourages conservation and efficiency. Centralized power use generates so much heat that huge columns of warm air rising above big cities alter weather patterns over large areas.

             We will be exploring the direct problems of nuclear power generation such as cost, waste disposal, environmental degradation, impact of accidents, etc. in future posts, but we will also spend time addressing larger and more indirect issues raised by nuclear power.