[from facebook] nuclear...

It seems that people are very quick to join the anti-nuclear cause. Using their extra large washing mashines, dryers, and fridges. Electric can openers and electric hair cutters. electric this and electric that.For most of them, their cause is like saying that whe shouldn't eat any beef, dairy, or any other meat/ fish because of dyoxin levels, finally getting their way so that nobody eats any of the any of the aforementioned foodstuffs, then wondering why the earth's population starves (http://alpineresearchcenter.com/?p=14, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=10167). We need to eat meat for the simple reason that most of us will die if we don't. We DON'T need another nuclear power plant - but I am sincerly inconvinced that anyone is willing to change their way of living enough to dent the increasing energy demand - and the government won't pass legislation to curb these outrageous Canadian energy demands (we produce more waste and use more energy per capita than any other nation in the world, save the United Arab Emrates).Yes - there are other energy sources - wind (which is NOT as expensive as pro-nuclearists proclaim), low head damns (which have limits on the energy demands that they can curb), wavel (which in most cases can be combined with offshore wind-farms - most use the wells turbine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_turbine), and tidal (using damns). The only thing is - the numbers don't add up. Unless we stop our wastefull lifestyles, there's NO way of not using nuclear. So let's just embrace the fact. Yes, things like ITER (magnetic confinement fusion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER) are trying in other ways to curb this - but still being AT LEAST 50 years from a commercial reactor - this reactor will produce radioactive waste, but with smaller half lives (reuse of material in ~100yrs) - or other good ideas like the Polywell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell) - good ideas, but physically impossible (http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33227017.pdf). My last hope - up until my coop at the National Research Council of Canada - layed in Research. We shurely could think of a solution in time to curb all these problems? Not quite. I'm currently working on a way of reducing GHG emmisions in the processing of Bitumen for oil production in the Alberta oil sands - and the process is SLOW. These things do take YEARS, and researchers work hard and aren't paid for it. So why not just embrace the fact that we will slowly poison the earth to death, and embrace nuclear power?

[after facebook]

The above I wrote pre Fukushima, and I still think nuclear is a good base load source of power after Fukushima.