…feel infinite…

 This is half of a research paper I wrote for my Earth Science class this year.  Enjoy.  I did!

(the next half will come next post)

Greenpeace was founded in 1971 as an environmental movement to promote awareness of the planet and to save it.  It started out as a simple mission of a few people to save whales in Alaska from offshore nuclear testing.  Today it harbors over 5 million members worldwide, with bases in 32 countries.  Greenpeace is considered by many to be one of the main organizers of the global warming movement that is so prevalent all over the globe today.  Known for their radical activist missions, like hanging off anchors of fishing ships, they are one of the many non-governmental organizations lobbying for a cleaner, greener planet.  In fact, one of their key slogans is to “… promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.”  Peaceful?  Are they really getting their message across when they are lobbying against some of the cleanest, greenest means of energy?  Sure, killing half the world’s population in the process may make the world more peaceful, because their ideas for a better earth require taking away much needed industry from the poorly developed and developing countries.

Greenpeace is one of the most known organizations who insist the current hypothesis on global warming will doom us all.  And for any of this argument to sound valid, one must accept the current and wide-spread idea that global warming is a direct impact from humans.  This occurs through the burning of fossil fuels and the release of CO2 (carbon dioxide, also lumped into the category “greenhouse gases” that contribute to global warming).  CO2 released into the atmosphere creates a blanket for trapping warmth and pollution.

CO2 is also produced naturally and transmitted into the atmosphere, however the theory is that the amount of CO2 in the atmostphere is significantly greater since the start of the mass burning of fossil fuels.  Humans use fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and oil to fuel cars, buses, heat homes, for electricty, and for major industry.  In other words fossil fuels warm, stock, wrap, light, and transport goods all over the world.

Fossil fuels not only contribute mass amounts of CO2 into the atmostphere, they also cause some of the worst health problems due to pollution trapped in the air.  Coal is by far the worst with coal burning plants contributing to thousands of cases of asthma, heart attacks, and lung cancer each year.  Coal burning can emit carbon monoxide, heavy metals, sulfur dioxide, and hydrocarbons, all of which are deadly.  Many of the soot particles can be caught in the lungs, or enter into the blood stream and lodge in the brain or other vital organs.  I completely agree that burning of fossil fuels like coal, need to be lessened.  However this is where Greenpeace and I differ.

Sustainable alternative fuels that are good for the environment are needed to create a cleaner, and healthier earth, however Greenpeace refuses to acknowledge and accept one of the cleanest means of energy available to us today:  Nuclear Power .

Uranium, the main element used for nuclear power, was discovered in 1789 by the German chemist Martin Klaproth.  In the early 1900s nuclear fission was discovered leading to the atomic bomb in the 1940s.  By the end of World War II in 1945 and through the 1950s, attention was turned to harnessing nuclear power for commercial use, and the first nuclear reactor plant opened in the U.S. in 1960.  By the 1980s about 16-17% of the world’s electricty was coming from nuclear power, and today it is about 15%.

Electricity is generated either by nuclear fission or radioactive decay, and many of the world’s nuclear power plants use steam from heat generated to produce electricty.  Some military sea vessels use nuclear power to propel them.  While thought of as unstable, many safety regulations are in place to make sure that systems shut off before reactor failure or damage.

For reference, the white puffy clouds that often come off of the top are not CO2, that is steam.  They are producing clean energy, with little by product.  They are more expensive  than our conventional methods, but maybe health care costs would reduce if not so many people had problems due to complications with burning of fossil fuels?

Directly on the Greenpeace website they use words like “dangerous, high-risk, meltdown, catastrophe…” to describe nuclear power.  These are harsh words, but can be expected from a group who uses scare tactics to rally people to fight for causes.  They mention incidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl right on the front page.  But let’s take a look at these incidents carefully.

Three Mile Island occured in 1979 in Middletown, Pennsylvania and is the worst nuclear incident to occur on nuclear soil.  The nuclear reactor was partially damaged.  It was considered a Level 5 incident on the Internation Nuclear Event Scale (INES).  The range of events start at Level 0 (no safety significance) and go up to Level 7 (major accident).   Oh, did I mention that no one died as a direct result of Three Mile Island incident?

The Chernobyl incident is the only Level 7 event to occur, and it happened in 1986 in the former Soviet Union.  The incident can be easily considered a product of a failing Soviet Union. where regulations were rarely upheld and safety precautions were often neglected.  The Soviets were doing experiments on the nuclear reactor and had all of the safety devices turned off and the reactor failed.

While nuclear power can be fatal if safety precautions are not taken and proper maintence is not observed, nuclear power is also clean and extremely efficient.  The only problem that arises is the disposal of the used Uranium rods.  This presents a problem.

Nuclear power, also, is not renewable.  But maybe giving the Earth a few years to disssipate the CO2 naturally by not burning  mass amounts of fossil fuels would lessen the threat of global warming.

Greenpeace has insisted from the beginning of nuclear testing that nuclear power is bad and should be abolished.   However, early November 2008, Greenpeace released a statement about that French reactors that are being created, the EPRs that are being constructed in France and Finland.  In this statment they claim that “… nuclear power could only make a negligible contribution to CO2 reduction, coming years too late…”  Really Greenpeace?  You’ve been rallying forces to stop the production of nuclear reactors since their inception.  They are they reason it may be too little too late.

Next post:  Why Greenpeace intends to harm half of the world’s population in one fell swoop.