Submitted by Frank Nevis, May 29, 2007 12:22

Lenny,

I'm not saying that Chernobyl was a perfect-design reactor. It wasn't. But immediate cause for the disaster was operator's error. Re-read my first comment - I acknowledge that today the risk of the disaster has highly diminished since the Chernobyl; the design is up-to-date, operators are much more experienced, etc. However, it doesn't mean that the probability of error is close to zero. And as a number of nuclear plants grows, the joint probability will only rise. Besides, Chernobyl was not the only issue in the history of nuclear energy technologies.

By the way, it's RBMK, not RMBK. It's for the case an engineer with 25 year experience in nuclear power doesn't know...

On the GM products. Don't get me wrong. I'm not against them, in general. If they are shown to be beneficial and without hazards, I'll stand up for them. But today, with Russia classifying its research, it seems that they bring more problems instead of solving existing ones.

About green revolution. It seems that the last 25 years you spent exercising yourself only in the field of nuclear power and didn't manage to notice that the world has changed since then. Sorry to be so offensive, but it seems to be quite true. Today, green revolution also raises a lot of questions over the worsening biodiversity and depletion of water resources. This world is not black and white, Lenny. So is the green revolution, which was really helpful and really beneficial some decades ago.

The number of environmental issues has been growing... We need someone or some organization that could come up with may be not a very pleasant approach, but very into deep core of the development issues, very investigative about any potential risk. In a negotiations with the other side, they would find a compromise, which would give us not only economical development, but ensure that this development could support life. That kind of organization is certainly Greenpeace. Patrick Moore is on the corporations' agenda. What he is trying to do is that he releases the steam of public aversion to some projects with bad environmental profile. Like 'look, Patrick Moore is gonna help and defend us; now we can be sure that the project won't deteriorate our environment'. Unfortunately, it's not working so! Today, under the supervision of such Patrick Moores, hundreds of millions of people are suffering from the ecological problems worldwide.

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