MICHAEL SHORE (Southeast Air Quality Manager, Environmental Defense): "We are messing with the delicate balance in our atmosphere that supports life on this planet. There is a balance between how much carbon dioxide is in the air and the temperature of the earth, and our atmosphere acts like a blanket that helps keep the earth at the right temperature. And as we pump extra greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide, into the air, we make the blanket around the earth thicker. Because we are making the heat blanket around the earth thicker, our planet is warming.”
JAMES HANSEN (Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies): “Without any doubt, it is a scientific fact, that the world is getting warmer. And also it has become crystal clear that that warming is primarily due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels.”
VO: “America’s largest single source of global warming emissions is coal fired power plants.”
SHORE: "We are already seeing more intense hurricanes. We are already seeing hotter summers, we are already seeing the disappearance of the spruce fir ecosystem, we are already seeing more mosquitoes and the vector born diseases that they bring, we’re already seeing the coral reefs off of Florida being damaged by warming oceans. The reality is, the planet is warming and we can either do something about it or no.”
VO: “The scientific debate is over; to reverse global warming, emissions must be reduced significantly. The debate on solutions has just begun.”
CHENEY: “We have after all mastered one form of technology that causes zero emissions of greenhouse gases: nuclear power.”
VO: “Is nuclear power the answer to our energy needs? To learn more, I traveled to Grants, New Mexico, America’s largest source of Uranium, the raw material for nuclear fuel.”
MELTON MARTINEZ (Navajo Nation, Haystack, New Mexico): “My, um, grandfather had discovered Uranium here in Haystack, back in 1950. They started drilling and they found out there was a lot, a lot, of Uranium in this area again.”
VO: “As long as Uranium remains in its natural state in the ground it is harmless, but when it is mined and processed, its radioactivity becomes toxic to humans. Uranium ore is processed into yellow cake uranium fuel. Leaving mountains of radioactive mill tailings across America’s southwest.”
MARTINEZ: “This is some of the waste that they just left behind, and you can still see on top of the ground. It’s yellow cake. It’s probably the heart of mother earth that we are playing with. All the stuff that they had brought up is radioactive, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, you can’t even feel it going through your body.”
VO: “New Mexico holds some of the largest Uranium reserves in America, and the health impacts on the locals are severe.”
MARTINEZ: “My uncle, he died of cancer at the age of 50, and the other guys that he all worked with, they all died of cancer. Everywhere you turn you hear of people dying of cancer or having respiratory leukemia or kids, I mean newborns having leukemia. Most of our people don’t even have electricity on our Navajo Reservation. Most of the elders are gone from here. We’re the elders now, and we’re only in our forties. We’re the elders.”
VO: “Before Uranium can be used to generate electricity, the mineral must be enriched at a plant like this one in Paducah Kentucky. The enrichment process creates tons of highly radioactive waste, that is being stored indefinitely on site. The enriched uranium is further processed before going to the power plants as nuclear fuel, which is used to boil water to generate electricity. After the fuel has been used, the leftover radioactive waste poses an unsolved problem in the nuclear power cycle.”
DR. ARJUN MAKHIJANI (Nucelar Physicist, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research): “We’ve got this material that’s has a very, very long dangerous life, 10s of 1000s of years, and we haven’t been able to solve that problem. The French haven’t solved this problem, the Russians haven’t solved this problem, the Japanese haven’t solved this problem, the US hasn’t solved this problem.”
VO: “Currently, more than 50 thousand tons of spent fuel and other radioactive wastes are being stored at nuclear facilities across America, and this amount grows each year. The proposed solution in the US is to move all of this radioactive waste to Nevada and bury it. It’s an expensive proposition.”
TEXT: Yucca Mountian, Nevada
Dr. ARJUN MAKHIJANI: “Currently, the projected costs of the repository in the United States in Nevada, Yucca Mountain, are more than 60 billion dollars.”
VO: “The entire nuclear power cycle is a costly one.”
DAVID LOCHBAUM: (Director of Nuclear Safety Project, Union of concerned scientists): “Nuclear power is very expensive. It is the most expensive way of making electricity when you look at construction costs, and waste costs, and operating costs.”
VO: “And it’s paid for by taxpayers.”
DR. MAKHIJANI: “The nuclear power companies are lining up for subsidies in Washington. They aren’t rushing to wall street, saying ‘we’ve got a great source of energy, invest in this, sell the bonds, give us the loans, raise the equity for us. And in fact, no new power plants have been ordered until the subsidies are let loose by the federal government.”
LOCHBAUM: “You know, its an expensive way of generating electricity, it’s a risky way of generating electricity. In the 21st century we have better options available today that we didn’t have in the 1960s when most of the nuclear power plants were built.”