I'd just like top say that there are those of us who look forward to Exelon setting up shop here, bringing in some actual economic gains for our region, and bringing in high paying jobs which could raise the pay scale for everyone over time. A lot of the press has focused on the O'Connors not wanting money that they can't control coming into the region.  I do admit however that there have been a few TV spots that have actually shown support for it, but I'm sure most of them were Exelon sponsored. 
We read the naysayers words and recognize them for what they are. Simply put, they are the typical reactions of people who dont want anything to ever change and have been fighting change since the the invention of the wheel.  I'm sure the same people who are against the nuclear plant would have been at home in the 1800's being adamantly opposed to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis's assertion that medical students should wash their hands after handling cadavers before they helped women through child birth.
Welcome to Victoria Exelon. 

build it!!!

SW Bones…
Yes, I know about vitrification, although dropping the glass logs into the ocean is not a good idea and not what is planned for them. They are supposed to go to Yucca Mountain. Bechtel is building such a plant in Washington to handle Hanford’s waste.

Hanford is the nation's most contaminated nuclear site, with cleanup costs expected to total as much as $60 billion.
Key to the cleanup is the removal of 53 million gallons of toxic, radioactive waste left from Cold War-era nuclear-weapons production.

Thursday, October 4, 2007 -
Energy Department to fine contractor building plant at Hanford
By The Associated Press
YAKIMA — The U.S. Department of Energy plans to issue a $165,000 fine to the contractor building a massive plant to treat radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation.
The Energy Department has issued the notice of intent to fine Bechtel National for a series of violations that occurred between October 2001 and February 2006. The agency says the violations include failures in processes to control design changes and failure to ensure vendor-supplied equipment met nuclear safety specifications.
Bechtel officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
The $12.2 billion plant is being built to convert highly radioactive waste into glasslike logs for long-term storage.
Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company

Look at the cost of cleaning up Hanford, and clean it up we must. But to continue to produce the same lethal products is stupid and it just proves my point about the total costs of the nuclear industry. We make these horrible mistakes and 50 years later spend trillions trying to clean up the mess. So why do we continue to repeat our mistakes?

http://www.antinuclear.net/world%20-%...

Not attacking the “Messenger” . Made a comparison that might be closer to some folks understanding.

There is always a possibility for disaster. Knowing that there is a potential for you to be shot at the Mall and die, you ignore that danger and go shopping. Why??
You know and trust that the possibility of that event is so slight it is not a concern of yours. You go shopping without a thought.

Same sort of Odds of having a disaster at a modern nuclear power plant harming anyone or anything.

On the subject of waste, Kenneth is 100% correct. Necessity is the mother of all invention.

Here is a portion of a paper on the subject of waste.

The waste produced from a nuclear plant is different from coal-burning wastes in two very spectacular ways. The first is in the quantities involved: the nuclear waste is 5 million times smaller by weight and billions of times smaller by volume. The nuclear waste from 1 year of operation weighs about 1� tons2 and would occupy a volume of half a cubic yard, which means that it would fit under an ordinary card table with room to spare. Since the quantity is so small, it can be handled with a care and sophistication that is completely out of the question for the millions of tons of waste spewed out annually from our analogous coal-burning plant.
The second pronounced difference is that the nuclear wastes are radioactive, providing a health threat by the radiation they emit, whereas the principal dangers to health from coal wastes arise from their chemical activity. This does not mean that the nuclear wastes are more hazardous; on nearly any comparison basis the opposite is true. For example, if all the air pollution emitted from a coal plant in one day were inhaled by people, 1� million people could die from it,3 which is 10 times the number that could be killed by ingesting or inhaling the waste produced in one day by a nuclear plant.4
This is obviously an unrealistic comparison since there is no way in which all of either waste could get into people. A more realistic comparison might be on the basis of simple, cheap, and easy disposal techniques. For coal burning this would be to use no air pollution control measures and simply release the wastes without inhibition. This is not much worse than what we are doing now since the smoke abatement techniques, which are the principal pollution control on most coal-burning plants, contribute little to health protection. We have seen in Chapter 3 that air pollution causes about 75 deaths per year from each plant. Some other comparably serious consequences will be considered later in this chapter.
For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and simply drop it into the ocean at random locations.5 No one can claim that we don't know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities, spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood. Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In fact, if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power and all the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above its present level from natural radioactivity.

Well if you all have ever been to Houston in The Village Area..the Sonoma Construction people are about to lay out a Huge highrise there..right across the Walgreens and the Children services.. off of Kelvin Street..and the village is a quiet area... where middle to upper class people go and shop,relax and talk while they walk from shop to shop..... where you rarely see young men with pants below their butts.. just a very nice area.. catering to the elderly and middle age..well since 2005 I would say...they have these signs plastered all over the neighborhood donot let the highrise go up.. and people have the signs in their yards all over the place.. but guess what Sonoma Construction...is planted right dab in the middle of that huge area.. and you know what ..yep that Highrise is going up..In that area the streets are already crowded..what is the highrise going to bring to this area..well, my point is all that fuss.... the signs and etc... .. and the highrise is still going up..when its a done deal its a done deal..just like evrything else..

One more: What are you going to do with the waste?
It's sorta like buying a truck and the salesman telling you "I am sure they will provide you that essential part in the near future."...I am not a naysayer just cautious.

Now Kenneth be fair
According to a former EPA official, Dick Cheney pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on climate change. . .The the Bush administration has suppressed evidence it had for a yea or nay decision on global warming.

If it is indeed a hoax,why push for deletions in the Congressional report?Are we going to say that the findings for a global warming hoax funded by the oil companies are legit?

I can go to all the websites and find pros and cons of global warming,but I have not been convinced either way. I imagine it is a little bit of both.

But this is about Exelon.

Have a good week end.

One of the shows, 20/20, Dateline, can't remember which, did a study on this several years ago. The investigator visited a number of nuclear reactors and found not a few of them wide open to sabotage or other unacceptable activity. One facility was so lax that the back door was propped open with no guard or security whatsoever at that location.

Any reactor is only as safe as its human caretakers. We have been made aware of government shortcomings tragically through mine disasters, cranes toppling, whistleblowers whistles being silenced by the administration, government scientists being muzzled, etc.

Not even the resident experts on this forum can assure us 100% that stupid won't creep into this nuclear site endeavor. One doesn't have to be in fear constantly, but neither does one need to invite the potential for disaster into their home. No nuclear is good nuclear.

Flunked ethics class did you? Attack the message not the messenger SW.

"Sabotage of a nuclear reactor could result in a large release of radiation."

And if frogs had wings they would not bump thier a** every time they hopped.

"The earth is flat, man causes global warming and burn witches at the stake"

Maybe you should stay locked in your home due to if you were to be shot in the Mall you could die.

Awareness of safety, global warming and other issues relating to the nuclear energy industry should be on the minds of most people.

“In a time of turbulence and change, it is more true than ever that knowledge is power”. John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The Union of Concerned Scientists began as collaboration between students and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 and is now an alliance of more than 200,000 citizens and scientists.

“The scientists and policy experts on our staff are highly respected in both Washington, DC, and state capitals, and are frequently called to testify before government committees.”

Some of their findings…

Sabotage of a nuclear reactor could result in a large release of radiation.

If a team of well-trained terrorists forcibly entered a nuclear power plant, it could disable safety systems within a matter of minutes, and do enough damage to cause a meltdown of the core, failure of the containment structure, and a large release of radiation.
Such an attack could contaminate large regions for thousands of years, producing higher cancer rates and billions of dollars in associated costs.

Spent fuel pools are highly vulnerable to terrorist attack.
Unlike reactors, the pools used to store spent fuel at reactor sites are not protected by containment buildings, and thus are attractive targets for terrorist attacks. Such attacks could lead to the release of large amounts of dangerous radioactive materials into the environment.

The Price-Anderson Act lessens incentives to improve safety.
The act, just renewed for another 20 years, severely limits the liability of owners for accidents at nuclear power plants. This protection lessens the financial incentives for reactor vendors to increase safety measures, and for owners to improve operating standards.

Global Warming Solutions
Nuclear Power in a Warming World
Executive Summary

Findings and Recommendations in Brief

Global warming demands a profound transformation in the ways we generate and consume energy. Because nuclear power results in few global warming emissions, an increase in nuclear power could help reduce global warming—but it could also increase the threats to human safety and security. The risks include a massive release of radiation due to a power plant meltdown or terrorist attack, and the death of hundreds of thousands due to the detonation of a nuclear weapon made with materials obtained from a civilian nuclear power system. Minimizing these risks is simply pragmatic: nothing will affect the public acceptability of nuclear power as much as a serious nuclear accident, a terrorist strike on a reactor or spent fuel pool, or the terrorist detonation of a nuclear weapon made from stolen nuclear reactor materials.

The report finds that:

1. The United States has strong nuclear power safety standards, but serious safety problems continue to arise at U.S. nuclear power plants because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is not adequately enforcing the existing standards. The NRC’s poor safety culture is the biggest barrier to consistently effective oversight, and Congress should require the NRC to bring in managers from outside the agency to rectify this problem.

2. While the United States has one of the world’s most well-developed regulatory systems for protection of nuclear facilities against sabotage and attack, current security standards are inadequate to defend against credible threats. Congress should give the responsibility for identifying credible threats and ensuring that security is adequate
to the Department of Homeland Security rather than the NRC.

3. The extent to which an expansion of nuclear power increases the risk that more nations or terrorists will acquire nuclear weapons depends largely on whether reprocessing is included in the fuel cycle, and whether uranium enrichment comes under effective international control. A global prohibition on reprocessing, and international ownership of all enrichment facilities, would greatly reduce these risks. The United States should reinstate a ban on reprocessing U.S. spent fuel and take the lead in forging an indefinite global moratorium on reprocessing. The administration should also pursue a regime to place all uranium enrichment facilities under international control.

4. Over the next 50 years, interim storage of spent fuel in dry casks is economically viable and secure, if hardened against attack. In the longer term, a geologic repository would provide the stability needed to isolate the spent fuel from the environment. It is critical to identify and overcome technical and political barriers to licensing a permanent repository, and the Department of Energy should identify and begin to characterize potential sites other than Yucca Mountain.

5. Of all the new reactor designs being seriously considered for deployment in the United States, only one—the Evolutionary Power Reactor—appears to have the potential to be significantly safer and more secure than today’s reactors. To eliminate any financial incentives for reactor vendors to reduce safety margins, and to make safer reactors competitive in the United States, the NRC should require new U.S. reactors to be significantly safer than current reactors.

6. The proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) plan offers no waste disposal benefits and would increase the risks of nuclear proliferation and terrorism. It should be dropped.

For the full report or the Executive Summary please visit http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/...