Over time many veterans exposed to Hiroshima and Nagasaki radiation experienced life-threatening malignancies, but their requests for help from our government were consistently rejected. Officials assured them of “no possibility of any occupation force member having received a significant dose, and there is no cause whatsoever for concern over an increased risk of adverse health effects.” Evidence of conflicting reports wasn’t acknowledged. Similar denial and lack of scientific scrutiny occurred regarding troops and civilians exposed to Nevada and South Pacific nuclear bomb tests.

Dishonesty and secrecy have permeated public relations efforts to promote the “peaceful atom.” The military-industrial complex has been well represented by our post-war Atomic Energy Commission, and International Atomic Energy Agency, in promoting nuclear power. Powerful corporations’ lobbyists and wealth accentuate this expansion. The findings of scientists, whose results regarding radiation’s health effects conflicted with the convictions of the promoters, have been discredited.

Nuclear power’s claims of safety came through withholding facts. Three 1961 deaths occurred at an atomic reactor in Idaho. Detroit narrowly avoided devastation in 1966 from a reactor’s near meltdown, kept secret from the media and community, but documented in “We Almost Lost Detroit.” Belatedly, information about Three Mile Island’s 1979 partial meltdown emerged when Dr. Steven Wing of UNC-Chapel Hill found a 400 percent increase in cancers among those exposed.

According to a report published by the New York Academy of Science, Chernobyl’s 1986 catastrophe resulted in an estimated 985,000 deaths through 2005.

In 2002, meltdowns were narrowly avoided at Ohio’s Davis-Besse and South Carolina’s Oconee nuclear facilities. Numerous safety incidents at other U.S. nuclear reactors have been commonplace.

Japan’s current nuclear catastrophe including radiation releases, including plutonium, from multiple reactors indicate the amount of radioactivity to be emitted over many years will likely exceed that from Chernobyl. Much land will become permanently uninhabitable. Our Northern Hemisphere will experience effects.

Despite reassurances that “it could never happen here,” even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged the risk of a significant meltdown accident in the U.S.

Western North Carolina represents the Southeast’s nuclear heartland with seven nuclear reactors, plus Duke’s two proposed for Gaffney, S.C., not 100 miles from us, a new $6.5 billion H-bomb factory underway at Oak Ridge and Savannah River Site’s plutonium processing. http://www.wncpsr.org/nuclear-power/long-history-of-nuclear-secrecy