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UK government disregards the danger of nuclear reactors

 In the UK, the government is determined to push ahead with the development of a new fleet of nuclear reactors, as the partnership announced by David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy shows.

 The orchestrated effort between coalition officials and the nuclear industry to create a pro-nuclear public information campaign in the days after Fukushima showed that not even a large-scale nuclear incident could halt ministers’ obsession with new nuclear. Officials did not even wait for the results of the government’s own safety review before rushing to assure the British people that a similar disaster is not possible in the UK.

Why we must phase out nuclear power The inherent risk in the use of nuclear energy can and does have disastrous consequences, Guardian UK, ,   Rebecca Harms,  Dany Cohn-Bendt, 18 Feb  While global attention has long since shifted elsewhere, the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima is far from over. This is the nature of nuclear accidents: they leave a long-lasting radioactive legacy.

 One year on, the situation is not under control. The announcement by the Japanese government that the damaged reactors were in a state of “cold shutdown” was met with scepticism and anger from a concerned public – and with disbelief among nuclear experts.

As the recent rise in temperature in Reactor 2 has shown, the Fukushima facility remains unstable and highly vulnerable to a new earthquake. Meanwhile, it has been estimated that “cleaning up” the disaster will take a hundreds-strong workforce decades to complete.

Beyond the reactors themselves, and the arbitrary 20km exclusion zone, the surrounding area in Fukushima province and beyond will suffer from radioactive contamination for generations to come.

To give a concrete example: the amount of radioactive caesium 137 (which has a half life of around 30 years) released during the Fukushima disaster was 168 times that released by the Hiroshima bomb.

It has been estimated that excess deaths, due to radiation exposure in the region, could run into the thousands.

Fukushima, like Chernobyl 25 years before it, has shown us that while the likelihood of a nuclear disaster occurring may be low, the potential impact is enormous.

The inherent risk in the use of nuclear energy, as well as the related proliferation of nuclear technologies, can and does have disastrous consequences. The only certain way to eliminate this potentially devastating risk is to phase out nuclear power altogether……

The European level response has been to undertake stress tests on nuclear reactors across the union. However, these stress tests appear to be little more than a PR exercise to encourage public acceptance in order to allow the nuclear industry to continue with business as usual.

The tests fail to assess the full risks of nuclear power, ignoring crucial factors such as fires, human failures, degradation of essential infrastructure or the impact of an airplane crash.

In the UK, the government is determined to push ahead with the development of a new fleet of nuclear reactors, as the partnership announced by David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy shows.

The orchestrated effort between coalition officials and the nuclear industry to create a pro-nuclear public information campaign in the days after Fukushima showed that not even a large-scale nuclear incident could halt ministers’ obsession with new nuclear. Officials did not even wait for the results of the government’s own safety review before rushing to assure the British people that a similar disaster is not possible in the UK.

 

Now, the proposed electricity market reform is set to rig the energy market in favour of nuclear – with the introduction of a carbon price floor likely to result in huge windfall handouts of around £50m a year to existing nuclear generators.

 

Despite persistent denials by ministers, this is clearly a subsidy by another name, making a mockery of the coalition pledge not to gift public money to this already established industry. The Energy Fair group is arguing that the cap on liabilities for nuclear accidents is technically a subsidy and therefore illegal under EU law – and is now taking the case to the European commission….

The hidden costs of nuclear – such as waste disposal, insurance and decommissioning – are also huge, and it is the public that ends up footing the bill. Surely it makes more sense to invest billions of pounds in genuinely sustainable and low risk technologies?

One year on from Fukushima, we should not wait for another disaster to finally convince us to give up on nuclear power. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/17/phase-out-nuclear-power

February 18, 2012 - Posted by | general

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