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Nuclear lobby downplays the real dangers

Nuclear Energy  White Knight or Dangerous Fantasy?
Solve Climate Aug 17th, 2009
In their current enthusiasm for nuclear energy, boosters have tended to overlook or dismissed the dark days of nuclear’s more recent past.
For example, British scientist James Lovelock has dismissed the Three Mile Island accident as a “a joke.” In reality, it was anything but that. When the reactor tripped in the early morning hours of March 28, 1979, the world’s most highly-trained nuclear operators (they had been part of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s nuclear navy corps) stared for more than two hours at a bank of blinking lights, unable to decipher their meaning, while approximately half the core melted. Then, for more than two days, while state and federal officials weighed the pros and cons of a general evacuation order, the nation’s leading nuclear experts debated whether a hydrogen bubble inside the reactor would lead to an explosion.

Luckily, the worst did not happen but that is not the point – scientists and engineers did not have answers when they should have and thousands of lives, even as far away as Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, according to one Nobel Prize-winning biologist, were put at risk.

Things, of course, did not turn out so well at Chernobyl, whose history is also being rewritten by rosy-eyed optimists. That there is new vegetation and animal life in the region immediately around the reactor or “only 56 deaths” (the number is disputed) is hailed as evidence the damage was not so bad after all.

But what about the thousands of excess cancer deaths predicted by the World Health Organization in a 2006 report? Or the thousands of childhood thyroid cancers already documented? Or, to quote the WHO study, “the massive relocations, loss of economic stability and long-term threats to health in current, and, possibly, future generations, that resulted in an increased sense of anomie and diminished sense of physical and emotional balance.” The disruption caused by Chernobyl is measured in decades, not days, or weeks, or years, and in the mental and physical health of millions of people…………

……………Reactors themselves are big heat generators that require large amounts of water for their cooling systems. With unexpected droughts, particularly in the United States and Europe, reactor operators have been forced to cut back operations at various times, and there are growing concerns about the willingness of regulators to allow utilities to override their own norms on water temperatures released into rivers and lakes.

Nuclear Energy – White Knight or Dangerous Fantasy? | SolveClimate.com

August 18, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, 2 WORLD, spinbuster