nuclear-news

Don’t be the nuclear industry’s April fool

Christina Macpherson's websites & blogs

When you check out the nuclear news, you find plenty of cosy little items saying how Chernobyl wasn’t so bad – very few deaths etc.  How low level radiation is not harmful to you, might even be good. How ‘progress’ is being made on the Fukushima cleanup. How it was all the fault of TEPCO anyway – the industry as a whole is safe, really. The new model nuclear reactors are really really really safe.

Don’t believe it.  In 2011 – 25 years after the Chernobyl explosion, it’s just the right time for cancers to emerge in those who were subjected to “low level” radiation in the Ukraine.  While it is true that one individual’s risk of cancer is small from exposure to low levels of radiation, exposure of many to this radiation will produce cancers in some of them. The world’s scientific authorities are united in pronouncing that there is no safe level for ionising radiation.

As to the safety of nuclear reactors, and the effects of radiation from even the normal operations of the nuclear fuel cycle –  ask yourself who is supplying this information – “What’s in it for whom?

There may be some legitimate grounds for minimising the effects of the Fukushima radiation – a reasonable aim by authorities to prevent panic, and perhaps to save the businesses of farmers whose produce is not radioactive. To avoid unnecessary anxiety in countries distant from Japan. Just ask  “What’s in it for whom? – Christina Macpherson

April 1, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Christina's notes