nuclear-news

The health toll of ionising radiation at all stages of the nuclear fuel chain

Cancer, Coverups and Contamination: The Real Cost of Nuclear Energy 27th September 2015

Andreas Toupadakis Ph.D Contributing Writer for Wake Up World   “……Uranium mining has also cost many lives and great suffering, not just on the workers but on all the communities around these mines. These problems, and the lack of a solution or accountability from the nuclear industry, is described in detail in the ECRR report:

“In response to a challenge to the ethical foundation of civilian nuclear power and the cancers caused by licensed emissions, nuclear industry apologists have offered comparisons between the number of miners killed as part of the lifecycle of energy production in coal-fired power stations with the number of citizens killed by cancers consequent on nuclear releases. However, this is an ethically flawed position. The miners are well informed about the risky nature of their employment and accept it in return for direct pecuniary gain. Their situation is not the same as that of the adult or child who breathes in radioactive particles released from Sellafield without knowing they are in the air, or without benefiting directly from their production. Such people are in effect bystanders and thus have a morally distinct status from those who are engaged in producing the pollutants…

“If the nuclear industry and the military are to continue within a sound ethical framework serious questions need to be addressed and those who will suffer its health consequences need to be informed and consulted to a far greater extent than they ever have been… while children will inevitably die from leukemia as a result of radioactive discharges, causality will be denied and… [their numbers deemed] not worthy of consideration. The moral bankruptcy of such a justification is intuitively apparent…

“The Committee concludes that releases of radioactivity without consent can not be justified ethically since [even] the smallest dose has a finite, if small, probability of fatal harm.”

And how about many other locations, beside power plants, where radiation pollution exists? How about the hundreds of thousands of people that have died and suffered from the whole nuclear cycle? How about future generations who will similarly suffer from long-term contamination?

Nuclear power plants are just one point of the nuclear waste cycle. To this day, the disposal and storage of high-level nuclear waste remains a major unresolved issue. Now 15 years later, only 70 years into a million-year long waste cycle, we are no closer to solving the problem of mounting nuclear waste generated by these continuing programs. The populations in regions where radioactive waste is stored, such as Savannah River and Yucca Mountain (at which millions of gallons of high-level nuclear waste is stored in 49 leaking tanks), are equally as susceptible to disease as those communities near active power plants.

Furthermore, in 2000, the National Academy of Sciences released a report commissioned by the Department of Energy that states that most of the sites where the US federal government built nuclear bombs will never be cleaned up enough to allow public access to the land. The report also noted that the plan for guarding sites that are permanently contaminated is inadequate:

“Nearly 150 sites around the country are contaminated, a nagging reminder of the nuclear arms race. DOE has concluded that even after planned remediation activities are completed — or found to be infeasible — at these so-called “legacy” waste sites, 109 of them will never be clean enough for unrestricted use… [These sites] are located in 27 states, Puerto Rico, and territorial islands in the Pacific…

“There is no convincing evidence that institutional controls — such as surveillance of radioactive and other hazardous wastes left at sites, security fences, and deeds restricting land use — will prove reliable over the long run…

“Because the long-term behavior of contaminants in the environment is unpredictable and physical barriers may break down at some point, the committee urged DOE to develop its stewardship plans under the assumption that contaminant isolation eventually will fail… Today’s scientific knowledge and institutional capabilities do not provide much confidence that containment of sites with residual risks will function as expected indefinitely.”

And how about the places where nuclear material is processed into forms of nuclear fuel? From “nuclear rocks” into nuclear fuel, thousands of people die in agonizing death, families are destroyed, deformed children are born, and many others are born dead. These are very well established facts around the world, in every place that nuclear material is present in one form or another. In fact a 2003 review by the ECRR, headed by an adviser to the British Government, examined research results and concluded that that pollution from nuclear energy and weapons programs will account for as many as 65 million deaths, also asserting that previously accepted figures massively underestimated the nuclear industry’s impact on human life……….http://wakeup-world.com/2015/09/27/cancer-coverups-and-contamination-the-real-cost-of-nuclear-energy/

September 28, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general