In the beginning, the usual official reassurances were highlighted in virtually every story on Japan’s Fukushima nuclear nightmare, faithfully reported by woefully anemic corporate journalists, without question or challenge. “The radiation is not currently a threat to public health. There is no immediate threat to public safety.”
As one of the world’s largest nuclear power plants continues its slow-motion meltdown, hemorrhaging radiation into the air, ocean, groundwater, food supply and who-knows-what-else, take the official statements with one bitter grain of salt: Anyone who minimizes the threat of this event is tragically misguided, or a fucking liar.
For all sorts of reasons, nuclear issues are among the most misrepresented of any issue in the public eye. Exhibit A: The official recap of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster that’s been included in some Fukushima coverage for context. An Associated Press story parsed it this way: “(Chernobyl) killed at least 31 people with radiation sickness, raised long-term cancer rates, and spewed radiation across much of the northern hemisphere.”
Really? Thirty-one? Last year, the New York Academy of Sciences published a painstaking and comprehensive analysis of 5,000 studies and papers on the effects of Chernobyl, which concluded that its radiation may have killed about 1 million people around the world in the 20-year aftermath. But I guess we can hardly blame the AP for the 999,969-death discrepancy, since they completely ignored the announcement of these findings, as did virtually every other major media outlet. Fukushima differs in some ways, and it’ll be years before the cumulative effects become clear, but I’ll bet my DNA that it, too, will kill many thousands of people.
Unfortunately, those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. “We can only work on precedent, and there was no precedent,” said a former director of the Fukushima plant to The New York Times. “When I headed the plant, the thought of a tsunami never crossed my mind.” Really? The coastline of Japan is littered with hundreds of stone monuments erected by previous generations warning of devastating tsunamis that followed major earthquakes, some of which precisely mark the high-water reach of ancient killer waves. What kind of world is this, in which we consume vast amounts of information masquerading as knowledge, yet somehow manage to forget real knowledge, even when it is written in stone?
When the Arizona Corporation Commission held a hearing last month on safety issues at Arizona Public Service’s Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station—the largest nuke plant in the United States—nuclear cheerleaders fell all over themselves to declare the facility safe. Really? Just two years ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rated Palo Verde as the least safe of this nation’s 104 nuclear plants, due to a host of problems—inadequate maintenance, failed safety systems, inoperable emergency equipment, human errors, falsified records and so on. A scathing report by one of the most clear-eyed and level-headed of the world’s nuclear watchdogs, the Union of Concerned Scientists, cited a culture at Palo Verde that emphasized “doing what is needed to keep the reactor operating as opposed to keeping the reactor safe.”
Incredibly, the preferred response of nuclear profiteers to safety concerns is denial, dismissal and debunking. The UCS report concluded that it was “insane” for nuke owners to spend so much effort “trying to explain away yesterday’s mistakes and so little time watching the road ahead to prevent tomorrow’s mistakes.” Absurdly, the Obama administration includes nuclear power on its list of “clean energy” options for the road ahead. Regardless of meltdowns, the entire production chain of nuclear energy—from the toxic and radioactive contamination of its mining to the 100,000-year hangover of its waste—is fraught with deadly health impacts.
It’d be one thing if there were a net benefit to be derived from nuclear power, but there simply is not. People squawk about subsidizing solar, but honest accounting shows that the per-kilowatt-hour costs of subsidizing the development of the nuclear industry actually exceeded the average market value of electricity. Translation: It literally would’ve been cheaper to buy power and give it away for free. If we spent as much on solar as we’ve thrown down the radioactive rat hole, our future would be a lot brighter.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2011.
Let’s have some reasonableness and common-sense, please. Fukushima’s design was at least 40 years old and it was hit by a once-in-a-millenium event. Chernobyl was essentially designed to be unsafe so it could fulfill a dual-use purpose of making military-grade plutonium. Yes, they could have been largely or entirely mitigated by simple things such as protecting back-up generators from flooding, having robust containment structures, etc, etc. I think you will find that U.S. nuclear power does not suffer from these simple, obvious in hindsight, problems–but how about finding that out and reporting on that instead of characterizing the entire industry here in the U.S. based on the two most extreme disasters in the world?
Anyone who believes nuclear power plants in the U.S. are any safer than the Fukushima plant has not been paying attention. The nuclear industry and their pimps here seems to think they are god-like, that they can keep their radioactive garbage out of the environment for the tens of thousands of years necessary to prevent catastrophe, that they can predict that the disaster that hit Japan is a “once-in-a-millenium event.” What hogwash, what arrogance. They’ve been lying to us for the past 40 years.
A MILLION??!? REALLY??!? This is by far the highest estimate of Chernobyl deaths out of any analysis. Even Greenpeace, not known as a friend of nuclear power, estimates less than 10% that number.
Further, what about a comparison of the number of deaths in Japan due to the earthquake? The Tsunami? and the Nuclear Plant? Why rail against the distant third of these?
nuclear power is simply not safe
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It is extremely safe even as human beings abuse it, and use very ugly handling procedures.
That plant was built in 1976 or so and while it is safer than it was, it has never had a real serious examination. If it had, the tsunami danger would have been upgraded a great deal. Other parts of the safety procedures would have been up graded also.
We need nuclear power or we don’t have, and won’t get, energy to keep us warm and run our factories, farm tractors and trucks, cars and pumps. If we don’t have nuclear power.. we are running on empty. We are out of energy in a world of 6 billion people.
The solution is to gather the experts and find a way to use it, and safely. The solution is NOT to throw it in the waste bin.. but find the way to use it safely. And very frankly, that should not be to hard at all.
It is worth noting that the New York Academy of Sciences itself has distanced itself from this work because of its lack of hard scientific data. I’m all for a civil, fact-based debate of the (de)merits of nuclear, but Serraglio’s piece doesn’t contribute to that. To fail to acknowledge the valid points that pro-nuclear advocates make–agree with them or not–is to be a thoughtless ideologue. Former founders of the anti-nuclear movement such as Stewart Brand and Patrick Moore have embraced nuclear power, and it is worth exploring the evolution of their positions. For a much more respectful, balanced and though-provoking debate between pro- and anti- nuclear positions, I highly recommend this podcast: http://longnow.org/seminars/02006/jan/13/n….