Nuclear Power- A Death Threat
... The pollution involved has damaged our landscape and poisoned many indigenous peoples. The often heavily populated areas that surround nuclear processing plants, are full of children whose high incidence of leukaemia defies any attempt to pass this off as a coincidence. Two nuclear processing plants in Europe, Sellafield in the UK and La Hague in France are two of the most radioactive spots on our planet. Sellafield pumps more than 800 litres of radioactive waste into the Irish Sea each day. That radiation is washed up as far away as Scandinavia. In particular it has made the Irish Sea the most toxic, radioactive sea in the world. The level of radiation may well decrease over time, but that time is measured in terms of thousands of years. How many statistics of sickness and death do we have to hear in order to understand this fatal link? That even one nuclear power plant is allowed to affect the lives of so many thousands of people is a travesty. Can you imagine what ten times the amount of nuclear power and reprocessing plants would do to our planet? The fact is only a small percentage of our energy needs are currently met by nuclear power. Currently the US has around 100 nuclear power stations. We would need another 400 additional reactors to replace the coal fired plants that are already in use. World-wide 8,000 nuclear reactors would have to be built to provide the equivalent amount of energy we need. Can you even begin the imagine the cost of this, not just in terms of trillions of dollars, but in the resulting pollution from mining and reprocessing? That will mean people and the environment poisoned for ever. Is this a cost worth paying in anybody’s language? Those who advocate the development of more nuclear reactors often talk about a 'properly run nuclear reactor’. The fact is even with the relatively small number of reactors we already have, no such thing is evident. High profile accidents such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl would be bad enough on their own. The unreported mistakes made in the running of many nuclear reactors, reads like a catalogue of inefficiency, violations, contamination and sheer incompetence. There is, it seems, no such thing as a 'properly run nuclear reactor’. Critics of anti-nuclear groups often use Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as examples of relatively safe disasters. In the case of Chernobyl they point to the fact that less than 50 people actually died and that the radiation fallout was not as bad as we had feared! Such arrogance is almost beyond belief. The radioactive fallout from this one accident affected many countries and continents in the world. Thousands of people were displaced from their homes on land that will be unfit to live on for hundreds if not thousands of years. The real death toll from this accident has only just begun. Even the basic lessons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that it took decades for the full effect of the poison to show up in the population. Thousands of children were and will be affected by the horror that was Chernobyl. If this is an example of a relatively good safety record, we can only pray that we never see a bad one. There is an idea somehow that nuclear generated power will be the answer to our energy needs for the future. Some people say that nuclear power can and should replace the burning of coal, gas and oil. Yet all these fuels were at one time themselves thought to be safe! The build up of greenhouse gases was not something anybody worried about fifty years ago. Are we merely to replace the dirty burning of these fuels with another far more toxic? Is this really the legacy we want to hand on to future generations? The idea that nuclear reactors will somehow prevent global warming is a basic error. The build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will not be affected by the development of more nuclear reactors. In fact studies have shown that for each dollar invested in the efficient use of energy, displaces seven times more CO2 than a dollar invested in nuclear power. Besides this the burning of coal for energy only produces 7% of the CO2 in the world. In any case in would take far too long to build the necessary reactors to have any effect upon this problem. Nuclear power is not cheaper than conventional power. While uranium may be a common enough element, the human costs of extracting it from the ground, the cost to the environment and the cost of reprocessing means that the actual costs are much higher. The vastly expensive cost of building even one nuclear reactor means that the unit cost of nuclear power is just as high as fossil fuel generated power. On top of the worries about the development of nuclear reactors must be the danger poised not just through accident and malpractice, but also through terrorist activity. Recently US troops found detailed maps of US nuclear plants in Afghanistan. By our own admission our plants are under secured and a soft target for terrorism. One such hit co...