Newest Attempt to Revive Nuclear Power
April 2007  
   
By Karl Grossman

There's again a move on to "revive" nuclear power. Every decade or so, those with a vested interest in this deadly dangerous technology seek to get the public to swallow the nuclear pill¬ and that's happening again.  The promotion has consistently been based on falsehoods. For example, in a heavy push years back ¬ during a gasoline shortage that included lines at gas pumps, ¬ the claim was that if we had nuclear power somehow this wouldn't happen. In fact, only 3% of electricity in the United States is generated with oil. Nuclear power has nothing to do with oil or gas.  

Currently, the big pitch as the global warming crisis is acknowledged (after years of the vested oil interests denying it): nuclear plants don't emit greenhouse gasses and contribute to global warming.  In fact, the overall nuclear cycle necessary has significant greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. This so-called "nuclear fuel chain" includes uranium mining and milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication, use in nuclear reactors and disposal of radioactive wastes.

Moreover, notes Linda Gunter, project director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, "clean air is not just about greenhouse gases. All nuclear reactors emit radiation."

Recently, Matthew Cordaro, a top executive of what was once the Long Island Lighting Company and a main LILCO figure in pushing for its Shoreham nuclear plant, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times lamenting Shoreham never going into operation.  He cited global warming and dismissed the accident threat. "Sure," said Mr. Cordaro, "there are those who say they sleep better at night because there is no Shoreham, but this false sense of security is derived from a fear of an extremely unlikely piece of Hollywood fiction."  

Illuminating here is a letter-to-the-editor that Mr. Cordaro wrote the News-Review of Riverhead in 1979 stating: "Even if the worst credible accident happened at Shoreham, and the decision was made to evacuate, in fact, they could return shortly after the accident had been terminated. Any emissions to the atmosphere following the loss-of-coolant accident would form a plume, similar to smoke from a chimney [and] once the plume passed, it would be safe to come back to the area."  

Tell that to the people from the "exclusion zone" around  Chernobyl!  Since the explosion in 1986 at that nuclear plant spewing tons of radioactive poisons out into the environment, people have been unable to live in the radiation-laden "exclusion zone" which forms a circle with a 30-kilometer radius around the plant. That dead zone will need to remain uninhabited for centuries.  Meanwhile, now 21 years after the Chernobyl disaster¬ no "Hollywood fiction," as Mr. Cordaro put it, but the reality of what happens in a nuclear plant accident. ¬Solid data has come through about long-term health impacts.  A book on those consequences has just been completed by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy and former environmental advisor to the late President Yeltsin.  Total deaths from the fall-out from Chernobyl¬ which spread far from the "exclusion zone"¬ has been 300,000, he finds.  And the life expectancy in Russia, which had been the same as that of the United States, is now 59 for men and 64 for women which Dr. Yablokov attributes principally to Chernobyl.  "You see longevity dropping precipitously right after 1986 and the accident," he told me on a recent visit here. Still, some in media don't seem to get it.  

I was surprised at a 60 Minutes segment on which Steve Kroft of North Haven served as correspondent on this month passing on, unquestioning, another piece of nuclear establishment baloney: nuclear power has been a success in France.  Totally ignored, among other things: studies finding radioactivity in the sea and marine life contaminated off Normandy where La Hague, the French reprocessing center sits, and leukemia clusters in people living along the coast; massive demonstrations last month in French cities protesting construction of new nuclear power plants by AREVA, the government-supported nuclear giant; the immense subsidies the French public have been paying for nuclear power; claims of a new reactor with "no meltdowns" when, in fact, such a "pebble bed" reactor underwent a major accident in Germany causing its permanent closure. 

Downplayed were safe, clean energy technologies here now. "There are faster, safer and cheaper ways to meet our energy needs including renewable resources," said a statement challenging the 60 Minutes piece from Alden Meyer, strategy and policy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists.  

Karl Grossman