Christine,
I don't see any way that this could be blamed on nuclear power.
Low levels of radiation have been present on our planet from its creation. Life forms here have developed mechanisms to repair genetic damage caused by the ever-present radiation exposure that pre-dates nuclear power by billions of years.
If (as is reported) cancer rates have increased since the 1950s I would suspect that the causative factors are much more likely associated with toxic chemicals used in industry and agriculture, as well as man-made hormones which make their way into our food and water.
Estrogens are probably the biggest component of this hormone load.
Apart from their use in birth control pills, estrogens are widely used in skin and hair products. Some of this material is ingested or absorbed. Estrogens in some locations have been found in public drinking water systems. This cannot be good for us.
My opposition to the use of nuclear power for electricity production is based on accident risks and the failure of the U.S. to develop a rational approach to the disposal of spent fuel. The low levels of radiation in the environment surrounding nuclear power plants are not a concern to me, because they are well below background levels.
I could go on and on about this, but basically I believe that Murphy's Law is operative. That is, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. And, based on the history of technological disasters, these tend to occur not as a result of bad design or equipment failure (things that are routinely analyzed), but, rather, from sheer human stupidity, as happened at Chernobyl. The Chernobyl reactor itself and all its written procedures were designed to prevent such a thing happening. It was only when more than three separate safety systems were manually turned off, in violation of procedures and training, that this accident became possible.
Accident consequences are a different matter. But there too there is matter for concern. I wrote a report on "cleanup costs" from nuclear weapon accidents for the government: it's available to the public as SAND96-0957.
Basically, I and my co-author found that if land is contaminated with radioactive material, the only practical method of cleaning it up is to demolish all the structures and cart away all the debris as low-level waste, scrape the soil with earth-moving equipment till it is "clean" and then restore the land to some useful condition.
Performing such a cleanup would require that there be some place to put the waste. Currently, there are very few waste disposal sites for low-level radioactive waste, and strong local opposition to the new sites under development or consideration.
Chernobyl is in a very remote area, with low population. If that accident had occurred in close proximity to a city, the consequences would have been much more severe.
David |
