02 October 2007

Nuclear Power

Greenpeace's Nuclear Campaigner, Jan Beranek, posted a blog about Russia, Sweden, and Spain not taking proper care of their nuclear waste. At the end was this:
How many more accidents and safety failures do we need, before we acknowledge that it is just impossible to safely run nuclear energy in our complicated world?
My comment to the post was this:
It's going to take a lot more than accidents and safety failures to convince governments that nuclear energy is never a good idea. Take Chernobyl as an example. Even though the initial death toll was small, the number of people dying as a result of the radiation are climbing astronomically. It's a clear example of the disaster that can occur at a nuclear power plant. And yet what do we do? We keep building plants. We convince ourselves that the Chernobyl reactor was built flawed, and with the new technology we have, it could never happen to us. It's going to take a major CATASTROPHE to convince people that nuclear power is bad.

I really do think that safety failures and accidents alone will result in a ban on nuclear energy. I'm very much against nuclear anything, mainly because of waste and the destruction and suffering it can cause if something goes wrong. Even though I think that the problems we're seeing today is major, most people probably just ignore it. It's going to take something bigger than Chernobyl happening in America to get people angry.

Making Waves: Nuclear amnesia

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