Ten Lessons From Chernobyl And Fukushima

Ten Lessons From Chernobyl And Fukushima

By David Krieger, May 13, 2011


Here are ten lessons from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 25 years ago and the Fukushima disaster this year.

1. Nuclear power is a highly complex, expensive and dangerous way to boil water to create steam to turn turbines.

2. Accidents happen, and the worst-case scenario often turns out to be worse than imagined or planned for.

3. The nuclear industry and its experts cannot plan for every contingency or prevent every disaster.

4. Governments do not effectively regulate the nuclear industry to assure the safety of the public. Regulators of the nuclear industry often come from the nuclear industry itself and tend to be too close to it to regulate it effectively.

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Are bullet points considered the same as paragraphs?


This extreme enviroweenie with his biased claptrap does not wish to violate sacrosanct rules. I will post the remaining lessons of the 10 in subsequent posts from this same article.



"...Me, I'm waiting so patiently
Lying on the floor
I'm just trying to do my jig-saw puzzle
Before it rains anymore..."

Jagger/Richards

5. Hubris, complacency and high-level radiation are a deadly mix. Hubris on the part of the nuclear industry and its government regulators — along with complacency on the part of the public — has led to the creation of vast amounts of high-level radiation that must be guarded from release to the environment for tens of thousands of years.

6. The corporations that run the nuclear power plants are protected from catastrophic economic failure by government limits on liability. If the corporations that own nuclear power plants had to bear the burden of potential financial losses in the event of a catastrophic accident, they would not build the plants because they know the risks are unacceptable. It is only when government limits the liability, as the Price-Anderson Act does in the United States, that companies go ahead and build nuclear power plants. No other private industry is given such liability protection, which leaves the taxpayers on the hook.

7. Radiation releases from nuclear accidents cannot be contained in space and will not stop at national borders.

8. Radiation releases from nuclear accidents cannot be contained in time and will adversely affect countless future generations.

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TEPCO = FUCKING WEASELS

9. Nuclear energy — as well as nuclear weapons — and human beings cannot coexist without the risk of future catastrophes. The survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long known that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist. Fukushima, like Chernobyl before it, makes clear that human beings and nuclear power plants also cannot coexist.

10. The accidents at Fukushima and Chernobyl are a bracing reminder to phase out nuclear energy. We need to move as rapidly as possible to a global energy plan based upon conservation and various forms of renewable energy: solar cells, wind, geothermal, and energy that is extracted from the oceans and the tides and the currents.

Poet Maya Angelou once said, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage doesn’t need to be lived again.”

We need the courage to abandon nuclear power. No one should have to experience the wrenching pain of another Chernobyl or another Fukushima.

David Krieger is a councilor on the World Future Council and the chair of the executive committee of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.


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Some days the best thing you can do is to cut and paste.


Then pray it doesn't rain this weekend here.


rdb (the extreme enviroweenie with claptrap biases)

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TEPCO = FUCKING WEASELS

:kick:

worse happened/the world didn't end/the universe is still here." :eyes: :mad:

That are not being taught. Number one should be a stopper for the rational. After that comes the pre-eminence of human greed and legalized murder. Number two begins a slight descent toward dishonesty. We know more about accidents than nuclear power but it is the dishonesty of planning that is the danger. Namely, you adjust everything around the goal rather than figure in reality. The preparation for the "worst case scenario" has to made affordable or the likelihood unthinkable.

Human "nature", the world that man specifically creates with tools and machines, is not something humans can survive in even if Nature could. Doubly perverse, the dominance over nature is the dominance by humanity's own weakness and blinkered self knowledge. We have "intelligently" evolved to a state of technology where humans are not fit to survive and in fact fed in increasing numbers as required blood sacrifices.

We are losing the race to change ourselves, as evidenced by putting thew worst and dumbest and most vice ridden of the species in charge of the flawed machinery of progress. Even if by revolution the best of humanity governed by better values were put in charge, the evolution of a new race unencumbered by so much dedicated stupidity is still a big question mark. Humanity hangs by a thread, but the response of the powers of this world is to make rope nooses.

These places are unbelievably complex. Just do a bit of research on the materials and methods for storing the waste. I hang out on a machining forum where I've seen a few questions asked about making these containers. Most people can't even appreciate the degree of effort that goes in to just taking the glowing mess away. The materials alone are simply astonishing.

Wind and solar, on the other hand...