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UN Chief Issues Nuclear Warning on Chernobyl Visit
CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — The head of the UN warned on a landmark visit to Chernobyl on Wednesday that the Ukrainian tragedy and the recent accident in Japan prompted "painful questions" about the future of atomic power.
Ban Ki-moon spent around 20 minutes at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. (AFP/Getty) United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon visited the site of the Chernobyl disaster a day after world donors pledged 550 million euros ($800 million) towards a permanent shelter to secure the ruined reactor, which exploded on April 26, 1986.
Speaking in Kiev afterwards, he warned that the recent quake damage to Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant showed that accidents like Chernobyl were likely to occur again in the future.
"The unfortunate truth is we are likely to see more such disasters. The world has witnessed an unnerving history of nuclear accidents," he said at a conference, calling for a global debate on the safety of nuclear energy.
"To many, nuclear energy looks to be a relatively clean and logical choice in an era of increasing resources' scarcity. Yet the record requires us to ask painful questions: have we correctly calculated its risks and costs?" he said.
Ban spoke after flying to Chernobyl by helicopter, standing outside the power plant for around 20 minutes with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych on a visit that he described as an "extremely moving experience."
He warned the effects of climate change were likely to lead to more disasters like that at the Fukushima plant, which was damaged by a quake and tsunami in a disaster that Japan has labelled at an equal level of severity as Chernobyl.
"We have seen in Japan the effects of natural disasters particularly in areas vulnerable to seismic activities," the UN secretary general said.
"Climate change means more incidents of freak and increasingly severe weather (and) with the number of nuclear energy facilities scheduled to increase substantially in the coming decades our vulnerability will only grow."
The UN chief's visit came after dozens of international donors gathered in Kiev Tuesday to come up with the funds needed to replace the temporary casing now protecting Chernobyl with a more permanent outer shell.
But the high-profile gathering, which included the head of the European Commission and the prime minister of France, fell short of the 740 million euros sought by Ukraine.
The pledged money will go to a project administered by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), with part also funding a safe storage facility for spent nuclear fuel from inside the reactor.
Both the new outer shell and the storage centre are due to be operational in 2015 and Yanukovych stressed Wednesday that the money pledged was enough to complete the construction of the shelter on time.
"Yesterday we raised the main part of the sum. The rest, I am sure, will be gathered shortly. De facto, we have the possibility to build the new shelter to finish the construction here by 2015," he said.
The EBRD said in a statement Tuesday that it would work with major donors "to close the remaining financial gap."
The UN chief said he was impressed by the construction work he saw at Chernobyl.
"I saw the Chernobyl command centre and the encouraging progress in building a new shelter for a damaged reactor," he said.
"It was a very impressive, creative and ambitious project to shelter the damaged reactor for the coming 100 years."
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26 Comments so far
Show All$800,000 million to "...shelter the damaged reactor for the coming 100 years."
In the year 2111, 100 years from now, how much will we all have to chip in for the next 100 years of containment? How much in 2211, 2311, 2411, 2511, 2611, etc....?
How many thousand years of containment will we have to pay for? What if all social order breaks down 500 years from now? Who will contain Chernobyl or the spent fuel rods in the many reactor pools around the globe?
"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds..." The destroyer of worlds is time. Give man enough time and he will destroy us all. Planet earth is a perpetual motion machine created by God and designed to last for all eternity. We are bringing on the second coming. What is coming is the end times of humanity.
Much sooner than we would hope for.
500 years? Sheesh. We don't even have 50. Game over. Time for revolution or social suicide...
oldy,
You are old and foolish indeed, oldy, if you can't understand the very valid point that SJRyan made. That Chernobyl is a black hole requiring billions in maintenance and constant government recognition that without that constant re-cementing and repair, the whole world will once again be fouled by Chernobyl's never ending reactor meltdown. And repair and money will be required for at least the next 240,000 years or else all life forms on this planet are going to undergo constant nuclear holocaust.
I suggest next time you desire to flame someone, you first put on your reading glasses or at least wiki the subject so you don't make such a spectacle of yourself.
TJ
Well-criticised, TJ.
I do honestly think, though, that we'd better focus on the real problems instead of their side effects. If we want to live.
Unless we reverse human overpopulation - which means giving Capitalism and several religions the push - Mama is going to render moot all our concerns about atomic half-life and similar.
She'll do it by killing us all, or such a big fraction of us that any survivors will have neither time nor energy to worry about anything but staying alive and out of the clutches of the scum.
So it seems to me as though worrying about 1500 years from now, never mind 15000 or more, is simply a pointless distraction, given that the best evidence right now is that we don't have 150 years left unless we pull our collective fingers out and start making the big changes PDQ.
Mairead,
You frequently cite population growth as the root problem facing society. Most of the economically advanced nations have established stable populations or slow reductions. The US birth rate, for example, is slightly below replacement level except for immigration.
Do you have any proposed program or process to limit population growth in the underdeveloped portions of the world?
I happen to agree with you that the population growth rate is unsustainable but, beyond educatiing and empowering women, I haven't got much of a clue as to a sane and humane policy. I do happen to be a believer in and a financial supporter of the UN's Millennium Development Goals.
Bill
Do you have any proposed program or process to limit population growth in the underdeveloped portions of the world?
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Were it within my gift, Bill, I'd have us see things in terms of the whole system, not in the fragmented, us-vs-them/here-vs-there way we've traditionally used.
Which means that, to create a proper sense of fairness, we should constrain reproduction everywhere to the same level. To me, that would be 0.5 live birth per person, followed by mandatory sterilisation. (That's where China goes wrong: theirs is wink-wink mandatory, and their population continues to grow.) Any male who impregnates more than one woman should lose his dangly bits.
The fact, as you point out, that the less-poor parts of industrialised urban populations have stable or decreasing populations doesn't really matter at this stage of the problem. "Slightly decreasing" isn't enough, and "stable" simply means the problem gets worse because of increasing expectations.
What we must have is the *sharp* decrease made possible by only 3 things: mandatory post-partum sterilisation; global nuclear war; or famine and plague.
There are actually individuals who'd prefer one of the latter two, but to me that's just a pathology for which they should be in treatment, possibly in a locked facility. There are other individuals who believe some version, typically obfuscated, of "God will provide". That feels pathological to me too, specifically like a thought disorder.
The level of population reduction we'd get from 0.5/person would (I hope!) be sufficient to preserve us as a species if we also work our arses off getting rid of the side effects that will be the proximate cause of our extinction if we fail: greenhousing because of deforestation and fossil-fuel combustion; non-human extinctions and near extinctions through overfishing, ocean acidification, and the destruction of habitat; pollution through careless exploitation.
Since we in the industrialised parts of the planet have been shunted by the rich into the role of driving the disaster (do I need to support that?), a proper systems solution will not only include even-handedness in population reduction, but the same in provision. If we want people to stop destructive practices, then we've to make them not merely illegal but unnecessary.
The implication there is that we change the rules: instead of everyone being forced to serve the rich to stay alive, and in the process do many horrible things to Mama and other people (I include non-humans), we change the rules such that everyone can easily earn a dignified, rich life --but only through non-destructive behavior.
We have the means for that. The western consumer culture was invented specifically to save Capitalism by beguiling the proles away from Communism while making it unnecessary for the rich to keep trying to install full-blown fascism.
But the consumption culture has now been completely revealed for the going-out-of-business strategy that it is. So if we want to stay in business, we have to kill it off by shifting to a non-profit economy, driven by need rather than greed. Since we're madly profligate right now, it seems obvious that supplying only actual human needs would be both easy and a net gain for everyone.
A semi-trivial example of that would be our supplying food to Africans in return for their cleaning up the effects of colonialism and warlordism. A non-systems view would reject the idea as having nothing in it for us, but the whole-systems view says that what benefits others benefits us too.
Sorry for the dissertation, Bill, but even at CD we seem to be spending our time talking about trivialities as though we can take having a future for granted. It's a leftover from our pre-human history, I suppose, but that doesn't make it less mad or maddening.
Okay, I'm reading the book "Germs" right now. So I'm jaded. One lab created enough of one deadly germ (all in a paint size bucket) to kill every person on the planet - over 7 billion, in the early 1980's. Now there's far worse germs created out there(faster) and there have been accidents where germs have been released due to things like an explosion with equipment. Like Nuclear power, the germ manufactures have also killed many people in surrounding areas to their labs, and rendered buildings and land unusable ever again - by accident.
So here's my beef, I didn't think the human race would actually destroy itself but now I can see it happening on four fronts - nuclear power accidents, biological weapons accident, global warming - killing crops and species, and pollution - in drinking water and ocean. Maybe we are nearing the end of the human race.
All being driven by the greed of the few. Always more and never enough. All to 'hold the gold' in their lifetimes. The same gold that once topped the great pyramids of Egypt, the very same gold. 'There is nothing new under the sun'. Now they lay plans to take it with them. To reach out from the grave in the form of charitable trusts. We are living Plato's "Republic" and have been for 2,500 years.
What you are saying is that the race is over.
Why read fiction when you can have the real thing?
Consider the (PNAC) Project for a New American Century's desire for genocidal tools (biological weapons that attack specific genotypes would be a polical useful tool), and you will realize that our "leaders" have zero morality.
Or look at the spread of Lyme disease by ticks centered around Lyme CT but now encompassing a good portion of our country. It is only pure coincidence that the Plum Island biologal warfare facility eight miles from Lyme was investigating how to use ticks for germ warfare purposes before the first outbreak.
And there are those who say that the greastest false flag operation in the history of our country was orchestrated by a guy on life-supporting dialysis, living in a cave. I guess it is our government and media who really like fiction. But you would think that they could do a more credible job of it.
You speak of Plato, and you are so right, "Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely" is one of my favorite quotes by him.. As long as the world is sucking the life blood out of the earth by burning it's fossil fuels and radioactive poisons, the world will be in a downward trajectory to destruction. That does not have to continue. There is a better way to restore life and the necessary balance to this incredible planet. Those in power don't ,and won't, like the new sources of clean power, but they will be absolutely powerless to stop it, very soon. New technologies exist that will provide all the power cleanly and cost effectively that will eliminate the need for Oil, Nuclear, and Coal power. Once the world is aware of what is possible and how it can give everyone on the planet a clean and almost free source of renewable energy for everyone, those who have become tyrants for Greed and Power will find that they have lost their clothes and are standing in the open for the world to see. Their days are numbered.
Those who hide from the truth, will blow away like the sand of a dune in a high wind. The new technologies will make the kings paupers and the paupers Kings, It has been said and it will happen. The change has begun. Its going to be an exciting ride into the future. I suggest you sell your stock in GE and those big companies that refuse to pay their taxes that they owe to society. .
The quote did not sound like Plato, so I looked it up:
From http://www.phrases.org.uk:
This arose as a quotation by John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902). The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
Just for the record.
"New technologies exist that will provide all the power cleanly and cost effectively that will eliminate the need for Oil, Nuclear, and Coal power. Once the world is aware of what is possible and how it can give everyone on the planet a clean and almost free source of renewable energy for everyone, those who have become tyrants for Greed and Power will find that they have lost their clothes and are standing in the open for the world to see."
Could you be a little more specific? Or is this just a vision?
What energy source are you referring to Mik? Not unobtainium I hope.
The absurd arrogance of building hundreds and hundreds of machines (nuclear power reactors) that require dozens and hundreds of years of close careful maintenance to avert catastrophe...
As if no inadvertent movements of the Earth's crust or ocean's waters or meteor strike or human terror or engineering error or unforeseeable series of mistakes or coincidences could ever occur... certainly no previous human engineering projects have ever unexpectedly failed in spectacular fashion, why should it start happening now?
And whose development, even without catastrophic breakdown, releases deadly radiation in mine tailings and processing, and involve risk of accident in processing and transportation, and produce materials for horrific weapons of nuclear explosives and depleted Uranium, and produce waste products that must be closely maintained with extreme care for hundreds and thousands of years...
The utter, utter, absurd, tragic, hilarious human arrogance.
Ban Ki-moon is ABSOLUTELY correct: Chernobyl and Fukushima will happen again, and again, and again... and given the likelihood of significant breakdowns in our civilization, again, and again, and again after our close careful maintenance falters...
And the utter, supercilious, oily, greasy, slimy arrogance of the shills and boosters and front-men and power-worshipers and propagandists who pretend that the act of stringing together a series of words like "clean safe 4th-generation designs" somehow answer or refute any of the above...
And all for no necessity, no desperate need, no pressing requirement, all for greed, and power, and hubris, and arrogance, and the false inevitability of an economic system of endless growth, profligate use of finite resources releasing concentrated energy for short-term glory, disrupting the natural systems of life that produced and sustain human existence, human consciousness, human society, human love and joy and pain and fear and solidarity, snuffed out in an orgy of utter, utter, utter foolish arrogance and ignorance and complicity...
Evidence is overwhelming that nuclear energy is too dangerous to be relied on. But the question is: do we have the politcal will to say no to it in the face of the energy industry's influence on comgresspeople?
As ones who do not profit from nuclear power, it seems absurd to us to endanger so much for so long for so little benefit. But the desire for money does strange things to people. It is the most destructive of all the addictions. It corrupts the thought process, develops its own justifications and rationalizations. Money or the desire for it, and that desire never being satisfied is truly the root of all evil. This is true whether it comes to oil prices, stock market bubbles, Ponzi schemes, political corruption, or nuclear power disasters. Take the money out of the equation and these things don't happen. And that's exactly what we have to do with energy production. We all use it and need it so don't let private money provide it. It corrupts absolutely. Think about it.
They are admitting Japan is like a Chernobyl, but then that is it. Information about the cloud passing around the Earth and how citizens of the World can protect themselves - not coming from our Leaders. I thought Ban Ki -moon was going to say something new, dramatic, but he too stops short of urgency, immediacy in being more forthright about where the radiation cloud is and what citizens need to do.
Absolutely accurate and reliable prediction for the future of humanity during the next several hundred thousand years:
cemetery keepers of nuclear graveyards.
Guaranteed full employment!
This body planet is prone to disease and breaks down as our own or a plant.
We are on this singular living entity that has a shelf life.
We treat our bodies as immortal.
We expect the earth to be immortal in our behalf.
So we can do as we please.
So we can reside ignorant of a potential.
The potential of conciousness that 99% of the population has no clue about.
So ends empire of world.
Is there anyone out there who knows what to do NOW?
Whoever survives and starts over, hmmm, not genetically possible
probably.
Guess it has to start all over.
Beautiful red cardinal outside my window, good bye. Sorry.
Earlier posts by SJRyan and Thomas Jefferson are totally on the money.
Thanks Oikos,
Just like the character "Yossarrian" in the book "Catch 22", it seems like Thousands of people around the world, that I have never met, are for some reason, all trying to kill me....
I suspect we will go extinct in the coming decades due to corporate greed and no bearded man in the sky will appear just in the nick of time to rescue us from our folly.
If we defy and outwit our own ignorance and superstition, in ample time, it will really be something, won't it?
I greatly enjoy all your posts guys,
TJ
We notice their visit to Chernobyl was a BRIEF visit.
I bet if they visit the one in Japan or anywhere within 20 miles of that plant it will be a very, very brief visit, even wearing the white protective suits and masks.
I'd also bet that within another few weeks, the Japanese disaster will make Chernobyl "seem" like small potatoes.
And when the nukers say such things as "The unfortunate truth is we are likely to see more such disasters", we have a big problem.
Yes we will likely see more such disasters, there have been four such in the past 42 years and we just cannot live that way. This one in Japan MAY end up insuring most of Japan if not all of it has to be evacuated IF it is true the number 1, 2 and 3 units have indeed melted down and most of the experts there say they probably have.
Then consider that every day poisonous radiation of severa different types from that plant is circling the globe just as Chernobyl's emissions did. The big problem there is this one is going to last far longer than Chernobyl's poisonous emissions did and that radio-active poison {accumulates}. That which may be considered by our EPA to be "harmless" now will not be the same tomorrow, or a month from now or nine months from now or perhaps a year or three years from now.
The engineers and workers at that melting down plant don't really have a clue if they can ever get it under control. The company wants to save units 5 and 6 instead of concreting in the entire plant. Even then if and when that is their last choice, the radiation will still enter their ground water table and probably still enter the ocean. It is far worse than has been presented.