Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Atomic Energy: Unsafe in the Real World
Nuclear power requires “perfection” and “no acts of God,” we were warned years ago. This has been brought home by the ongoing disaster caused by the earthquake and tsunami that struck the Fukushimi Daiichi nuclear plant complex, the flooding along the Missouri River in Nebraska now threatening two nuclear plants, and the wildfire laying siege to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of atomic energy.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fire -- these and other disasters will inevitably occur. Add nuclear power with its potential to release massive amounts of deadly radioactive poisons when impacted by such a disaster, and it is clear that atomic energy is incompatible with the real world.
There’s no perfection in human beings or in technology. Accidents will happen. And there will always be natural disasters -- we can’t eliminate them. But we can -- and must -- eliminate atomic energy.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Hannes Alfven explained in 1972 in declaring his strong opposition to nuclear power: “Fission energy is safe only if a number of critical devices work as they should, if a number of people in key positions follow all their instructions, if there is no sabotage, no hijacking of the transports, if no reactor processing plant or reprocessing plant or repository anywhere in the world is situated in a region of riots or guerilla activity, and no revolution or war -- even a ‘conventional one’ -- takes place in those regions. The enormous quantities of extremely dangerous material must not get into the hands of ignorant people or desperados. No acts of God can be permitted.” Dr. Alfven was writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology. It allows no room for error,” wrote Carl J. Hocevar of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1975. Hocevar had earlier been an engineer working on reactor safety at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. “Perfection must be achieved if accidents that affect the general public are to be prevented,” he wrote in his foreword to the book We Almost Lost Detroit. The book is about the partial meltdown at the Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in 1966 that threatened nearby Detroit, one of numerous near-misses and many other accidents involving nuclear power in addition to the disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and now Fukushima.
In We Almost Lost Detroit, Hocevar described the blind faith of scientists in atomic energy and their wrong assumptions. “The scientists involved were most confident that they had covered all possible problem areas. They had built safeguards on top of safeguards. Yet in spite of the precautions in the design and construction of the Fermi reactor, and in spite of the reassurances by the scientists that a serious accident could not happen, one did occur. The results far exceeded the expectations of anyone involved with the project. Fortunately, at the time of the accident, the reactor was operating at a very low power level or the consequences could have been much worse.”
“The Fermi accident and others described in this book demonstrate the fact that no matter how much diligence is exercised in the design, construction, and operation of a nuclear reactor, things can and do go wrong,” Hocevar related. “Design errors occur, the unexpected happens, human error is a very real possibility.”
Still, “for many years, the [nuclear] industry vigorously defended the nuclear power
program as being essentially risk-free. Nuclear power was claimed to be perfectly safe. It was said that no serious accidents would ever happen,” he noted. “Such a position was of course necessary to promote the acceptance of nuclear power by the general public. It has not been until just recently that the proponents of nuclear energy have admitted that accidents can and will happen, and the public should prepare itself for such eventualities.”
Wei Zhaofeng, an energy official in China, which is now reconsidering its plans for nuclear power because of the Fukushima catastrophe, said recently: “We have to ensure 100 percent safety of these nuclear power plants.”
That cannot be. Nuclear power can never be 100 percent safe. And it must be. That is why it should not be. And, instead, we must get rid of it and fully implement the clean, renewable technologies such as solar, wind and others now available which can provide, as major studies in the last several years have shown, all the energy we needand are safe.
As physicist Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, recently wrote: “Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving.” It’s “the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away.”
That’s been made evident by the Fukushima disaster, the crisis along the Missouri River in Nebraska and the wildfire at the gates of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
To err is human, it’s realized. Technology fails, it’s comprehended. And we must also understand that atomic energy is unsafe in the real world. It can never be safe. It must be eliminated in favor of energy we can live with.
16 Comments so far
Show AllUnsafe at any speed. Some countries have realized that unless you can afford to lose whole sections of your country every 30 yrs., because the Corps. and Gov'ts that own and regulate them ONLY care about their short term profits they produce not the dangerous way they store waste and produce those profits, it's not worth it. When one melts down and takes out a major US city like NY or Chicago, La etc. then we'll close them down. Its a sad reality that then and only then will the brain dead US Gov't and populace act. If even then.
We must force them to act as the European and US anti nukes movement in the 80's brought the INF treaty signed by Gorbachev and Reagan and no plants were built in the US for years. Wall Street won't insure these monsters so they rely on the taxpayer. The nuclear industry has tried to resurge relying on new generations to forget what has already happened; Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and many smaller accidents and releases of radioactivity. This is a vile technology derived from the minds of those who built the bomb trying to redeem their evil technology but making it worse and worse. They are Frankenstein scientists who never learn.
Now is the time to put our bodies in the wheels of the machine. Leave the Spectacle, create situations.
Deploying nuclear power is like keeping your house safe from burglars by filling it with land mines and time bombs. IT'S PERFECTLY SAFE - so long as you never touch a land mine and always make sure to reset the time bombs before they count down to zero.
I'm not even able to come up with another example of a technology where doing nothing is dangerous. Even the most deadly chemical or biological toxins imaginable will just sit there doing nothing if properly contained. Weapons are meant to kill, but they don't just go off on their own; you have to at least touch them to cause trouble; . But a nuclear power plant must be constantly actively cooled and monitored just to keep it from blowing up. Doing nothing means catastrophe.
I honestly can't fathom where pro-nukers get their strident attitudes. It's bizarre. It strikes me as some sort of authoritarian perversity. If it were really true that we need nuclear power, it would be a slightly different story, but we don't need it, and no pro-nuker can demonstrate otherwise. The US has not built a nuclear power plant in over 35 years. It hasn't kept us from meeting electricity needs. All of the electricity currently produced by nuclear power could be easily replaced with green renewables.
Nuclear power is insane.
Even the lowly Amerikan sit-com teaches us that trying to keep up with an impossibly high-maintenance lover because the payoff is so sublime and spectacular is inevitably a doomed act of hubris or folly.
Bloviator: I hope you prove wrong, but your words are well & wisely expressed.
With the regularity of an atomic clock's tic tic tic, Mark Abram will be along soon with his "quack quack quack".
I believe Mark Abram was nuked from CD :-) But he will be back, as a new screen name.
Alas, Mark is no longer with us. In an attempt to prove that all radiation is safe, he jammed a butter knife into the door sensor of a microwave, stuck his head in and turned it on. He was shouting, "See, perfectly safe!" as he lost consciousness. You would think that Mark would have been perfectly capable of continuing without a functioning brain cell, as there was no evidence he ever used them, but this was not the case. A memorial service will be held tomorrow at the "walk-away safe" Whiskey Creek Nuclear Reactor.
Farewell Mark. Glow on.
Damn that butter knife!
It obviously wasn't made in America or to American standards.
I say we start up a petition for a full bipartisan congressional inquiry, (headed by industry representatives of course), to ascertain if more no-bid butter knife contracts can be quickly awarded to head off any more unfortunate accidents such as this.
Perhaps Monsanto can help out here and together with research & development by General Electric we can finally come up with a truly all-American tactical butter knife solution, one that not only has an inbuilt radioactive supply that maintains the even spreading of GM margarine so much easier but one that is so adroitly made that it can be used as an emergency control rod in any nuclear plant or home kitchen.
I couldn't agree more. We need to prevent future butter knife tragedies. Have you considered making them out of depleted uranium? If we were ever overstocked we could just sell them to the military as weapons grade utensils.
We don't need Fail Safe, because that's impossible. What we need is Safe Fail.
A big thing right now is all the license renewing and extending the lives of these nuke plants. Nobody, including the alternative media here, is getting it right when this is written about and discussed and the Industry is telling a lie that these things are safe, based on the past 40 years of operating, and that they now can operate at 100% efficiency and profit, now that the 40 year construction loans are paid off.
Its total bullshit. The industry is getting away with a big one and its putting all our lives at risk.
The real reason is that they want to kick the stratospheric costs of mothballing, decommissioning and dismantling (to say nothing about waste disposal) another 20 years down the road, rather than deal with the huge cost of this now. The money that they put away for this was probably invested away in risky hedge funds (Think "Enron". Enron bought out several nuke-owning power companies such as Portland General Electric) and the amount needed and calculated and collected was pennies on the dollar of what would really be needed, thanks in part to the dilution of our currency. So there is no money for this - thus the only alternative to keep Wall Street happy is to keep these aging Baby Boomer vintage heaps of corrosion and rust like a 1971 Ford Fairlane operating for another few decades. How many rusted out 1971 Ford Fairlanes does one see on our highways? How many that operate 100% with zero problems? Rust never sleeps.
As if by 20 years from now, they will have the funds. This is a bigger promise than "Too Cheap to Meter"! Or maybe we'll even a permanent government-funded waste repository! Funded with what government money? There isn't any. Neither is likely to happen.
What will happen instead is that these plants, which are already at the end of their lives, will be held together increasingly by duct tape and bailing wire, and the investors will try to slip by another generation without having to cover the costs they promised to cover. Like a cat walking through cactus.
They did a good plant design that lasted 40 years with just one major TMI blip (1 out of 104 isn't too bad) but from now on is different. We will see an inevitable parabolic rise in the frequency and severity of accidents - until we get it finally and shut them down. That process will happen slowly as the governments still will have to overcome a phalanx of well funded lawyers, lobbyists, Stewart Brands and industry-controlled regulators, congresspeople and apologists. The nuclear plant owners seem to think that they can operate with disregard to state laws so the states are powerless. They plant owners feel the same way about the Federal government probably. They are under the impression that since they control the atom, that they are invincible.
Well I hope that they know what they are doing. The industry record on this doesn't give me much hope.
Not to worry Wall Street. Accidents and Acts of God do happen. Fortunately, the Price-Anderson Act will protect the sorry asses of Wall Street from liability. Guess who will be stuck with the bill? Look in the mirror....
Well put. Thank you.
The Crumbling of America - The History Channel is running a compelling documentary
on America's crumbling infrastructure right now. Every elected official from the President down to your city councilman or county commissioner needs to be watching this tonight!
http://www.history.com/shows.do?episodeId=452430&action...
"America's infrastructure is collapsing. Tens of thousands of bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. A third of the nation's highways are in poor or mediocre shape. Massively leaking water and sewage systems are creating health hazards and contaminating rivers and streams. Weakened and under-maintained levees and dams tower over communities and schools. And the power grid is increasingly maxed out, disrupting millions of lives and putting entire cities in the dark. The Crumbling of America explores these problems using expert interviews, on location shooting and computer generated animation to illustrate the kinds of infrastructure disasters that could be just around the bend."
Noo-Koo-You-Err energy unsafe? Whut?