This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl explosion, the worst nuclear power disaster in history. People are still dying from the long-term effects. An area the size of a small city is still off limits to human habitation.

In the U.S., there hasn’t been a new nuclear power plant built since the Three Mile Island accident of 1979. But that is beginning to change. Last year Congress passed an energy bill that gave the nuclear power industry tax credits worth $3.1 billion along with new liability protection. Now at least half a dozen new nuclear power plants are in various planning stages.

According to Physics Today, “the nuclear power industry believes the first new US order is only two years away.” Most of the new facilities would be in the South, where pay scales are lower and the public seems willing to accept the risks in order to get badly needed jobs.

Is the trade-off worthwhile? People might be able to make an informed decision if they knew the risks. But they can’t. When a nuclear accident happens, no one ever knows how bad the damage is. We can’t even get a firm estimate. In Chernobyl, the death toll was countless -- quite literally. By one reckoning, only 65 people died. Yet the BBC reports that the death toll is surely in the thousands and might be as high as one hundred thousand. When you add in illnesses, birth defects, and long-term environmental damage, it’s all way beyond anyone’s ability to calculate. How can anyone ever measure the benefits against the risks, when the risks are so totally unknown?

Of course every technology may have uncertain risks. It’s easy to catalog the benefits of things like automobiles and cell phones. It’s almost impossible to quantify the social costs. But there are two things that make nuclear power different.

First, it’s unnecessary. As Harvey Wasserman says: “In pure economic terms, nukes are a horrendous investment. … No reactor can be guaranteed not to melt. Nor can any be protected from terrorism.” A rational combination of energy conservation and alternative renewable energy technologies can give us far more power than nuclear at far less cost and risk. Hundreds of people who study the subject closely have been confirming that truth for years. Yet these experts can’t get their message out. The coal, gas, oil, and nuclear industries spend millions of PR dollars to make sure the public can’t clearly hear the truth.

Second, the nuclear energy industry has always been inextricably tied to nuclear weaponry. Though there is no convincing evidence that Iran plans to make nuclear weapons, the Bush administration is right about one thing. The same technology that a nation needs to produce nuclear power could eventually be used to produce nuclear weapons.

The U.S. has already used nuclear power to hide its own nuclear weapons plans. In 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower offered his famous Atoms for Peace proposal, he wasn’t worried about an energy shortage. It was a cold war ploy. Ike wanted to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal. But he faced growing protests from European allies and a growing Soviet “peace offensive.” To neutralize those problems, he tried to create an image of the U.S. as a nation dedicated to peace. Thus was born “the peaceful atom,” “your friend the atom,” and all the gimmicks the nuclear industry has used ever since to mask the lethal reality of atomic fission.

One thing couldn’t be masked, though. To make new nuclear weapons usable, the U.S., like other nations, has to test them. Testing in the atmosphere went on from 1945 to 1963. No one will ever know, or come close to knowing, how many people those tests killed.

Once the atom is let loose the effects are literally incalculable. Governments hardly even try to count the bodies accurately, because they know it can’t be done. If the U.S. does some day drop nuclear bombs on Iran, we will never hear any reports of the death toll.

Of course that’s just as true now, when the U.S. kills with conventional weapons in Iraq. As General Tommie Franks once said “We don’t do body counts.” Other nations aren’t likely to do body counts, either. We’ll never know how many the Chinese killed in Tibet, or the Indonesians in East Timor, or the Turks in Kurdistan, or (on and on and on). Counting the victims of state violence has become merely a quaint habit of a bygone era.

There are plenty of practical reasons to stop the new nuclear power plants before they are built. Beyond that, there is a deeper moral reason. Nuclear technology, in peace or in war, is the perfect symbol for all the dehumanizing trends of the modern world. It’s not just a coincidence that the rush to nuclear power is happening just as a whole new generation of nuclear weapons is being created in the U.S. It’s all part of the same immoral mindset.

When nukes kill, who counts? No one counts the victims because the victims don’t count. A step back toward the cold-war-era embrace of the atom is a step away from a world that cares enough to count the dead. And a world that won’t count the dead will never care enough to make every life count.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace. Email to: chernus@colorado.edu

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