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| # 53 In search of tomorrow |
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When I first started to write this months article and I wrote that title down, I actually had another yarn in mind to tell you.
But then the six o’clock news came on the tele and I wandered out of the office to catch up with what had been happening in the world while I had had my head down and bum up.
The very first item on that night was George W at APEC with this now infamous quote: “If you truly care about greenhouse gases, then you’ll support nuclear power. If you believe that greenhouse gases are a priority, like a lot of us, if you take the issue seriously, like I do and John [Howard] does, then you should be supportive of nuclear power.”
My dog got quite worried about me after that as I was rolling around the floor, laughing hysterically, coughing and spluttering with tears streaming down my cheeks.
Who ever said that the six o’clock news was depressing because it was full of wars, murders and terrorism and never had any good news obviously didn’t watch this show. This guy has to be the number one stand-up comic in the world at the moment; maybe he actually believes the stuff he says, does he think we do?
Doing a simple wikipedia search on civilian nuclear accidents threw up this list, and remember to get on this list the following serious criteria has had to have been met:
There must be well-attested and substantial health damage, property damage or contamination. The damage must be related directly to radioactive material, not merely (for example) at a nuclear power plant. To qualify as "civilian", the nuclear operation/material must be principally for non-military purposes. The event should involve fissile material, fission or a reactor.
I wont detail every one because it would take to long, but the list starts on December 12 1952 with the AECL’s NRX reactor in Chalk river Ontario which included hydrogen explosions and 4000 cubic metres of irradiated waste having to be disposed of. There were two more in the 1950’s, four in the sixties, two in the seventies including three mile island, thought to be the worst commercial nuclear accident in the US to date with 1 to 2 million people exposed.
The 1980’s saw the worst accident in the history of nuclear power at chernobyl with over 3000km of land declared off limits for humans for an indeffinate period and an unknown number of casualties. But the eighties also had another five accidents that made the list.
The ninties was rather quiet with only 3 incidents that made the list, and the 2000’s have had four so far with the last being in March 2006 in Erwin, Tennessee.
The military list is worse and starts in the 1940’s and includes 54 separate incidents serious enough to make this published list. Being military data though makes you wonder how complete it is as most would still come under clasified information.
In total 76 serious nuclear accidents in sixty years. As of 2007 the IAEA reported ther was 435 nuclear power reactors operating in thirty one countries.
With an unknown number of nuclear military vessels floating about the ocean waves the proportion of them that have had accidents or worse, sunk is hard to figure, but the US has reportedly lost two and the Russians have lost a further 19 to Davey Jones.
There is no argument that nuclear reactors do not produce carbon in the manufacture of electricity, that’s a given. But what politicians don’t tell you, has always been more important than what they do tell you. The amount of carbon produced ripping the fuel out of the ground, processing it, transporting it around the world, dealing with the waste products left over after use and cleaning up the mess when their safety systems prove to be not so safe, is colossal. What little George and Johnnies speech was about is money, greed and military power and while these two dinosaurs are solving the global warming problem with this mindset, your children’s future is looking pretty dire.
While nuclear energy will no doubt play a role as an interim measure in the solution, it is not the answer. This we haven’t found yet, but laziness and avarice is no excuse to stop trying.
I wonder how the naïve thinkers in the world would feel about nuclear power plants if someone had aimed four jet liners at four nuclear power plants instead of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The death toll would have been a hell of a lot more than 3000.
But hey, that could never ever happen, could it?
But then, that is “just an old trucker’s point of view”
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