The Japanese people are now paying a horrific price for the impossible dream of the "Peaceful Atom." For a half-century they have been told that what's happening now at Fukushima would never occur.
Our hearts and souls must first and foremost go out to them. As fellow humans, we must do everything in our power to ease their wounds, their terrible losses and their unimaginable grief.
But as the radiation arrives here, we are also obliged -- for all our sakes -- to make sure this never happens again.
In 1980, I reported from central Pennsylvania on what happened to people there after the accident at Three Mile Island a year before. I interviewed scores of conservative middle Americans who were suffering and dying from a wide range of radiation-related diseases. Lives and families were destroyed in an awful plague of unimaginable cruelty. The phrase "no one died at Three Mile Island" is one of the worst lies human beings have ever told.
In 1996, ten years after Chernobyl, I attended a conference in Kiev commemorating the tenth anniversary of that disaster. Now, another fifteen years later, a definitive study has been published indicating a death toll as high as 985,000... so far.
Today we are in the midst of a disaster with no end in sight. At least four reactors are on fire. The utility has pulled all workers from the site, but may now be sending some back in.
The workers who do this are incomparably brave. They remind us, tragically, of some 800,000 Chernobyl "Liquidators." These were Soviet draftees who were sent into that seething ruin for 60 or 90 seconds each to quickly perform some menial task and then run out.
When I first read that number -- 800,000 -- I thought it was a typographical error. But after attending that 1996 conference in Kiev, I spoke in the Russian city of Kaliningrad and met with dozens of these Chernobyl veterans. They tearfully assured me it was accurate. They were angry beyond all measure. They had been promised they would not encounter health problems. But now they were dying in droves.
How many will die at Fukushima we will never know. Never have we faced the prospect of multiple meltdowns, four or more, each with its own potential for gargantuan emissions beyond measure.
If this were happening at just one reactor, it would be cause for worldwide alarm.
One of the units has been powered by Mixed Oxide Fuel. This MOX brew has been heralded as a "swords into ploughshares" breakthrough. It took radioactive materials from old nuclear bombs and turned them into "peaceful" fuel.
It seemed like a neat idea. The benefits to the industry's image were obvious. But they were warned repeatedly that this would introduce plutonium into the burn chain, with a wide range of serious repercussions. Among them was the fact that an accident would spew the deadliest substance ever known into the atmosphere. If breathed in, the tiniest unseen, untasted particle of plutonium can cause a lethal case of lung cancer. But like so many other warnings, the industry ignored its grassroots critics. Now we all pay the price.
For 25 years the nuclear industry has told us Chernobyl wasn't relevant because it was Soviet technology. Such an accident "could not happen here." But today it's the Japanese. If anything, they are better at operating nuclear reactors than the Americans. Japanese companies own the Westinghouse nuclear division, whose basic design is in place throughout France. Japanese companies also own the GE nuclear division. Among others, 23 of their U.S. reactors are extremely close or virtually identical in design to Fukushima I, now on fire.
Jeffrey Immelt, head of GE, is one of the many heavy corporate hitters now advising Barack Obama. Obama says (so far) that he has no intention of changing course in nuclear policy. That apparently includes a $36 billion new reactor loan guarantee giveaway in the 2012 budget. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has made clear he considers the situation at U.S. reactors very different from those in Japan. Essentially, he says, "it can't happen here."
Chu and others keep saying that our choice is between nukes and coal, that atomic energy somehow mitigates global warming. This is an important sticking point for millions of concerned citizens, and an important and righteous legion of great activists, who see climate chaos as the ultimate threat.
But especially in light of what's happening now, it's based on a non-choice. Nukes are slow to build, soaring in cost and clearly have their own emissions, waste and safety problems. The ancillary costs of coal and oil are soaring out of reach in terms of environmental, health and other negative economic impacts. The "bridging fuel" of gas also faces ever-higher hurdles, especially when it comes to fracking and other unsustainable extraction technologies.
The real choice we face is between all fossil and nuclear fuels, which must be done away with, as opposed to a true green mix of clean alternatives. These safe, sustainable technologies now, in fact, occupy the mainstream. By all serious calculation, solar is demonstrably cheaper, cleaner, quicker to build and infinitely safer than nukes. Wind, tidal, ocean thermal, geothermal, wave, sustainable bio-fuels (NOT from corn or soy), increased efficiency, revived mass transit all have their drawbacks here and there. But as a carefully engineered whole, they promise the balanced Solartopian supply we need to move into a future that can be both prosperous and appropriate to our survival on this planet.
As we see now all too clearly, atomic technology is at war with our Earth's ecosystems. Its centralized, heavily capitalized corporate nature puts democracy itself on the brink. In the long run, it contradicts the human imperative to survive.
Today we have four reactors on the coast of California that could easily have been ripped apart by a 9.0 Richter earthquake. Had this last seismic hit been taken on this side of the Pacific, we would be watching nightly reports about the horrific death toll in San Luis Obispo, the catastrophic loss of the irreplaceable food supply from the Central Valley, and learned calculations about the forced evacuations of Los Angeles and San Diego.
There are nearly 450 atomic reactors worldwide. There are 104104 here in the US.
Faced with enormous public demonstrations, the Prime Minister of Germany has ordered their older reactors shut. At very least this administration should follow suit.
The Chinese and Indians, the biggest potential buyers of new reactors, are said to be "rethinking" their energy choices.
As a species, we are crying in agony, to the depths of our souls, from compassion and from fear.
But above all, the most devastating thing about the catastrophe at Fukushima is not what's happening there now.
It's that until all the world's reactors are shut, even worse is virtually certain to happen again. All too soon.
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Harvey Wasserman edits the NukeFree.org website. He is Senior Editor of Freepress.org, and author of SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH. This piece appeared at Buzzflash/Truthout.
This is the first quantitative analysis of the releases from the Fukushima plant that I have seen. The data was collected by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).
Release of Iodine-131 is 20% of that released by Chernobyl
Release of Cesium-131 is 50% of that released by Chernobyl
They noted in previous reports that the release from Fukushima is continuous and ongoing.
In any case, I haven't dismissed any other options at all. Carbon-neutral fuels, molten-salt solar, wind (to a lesser extent), hydrothermal, wave energy, all these things need to be researched, certified, and implemented, and the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned. Coal needs to be dropped like a bad habit, but we can't do that until we have something that can take its place.
As far as nuclear is concerned, well, there's nothing else that can match it in terms of energy density. Our current nuclear setup isn't ideal, no question about that, but it's pretty clear that there are better and safer ways to pursue nuclear energy. I see no reason whatsoever that we shouldn't be exploring those options.
"As a species, we are crying in agony, to the depths of our souls, from compassion and from fear." You should crying in agony at the hundreds of thousands of people killed by coal fired power's air pollution each year. If the entire world had dumped its coal fired plants for nuclear we could have saved literally millions of lives, and improved the quality of life of billions who have to deal with the fallout from coal power ever single day of their lives.
Ummm.... Greenpeace did not film the Chernobyl documentary, it was done by a Soviet citizen.
And Harvey Wasserman is not promoting coal, that is a false diversionary argument made by Nuclear Cheerleaders. We both support investment in alternative energy, investment that should have started large scale 20 years ago.
He is promoting coal by making people irrationally afraid of the only viable alternative to it.. What else are we going to replace our base coal-fired electricity generation with? Wind and solar are not practical to take coal's place and I'm sure you know why.
If you want the actual numbers go check out the World Health Organization study on Chernobyl. They are saying that the eventual death toll of people dying from cancer beyond the normal rate may reach 4000...
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people die EVERY YEAR from respiratory disease caused by coal fired power plants not to mention the millions who have their quality of life horribly decreased, and then there is the greenhouse gas emissions which actually has the possibility to "OMG KILL US ALL!1!!"
Fukushima was hit by a 9.0 earthquake, a 12-meter tsunami, and multiple hydrogen explosions. The fact that it's still standing at all is impressive - it's a testament to the outstanding engineering that went into it that this 40-year-old piece of technology didn't simply collapse. And comparisons to Chernobyl are fundamentally flawed - Chernobyl was a badly designed reactor, with no containment, that could be destroyed by operator error. This just isn't the case with Fukushima. Your article, Harvey, is spreading FUD like Chernobyl spread radioactive contamination.
The fact of the matter is that even when considering TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, is STILL cleaner, safer, and more reliable than the alternatives. It carries the weight of our energy grid - it IS our future.
That said, we should move towards better reactor designs - particularly ones based on Liquid Flouride-Thorium. They're self-regulating, simpler in design, have no chance of meltdown even in the event of complete power loss, and are much, much harder to use for bombmaking purposes. Thorium is an order of magnitude more plentiful than Uranium, 80% of its byproducts are clean in 10 years (the remainder in 300 years), and it's generally less wasteful because it comes out of the ground in a form you can use.
"simpler in design" - All thorium reactors must be of some breeder type which have shown over the years to be much more complicated in design, although there are proposed "next generation" designs which claim to be simpler.
"have no chance of meltdown" - Popular misconception. Thorium itself does not support a neutron chain reaction, so it does not directly produce energy, instead it breeds to U233 which does. People have said without a chain reaction there can be no melt down, but a complete reactor must also have U233 so it is still possible. Also, fission by-products lead to post-shutdown cooling issues, such as occuring right now in Japan, that have nothing to do with neutron chain reactions, and for which thorium is not significantly better than uranium. Thorium would not have fixed this.
"much, much harder to use for bombmaking purposes" - Harder, perhaps. But a U233 bomb could be made from the thorium fuel cycle with specialized handling methods, so "much, much" ... is not accurate.
-- Don't believe everything you read in Wikipedia. Check the references, cross check against other wikipedia articles, ...
Just the fact that MSTRs are not pressurized makes them hugely easier to design. While there are fissionable materials in such reactors concentrations are much lower making passive cool down practical in most if not all cases. The original 10KW prototype was famously just turned off via a switch when the researchers went home for the weekend. 100% passive.
Then there is the fact that the waste products are 80% less and storage for them needs to only be designed for 500 years, not 25,000. Not to mention that if you want you can burn up your legacy high level waste in one of these.
U233 bombs, why is that an issue? Their are easier ways to do it, so that's what people will do. Bombmaking only becomes an issue if you are proposing a process that is easier than current general practice.
Meltdowns are impossible. Just turn off the power and the liquid fuel will drain out of the core into a pan specifically designed for passive cooling. Your fission byproducts can be problematic, but that's why you continuously remove them when you're running your reactor. Just turn it off - no fission, no byproducts. And if something goes REALLY wrong, I suppose you could pump boron or xenon into the fuel line to poison the reaction.
It's a pain in the ass to make a useful fission bomb out of this stuff because U232 and U233 are chemically identical and come out of solution together. If you tried to use these leftovers for a bomb, you'd run into all sorts of problems with gamma radiation wrecking the explosives and electronics of your device. You could get around this, but it's so frickin' expensive that you'd be better off just buying weapon-grade plutonium or making it yourself. It's just not a practical way to make a fission bomb.
At any rate, no, it's not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than what we've got now...
Nuclear plants run the risk of killing you, but not having them will kill you more.