Nuclear Power
by A. Stanley Thompson*, May 1998
It is my belief,
based on a professional lifetime of study, that further development
of nuclear power presents an unacceptable radioactive curse on
all future generations. Aside from the risks of accidents worse
than we have so far seen, there is no suitable place in our environment
to dispose of either present or future nuclear waste. Now massive
public-relations efforts are being launched to retrain the public
to trust the "experts." Damaged gene pools and cancers,
and a ruined environment, will be our legacy to future generations
if we continue to build nuclear reactors and nuclear armaments.
How many of our grandchildren are we willing to sacrifice for
the continuation of nuclear electric power and nuclear war?
Nuclear Electric Utilites
The "peacetime" nuclear business
in the United States is in bad shape. The hard fact is that nuclear
power is the most subsidized of all industries, kept alive by
taxpayer, rate-payer, and bondholder financed welfare, and by
world wide military support. Abandoned reactors include Rancho
Seco in California, Trojan in Oregon, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania,
Shoreham on Long Island. All new reactors ordered since 1973 have
been can-celed. Estimates of the cost of disposal rise fantastically
above $500 million per reactor, and no one knows what to do with
the radioactive stuff stored within and around them. The United
States Department of Energy has expressed a desire for tritium
to replenish the dwindling supply in its thermonuclear bomb stockpile.
In order to survive, some electric utilities have expressed willingness
to produce wartime tritium as a government-subsidized by-product
of their nuclear electrical power.
Nuclear Construction Companies
Nuclear construction companies would like to build nuclear
power plants, but it is unlikely that any unsubsidized nuclear
power plant will be ordered by a US utility. The United States
has proposed to provide reactors to North Korea to replace their
"unsafe" nuclear plants. American, French, and Canadian
nuclear companies are considering joint ventures to build power
reactors in Indonesia and elsewhere, I presume with financial
aid from US taxpayers. Now it is proposed that US nuclear corporations
sell $60 billion of nuclear products to China, trusting that they
will not use their ability to produce plutonium for bombs.
Nuclear War with Depleted
Uranium
The US Atomic Energy Commission used its enormous diffusion
plants to separate uranium-235 from natural uranium for the purpose
of making nuclear bombs, like the one dropped on Hiroshima. The
tons of depleted uranium (mostly uranium-238) left over from the
diffusion process were to be a valuable material for conversion
to plutonium fuel for breeder reactors. Because our breeder program
has lost its support, depleted uranium is now a "waste"
material in need of "recycling." Its value for "peace"
has been replaced by its value for waging nuclear war. In the
Persian Gulf the US military recycled hundreds of tons of depleted
uranium into armor piercing shells and protective armor for tanks.
After piercing a tank wall the depleted uranium burned, forming
a radioactive and chemically lethal aerosol, incinerating everyone
inside the tank, then spreading unseen over Iraq. Sickness and
death for all future time were spread indiscriminately among Iraqi
soldiers and civilians (including children). American soldiers
and their children became victims as part of the Gulf War Syndrome.
Now US military suppliers plan to sell this "free" government
bonanza on the profitable world military market.
Radioactive Pollution on
a Worldwide Scale
The public has been conditioned by both corporate and
government proponents of nuclear power to believe in the necessity
for their inherently "safe" nuclear reactors to avert
a coming energy crisis. The nuclear establishment advertises itself
as the producer of "green" energy, completely ignoring
the non-green effects of the manufacture and eventual disposal
of reactors, their fuels, and their radioactive products. They
claim that they are now ready to produce "safe" reactors.
Extension of the analyses by which the experts support their claim
of safety shows, I believe, that there is no possibility of a
guaranteed safe reactor. There is certainly no way safely to dispose
of nuclear waste into the environment. Reactors are bound occasionally to fail. They are
complicated mechanical devices designed, built, and operated by
fallible human beings, some of whom may be vindictive. Our reactors
may be "weapons in the hands of our enemies," susceptible
to sabotage. Despite attempts at secrecy, the list of reactor
accidents fills whole books. In 1986 the Chernobyl reactor exploded, blowing
off its two-thousand-ton lid, polluting the northern hemisphere
with radioactivity, casting radiation sickness and death into
the far future, leaving a million acres of land ruined "forever"
by radioactive contamination. Radioactive reindeer meat was discarded
in Lapland, and milk in Italy. It is reported that half of the
10 million people in Belorussia live in contaminated areas. Some
estimates of adults and children doomed to be killed and maimed
by cancer and mutations run in the millions. If nuclear power
continues, there will be other "Chernobyls" scattered
around the world, perhaps more devastating. The Chernobyl accident
demonstrates the devastation which could happen with a nuclear
accident near a large city. The nuclear business, here and abroad, has a record
of willful and careless radiation exposure and killing of unaware
people since the beginning: its miners from radon gas, its Hanford
"down-winders", victims of Chernobyl in the Ukraine,
the SL-1 reactor in Idaho. Even "successful" reactors are intolerable.
Reactors produce radioactive pollution. They use uranium and make
plutonium. Both are radioactive, chemically poisonous heavy metals.
Plutonium, a nuclear bomb material, is also the world’s
most radioactively lethal material. A power reactor at the end
of its life has manufactured lethal radioactive products equivalent
to those from several thousand nuclear bombs. We as a society
cannot afford, even if we knew how, the cleanup of these radioactive
messes. Nuclear power, with its lethal radioactive poisons, pollutes
"forever", in new, more insidious, more intransigent
ways than any other form of energy.
* A. Stanley Thompson, 1910
Monroe Street, Eugene, OR 97405, November 19, 1997. Telephone:
541-683-2332.
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