Nuclear Power Not Clean, Green, or Safe

I n all the annals of spin, few statements are as misleading as Vice President Cheney’s that the nuclear industry operates “efficiently, safely, and with no discharge of greenhouse gases or emissions,” or President Bush’s claim America’s 103 nuclear plants operate “without producing a single pound of air pollution or greenhouse gases.” 

Even as the White House refuses to concede global warming is really happening, it touts nuclear power as the answer to it, as if the Administration was an arm of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) whose advertisements declare, “Kids today are part of the most energy-intensive generation in history. They demand lots of electricity. And they deserve clean air.” 

In reality, not only are vast amounts of fossil fuels burned to mine and refine the uranium for nuclear power reactors, polluting the atmosphere, but those plants are allowed “to emit hundreds of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year,” Helen Caldicott points out in her authoritative book Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer. 

What’s more, the thousands of tons of solid radioactive waste accumulating in the cooling pools next to those plants contain “extremely toxic elements that will inevitably pollute the environment and human food chains, a legacy that will lead to epidemics of cancer, leukemia, and genetic disease in populations living near nuclear power plants or radioactive waste facilities for many generations to come,” Caldicott writes. Countless Americans are already dead or dying as a result of those nuclear plants. 

Over half of the nation’s uranium deposits lie under Navajo and Pueblo and and at least one in five tribal members recruited to mine the ore were exposed to radioactive gas radon 220 and “have died and are continuing to die of lung cancer,” Caldicott writes. 

As for uranium tailings discarded in the extraction process, 265 million tons of it have been left to pollute the Southwest, even though they contain radioactive thorium. At the same time, uranium 238, also known as “depleted uranium,”(DU) a nuclear plant biproduct, “is lying around in thousands of leaking, disintegrating barrels” at enrichment facilites in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky where ground water is too polluted to drink. 

Fuel rods at every nuclear plant leak radioactive gases or are routinely vented into the atmosphere by plant operators. “Although the nuclear industry claims it is ‘emission’ free, in fact it is collectively releasing millions of curies annually,” Caldicott reports. 

S ince the Three Mile Island (TMI) meltdown on March 28, 1979, some 2,000 Harrisburg area residents settled sickness claims with General Public Utilities Corp. and Metropolitan Edison Co., the owners of TMI. Area residents’ symptoms included nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from the nose, a metallic taste in the mouth, hair loss, and red skin rash, typical of acute radiation sickness when people are exposed to wholebody doses of radiation around 100 rads. 

David Lochbaum, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, believes nuclear plant safety standards are lacking and predicted another nuclear catastrophe in the near future, stating, “It’s not if but when.” Not only are such plants unsafe but the spent fuel is often hauled long distances through cities to waste storage facilities where it will have to be guarded for an estimated 240,000 years. 

In the 2005 Energy Bill, Congress allocated $13 billion in subsidies to the nuclear power industry. Between 1948 and 1998, the U.S. government subsidized the industry with $70-billion of taxpayer monies for research and development— corporate welfare pure and simple. 

About 17 million people live within a 50 mile radius of the two Indian Point reactors in Buchanan, New York, 35 miles from Manhattan. Suicidal terrorists, Caldicott noted, could disrupt the plant’s electricity supply by ramming explosives into their Hudson River intake pipes. Over time, the subsequent meltdown could claim an estimated 518,000 lives. 

Caldicott points out there are truly green and clean alternative sources to nuclear power. She refers to the American plains as “the Saudi Arabia of wind,” where readily available rural land in several Dakota counties alone “could produce twice the amount of electricity that the United States currently consumes.” Now that sounds clean, green, and safe.