I would love to think that, in writing about the foolishness of nuclear power, I am preaching to the crowd.<\/p>\n
It’s not like that, though.<\/p>\n
When one reads about all the civilian nuclear accidents since 1950<\/a>, it is sobering indeed.\u00a0 How eerie, too, to read all the nuclear apologists claiming that nuclear power’s safety<\/a> is unassailable and that environmentalists have exaggerated the risks.\u00a0 “We can build the plants to be so safe that — ” well, there really is no way to end that sentence truthfully.\u00a0 Certainly, we can build nuclear reactors that are encased in thirty feet of stainless steel.\u00a0 We can place them in places where there has never been an earthquake, a volcano, a flood.\u00a0 Problem is, history shows that every defense is eventually challenged by a superior offense.\u00a0 Hence, oops!<\/em> on the thirty feet of stainless steel.\u00a0\u00a0 Oops!<\/em> on the totally unexpected earthquake.\u00a0 Oops!<\/em> on the totally unexpected and criminal ‘human error’.<\/p>\n What the proponents of nuclear power don’t seem to get is the simple truth that if<\/strong> something can go wrong, it will<\/strong>.\u00a0 In this way, nuclear power is a threat unlike anything else on Earth.\u00a0 A coal mine explosion will not contaminate 1,000 square miles as happened in Chernobyl<\/a>.\u00a0 Nor will an oil spill, as disastrous as that is — and I’m thinking about the BP disaster in the Gulf.\u00a0 It’s all small potatoes compared to the potential irradiation of a huge area, making it uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years.\u00a0 Imagine that: tens of thousands of years.\u00a0 There is nowhere on this planet that Nature has made off-limits for that long.\u00a0 You might not want to be in the pyroclastic flow from a volcano, but just wait a year or so and it’s fine.\u00a0 Not so Chernobyl.<\/p>\n If anything good will come out of the mind-boggling disaster in Japan, it would be finally putting to rest any notion of the safety of nuclear energy.\u00a0 It simply cannot be made safe, when the stakes are tens of thousands of years.<\/p>\n