Making You Pay for the Next Chernobyl ... in Advance!

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/


New Reactors, Same Old Risks


Are you ready to pay for the next Chernobyls---in advance? Are you willing to have nuclear power prevent a solution to the climate crisis?

Twenty-two years ago today, an apocalyptic cloud rose up from Unit Four, in the heart of the Ukraine. For the next few hundred generations, you and your progeny will breathe its radioactive fallout, which was thousands of times worse than that released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Conservative estimates of Chernobyl’s financial costs are in the $500 billion range. In downwind regions festering with cancer and birth-defected children, the ultimate death toll is impossible to estimate.

-snip-

Not one of the 104 US reactors now licensed to operate, and not one of the new ones being hyped, can get insurance from private sources against another Chernobyl.

For a half-century---since passage of the 1957 Price-Anderson Act---your tax dollars have protected the reactor owners. Now they want you on the hook for another century or so.

-snip-

Check out your homeowners’ insurance policy for its specific exclusions against liability for reactor-related radiation.

With an old reactor or new, a Chernobyl here will bankrupt the government…and YOU.

-snip-

Chernobyl proved that atomic energy’s most significant ability---by terror or error---is to spread radiation over large chunks of the Earth. While blocking the real solutions to climate chaos, nukes can bankrupt entire nations in a single moment. They can inflict birth defects and cancer on millions of humans with a single cloud.

Twenty-two years after, it’s time to ask the ultimate question about the last reactor catastrophe: In money, body and soul, do you really want to pay for the next ones?
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I don't

[Donnachaidh]

1. People need to be reminded of Three Mile Island

We came THATCLOSE to having the same thing happen. My stepfather, who worked in the industry inspecting, refused to go there after he had been informed of the *problems* he would be dealing with.

But we have a lot of young, uninformed people raising the flag for more nuclear power. Even Obama. With all the incompetence we have in this country, we're going to start playing with matches as deadly as this?

[spoony]

2. No we didn't.

TMI, like all US reactors, had/has a containment building far, far superiour to anything Chernobyl had (what they did have was containment in name only). TMI was not a dodged bullet. There was a meltdown. It was contained. No one died.