Clean Nuclear Energy? No such thing…

(There are interesting links at the bottom)

Here is another perfect example of what once was “preached” as the new horizon in energy. A brave new world. Touted once as the way to go for the future of electricity, it has proven once again it can’t be trusted or used safely over time. Does it produce clean and efficient electricity? I guess so but the lightning in the bottle can’t be tamed or remain caged forever. So is it worth it? Our leaders tell it is but the facts are in the pudding. So what if it produces electricity for 30 or 40 years without incidents? It only takes one incident to change the landscape for ever. In the last 30 years we’ve had three nuclear accidents that either lead to calamity or almost lead there. Even small accidents can lead to the poisoning of the land and the people around it.

Let’s go back to March 28, 1979. Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. A stuck valve and the nuclear reactor almost went into meltdown. It also released an unknown amount of radioactive material into air. Was a major disaster averted? Yes but barely. The clean up from the accident took from 1979 until 1993 and cost over a billion dollars…

Fast forward to April 26, 1986. Ukraine.The  Chernobyl Nuclear power plant. During a routine system check all hell broke lose. The reactor melted down and exploded and sent radioactive fuel and core materials into the air. Whole cities had to be evacuated. Evacuated as in “Leave now’…”Take nothing with you”so here we are almost 30 years later and Russia has entire cities frozen in time. The people sent in to fight the fires at the reactor were not aware they were exposing themselves to deadly radiation levels. Radioactive rainfall fell on other Countries. The radiation in the clouds traveled around the world…Today the perimeter keeps getting larger and larger. It is said that some places the half life of the radiation is 24,000 years.So to quote the 1968 movie “The Planet of the Apes” we have created a forbidden zone.. So mankind has basically poisoned the land for hundreds of generations to come. Today the reactor is encased in concrete. It’s a temporary fix until someone else in the future can figure out what to do with it…

And last  on our list is the Fukushima nuclear plant. March 11, 2011. Rocked by an earthquake and hit directly by a tsunami,  This one was a natural disaster but a deadly one too. This thing is of like nothing we have seen before and it continues to dump radioactive water into Japan’s ground water effecting them and dumping contaminated water into the sea effecting “EVERYONE”. The situation is not even under control as of yet and the people in charge are basically trying to balance a pencil on a breath of air. Once slip and its all gone…

All these plants were built by “Modern Men”. “Extremely knowledgeable Men”. “Nuclear “Educated Men” but still things went wrong… And now Iran is making uranium supposedly for power for it’s people…

I realize the genie is out of the bottle but it’s too big to contain. We need to put the monster back in the bottle…There has got to be something out there that is cheaper and not so harmful if  “everything goes to hell”

I don’t have the answers but I can clearly see we have a problem…Opinions welcome at submit@kickacts.com

chuck

Here is the first link:

This lady had permission to travel through the vast waste land of Chernobyl’s legacy. She has went back for several years now. Well worth the read and has plenty of photographs too. Read all of it…

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/chapter1.html

To see the graveyard of all the equipment used to trying to put out the fire at Chernobyl go here. Interesting note though. Despite all the equipment still holding high radiation levels people continue to still equipment and parts from the graveyard.

http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?6742-Chernobyl-vehicle-graveyard