Clear and Present Danger
Perhaps the current situation has not been clear with all the secrecy, lies, deceit and hypocrisy surrounding the nuclear industry, but after reading this excellent work, there remains a clear and present danger.
As highlighted by Cooke, the nuclear industry is not safe. The big items, Chernobyl and TMI are history (although Counterpunch has run a recent series of articles reviewing the seriousness of the TMI incident) and the cover-up of hundreds and hundreds of other incidents is ongoing and pervasive. No nuclear reactor site is safe: either within its own design and safety features that continually have proven to not be fail-safe and requiring "intuitive" responses when incidents go beyond the training manual; nor from the lack of security on the site of nuclear waste and nuclear materials transportation.
Waste management for the industry is essentially non-existent. Yucca Mountain is temporarily off the map again and there are no alternatives, so thousands and thousands of kilograms of nuclear waste – both spent fuel and highly radioactive plant components and waste materials – lie around the country. Other countries are in the same position, waiting for some form of 'accident' as the storage areas are exposed and continually under threat by the radioactivity itself. Amazingly – and I am not amazed too easily in my personal cynicism, and I should have known this – radioactive steel and radioactive sludges, dried and powdered – have been "recycled" into commercial steel and cement products. And anyone reading the current war descriptions in the Middle East should know that a kind of nuclear war is already ongoing as the armaments used in Iraq and Afghanistan contain depleted uranium – another strategic form of "recycling" uranium waste, regardless of consequences to human health.
Considering the number of nuclear tests – hundreds of above ground tests in the 1950s and 1960s – the whole world is irradiated with the long-term contaminants of the industry. Underground tests are marginally better, but venting leaks and radiation seeping into aquifers and water tables provide other long term health threats.
The future
It goes on. This is possibly one of the most important books that I have come across for all spectrums of interest, from the military, through government secrecy and control, for the environment, for the 'business' of greening nuclear energy. It should be read by anyone involved with any of these interests. It is readily accessible to the lay reader, and even the politicians should be able to understand it, but whether they can break away from their corporate financial obligations to do anything about it other than provide more lip service is questionable.
If we are to have a future without the threat of nuclear war or serious nuclear accident, and if public access to good information, and not secrecy and deceit, is key, then In Mortal Hands is the place to start.
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