Since nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years 4 we are dumping our energy problems on future generations instead of using the benign methods of creating energy which are available to us.
The currently favoured "solution' of burying the waste in bedrock and sealing off access for ever is desperate and irresponsible.
The plants and waste
deposit storage are vulnerable to terrorist attack
Because of their destructive potential nuclear power stations are a major target for terrorists. The 9/11 atrocity would be tiny by comparison. If a large plane were flown into a nuclear power station the disaster would be immeasurably worse than Chernobyl.
John Large, an
international expert on nuclear power, has said that if a plane was flown into
the nuclear waste storage tanks at Sellafield the whole of the English Midlands
could be catastrophically contaminated.
Safety studies of Sellafield carried out for local authorities tell us that
a direct hit by a passenger jet on the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant
would contaminate Britain with two and a half times more radioactivity than the
amount that escaped during the Chernobyl disaster 5 .
The studies also inform us that up to 2,646lb of the highly radioactive and
long-lasting isotope caesium-137 would be released into the atmosphere,
contaminating Britain, Ireland, continental Europe and beyond, making swathes
of the country uninhabitable and causing more than two million cancers.
In the light of the twin towers atrocity this is a completely unacceptable
risk.
They epitomise the
centralisation of power
There is a burgeoning awareness among citizens that they are more free and more in control of their lives if facilities and decision-making occur at local level; that Big Government should only control those matters which cannot be dealt with locally. Nuclear power is the ultimate way of centralising power, putting it in the hands of experts, multi-national corporations and Big Government. In complete contrast to this, benign methods of supplying power such as wind and water turbines, solar energy, and heat pumps can be in the control of local communities and even, for some provisions, households.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
