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Is nuclear power really the answer?
There was an earthquake in Japan this morning which caused damage to a nuclear power plant there. The Associated Press article included this statement:
"The quake triggered a fire in an electrical transformer and also caused a leak of radioactive water at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world's largest in terms of electricity output.
The leak was not announced until the evening, many hours after the quake. That fed fresh concerns about the safety of Japan's 55 nuclear reactors, which supply 30 percent of the quake-prone country's electricity and have suffered a long string of accidents and cover-ups."
I've noticed a number of posts here and comments elsewhere saying the only answer to global warming is nuclear power. But to me that seems like leaping from the frying pan into the fire. Have people already forgotten Chernobyl and Three Mile Island? Everyone says "It's safer now." Then what happened in Japan?
I share your concern. The US nuclear industry also has a long history of accidents and coverups. The Department of Energy has a list of literally thousands of incidents that could have been extremely dangerous. People have been killed. One accident came within hours of making the city of Detroit permanently uninhabitable. We still have no good idea of how to store safely waste which remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.
People say "There's no alternative." Maybe. We could do a tremendous amount right now with conservation, higher automobile mileage standards, mandatory fluorescent lighting, wind energy, etc. And we sometimes forget that the government spent billions of dollars developing nuclear energy, and continues to subsidize it. What if we took the $500 billion we spent in Iraq and used it for a Manhattan Project style crash program to develop better solar energy, tidal energy, geothermal and maybe some we haven't even though of. If we limit ourselves only to the approaches that are guaranteed to make a profit for large corporations, we're already doomed.
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UNICEF: Water supply and hygiene issues in Haiti
