The Chernobyl nuclear power station rendered this city uninhabitable for centuries. The power station looms on the horizon, 2.5 kilometers away. Photo by Phil Coones.
This is Pripyat, it was a beautiful modern city. Streets were lined with rose gardens.
The people were prosperous. They do not need electricity any more.
The documentary movie "Chernobyl Heart" showed gruesome birth defects in children in the general vicinity. Doctors stated that decades after the 1968 accident, only 15 to 20 percent of the children are healthy.
The nuclear power lobby has downplayed the true harm caused by this disaster. Then they said an accident this bad could not happen here because American plants have containment structures whereas Chernobyl did not. Actually, Chernobyl did have a containment structure. It was different than American designs but it was rated for a much higher pressure than some American nuclear plants. Other areas of our nuclear plants which are very vulnerable do not have any containment structure. An accident or a terrorist attack on the spent fuel pools at American plants could cause a disaster as bad or worse than Chernobyl, denials notwithstanding.
JUNK SCIENCE
Those who don't want to look closely at nuclear power have underplayed the poisoning of our planet by radioactivity.
Many have a sinister conflict of interest.
The harm to humans from nuclear plant radiation is well-documented. The Radiation and Public Health Project (609-399-4343)
demonstrated that when seven nuclear power plants closed, the health status of children improved in the areas surrounding the plants. Leukemia death rates in the U.S. rose sharply vs. the national trend. Similar results were reported around the world.
"Nonsense" say nuclear promoters; "that is junk science" - a term of opprobrium first used to ridicule claims that smoking tobacco is dangerous. This term is now applied to findings about global warming and other environmental problems. Every honest investigation of radioactive contamination by highly qualified scientists has been labeled junk science. Here are a few examples.
* In the 1950's, Alice Stewart was persecuted when she proved that there is no such thing as an absolutely safe dose of radiation from
X-rays. Further proof resulted in reducing exposure in newer machines and introducing precautions.
* Dr. John W. Gofman was forced to resign from his position of associate director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory when he found that the rules for allowed exposure from nuclear plants were damaging. This is a man with several discoveries, and who won a top award for medical research. His books on the medical effects of radiation on human health are classics.
* Radiologist Dr. Ernest Sternglass invented devices for the early development of nuclear energy. When he discovered that official reports of exposure were false, he was smeared. Warehouse copies of his book "Secret Fallout", documenting real junk science by the nuclear industry were destroyed.
* A superb study of the effect of exposure to workers at Hanford by Dr. Thomas Mancuso was shelved because nuclear advocates did not like the results. Mancuso pioneered the science of health physics. To prevent more unwelcome findings, he was forced to take early retirement.
* Karl Z. Morgan, director of health physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was muzzled, forbidden to present his findings at a conference.
* Gordon McLeod, director of the Pennsylvania Department of Health was fired when he protested the falsification of health data from the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident.
* Independent readings by radiation chemist Dr. Chauncy Kepford found extremely high radioactivity readings 25 miles downwind of the stricken Three Mile Island plant. There were no official meters to take readings near his measurements. Officials don't want to know that much more was released from that partial melt-down than they will ever admit. Kepford was fired from his teaching position at Pennsylvania State College.
* Robert Rowen was fired from the Humboldt nuclear plant for protesting the fixing of radiation meters. I met another man who was fired when he refused to falsify emission data at the Millstone plant in Connecticut. Millstone leaked so badly that it produced a level of fallout like the fallout from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. There was a 58 percent increase in cancer downwind of Millstone over a five-year period. This consequence was dubbed "junk science" of course.
HIGH STAKES GAME
The horror of nuclear weapons programs by nuclear nations made it imperative to put a friendly face on nuclear technology. With multi-billion-billlion dollar subsidies up for grabs, anyone who threatened boondoggles has been censored or persecuted. There are many more people than those mentioned, who have been repressed.
Before he resigned from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Peter Bradford said, "The first casualty of nuclear power was the truth". He said, "the history of nuclear power is a history of silenced concerns, rigged studies, and suppressed scientists".
People who howl the term junk science whenever honest investigations expose the truth are the same ones who have discovered a new law of physics. According to them, when you have a nuclear accident, the wind stops blowing. They are satisfied with a mere 10-mile evacuation zone around a nuclear plant.
They refuse to accept full responsibility for the potential harm they foist on everyone else in the event of another nuclear power accident.
They need the Price Anderson Act that protects their property rights at everyone else's expense. No other energy source needs this. Their claims violate the most elementary principles of physics, engineering, common sense and decency.
Their actions are not science at all. Science is an error-correcting process. They corrupt this process when their subsidies are threatened.
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Video - Energy Matters - part 1 - El Sid on this video CHERNOBYL: UPDATED CONSEQUENCES OF THE CATASTROPHE FOR PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment is written by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko. The senior author, Dr. Alexey Yablokov was State Councilor for Environment and Health under Yeltsin and a member of the Russian Academy of Science - since then he receives no support. Yablokov is an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy Art and Science (Boston.) Dr. Vassily Nesterenko, head of the Ukrainian Nuclear establishment at the time of the accident, flew over the burning reactor and took the only measurements. In August 2009, he died as a result of radiation damage, but earlier, with help from Andrei Sakarov, he was able to establish BELRAD to help children of the area. Dr. Alexey Nesterenko is a biologist/ ecologist based in Minsk, Belarus. Dr. Sherman-Nevinger (consulting editor) is a physician and toxicologist and adjunct professor in the Environmental Research Center at Western Michigan University. The authors abstracted data from more than 5000 published articles and studies, mostly available only in Slavic languages and not available to those outside of the former Soviet Union or Eastern bloc countries. The findings are by those who witnessed first-hand the effects of Chernobyl. This book is in contrast to findings by the World Health Organization (WHO), International Atomic energy Agency (IAEA) and (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) who based their findings on some 300 western research papers, and who found little of concern about the fallout from Chernobyl. The explosion of the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 was hundreds of times larger than the radioactive contamination from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the most apparent human and environmental damage occurred, and continues to occur, in the Ukraine, Belarus and European Russia, more than 50 percent of the total radioactivity spread across the entire northern hemisphere, contaminating some 400 million people. Of life systems that were studied – humans, voles, livestock, birds, fish, plants, mushrooms, bacteria, viruses, etc., with few exceptions, were changed by radioactive fallout, many irreversibly. Increased cancer incidence is not the only observed adverse effect from the Chernobyl fallout – noted also are birth defects, pregnancy losses, accelerated aging, brain damage, heart, endocrine, kidney, gastrointestinal and lung diseases, and cataracts among the young. Children have been most seriously affected – before the radioactive Chernobyl releases, 80% of children were deemed healthy, now in some areas, only 20% of children are considered healthy. Many have poor development, learning disabilities, and endocrine abnormalities. Below is the New York Academy of Sciences site for the book: http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1
Video - Energy Matters - part 2 - El Sid on this video
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The nuclear club has incessantly boasted that a Chernobyl accident could never happen in the USA because Chernobyl did not have a containment structure. This is false. It did have one, with a higher pressure rating than some American nukes.
Also, an attack on an American spent fuel rod storage could cause a disaster worse than Chernobyl.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT RADIOACTIVITY
Radiation and Public Health Project - http://www.Radiation.org
OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES
Natural Resources Defense Council - http://www.nrdc.org/
Union of Concerned Scientists - http://www.ucsusa.org/
Nuclear Information and Resource Service - http://www.nirs.org/
Sierra Club - http://www.Sierra Club.org/
Beyond Nuclear - http://www.beyondnuclear.org/
Wiser Earth - http://www.wiserearth.org/
Riverkeeper - http://www.riverkeeper.org/
Unplug Salem - http://www.unplugsalem.org/
Solar Discounts from group purchashing - http://www.1bog.org/
Environmental Defense Fund - http://www.fightglobalwarming.org/
League of Conservation Voters - www.lcv.org
Health Data from Dr. Janette Sherman - http://www.janettesherman.com
Includes comprehensive book on total effects of the Chernobyl disaster
PROGRESSIVE RESOURCES
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