Hier een bericht dat ik gisteren las, over nucleaire energie en hoe de bevolking wordt belazerd met geruststellende verhalen aangaande deze levensgevaarlijke, zwaar milieuvervuilende energievorm (en niet alleen door de straling maar ook met de winning van uranium), peperdure, zwaar gesubsidieerde, niet te verzekeren energieopwekking:
The Nuclear Omnicide
Posted on Apr 1, 2014
By
Harvey Wasserman
The Three Mile Island nuclear power generating station shown
here in 2011 in Middletown, Pa., continues to generate electric power
with the Unit 1 reactor. TMI was the scene of the 1979 meltdown of the
Unit 2 reactor, the worst nuclear power plant disaster in the United
States. AP/Bradley C Bower
In the 35 years since the March 28, 1979, explosion and meltdown at
Three Mile Island, fierce debate has raged over whether humans were
killed there. In 1986 and 2011, Chernobyl and Fukushima joined the
argument. Whenever these disasters happen, there are those who claim
that the workers, residents and
military personnel exposed to radiation will be just fine.
Of course we know better. We humans won’t jump into a pot of boiling
water. We’re not happy when members of our species start dying around
us. But frightening new scientific findings have forced us to look at a
larger reality: the bottom-up damage that radioactive fallout may do to
the entire global ecosystem.
When it comes to our broader support systems, the corporate energy
industry counts on us to tolerate the irradiation of our fellow
creatures, those on whom we depend, and for us to sleep through the
point of no return.
Case in point is a new
Smithsonian report on Chernobyl, one of the most terrifying documents of the atomic age.
Written by Rachel Nuwer, “Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly” cites recent
field studies
in which the normal cycle of dead vegetation rotting into the soil has
been disrupted by the exploded reactor’s radioactive fallout.
“Decomposers—organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects
that drive the process of decay—have also suffered from the
contamination,” Nuwer writes. “These creatures are responsible for an
essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into
the soil.”
Put simply: The microorganisms that form the active core of our
ecological bio-cycle have apparently been zapped, leaving tree trunks,
leaves, ferns and other vegetation to sit eerily on the ground whole,
essentially in a mummified state.
Reports also indicate a significant shrinkage of the
brains of birds in the region and negative impacts on the insect and wildlife populations.
Similar findings surrounded the accident at Three Mile Island. Within
a year, a three-reporter team from the Baltimore News-American
cataloged massive radiation impacts on both wild and farm animals in the
area. The reporters and the Pennsylvania Department of Health confirmed
widespread damage to birds, bees and large kept animals such as horses, whose reproductive rate collapsed in the year after the accident.
Other reports also documented deformed vegetation and domestic
animals being born with major mutations, including a dog born with no
eyes and cats with no sense of balance.
To this day, Three Mile Island’s owners claim no humans were killed
by radiation there, an assertion hotly disputed by local downwinders.
Indeed, Dr. Alice Stewart established in 1956 that a single
X-ray to a pregnant woman
doubles the chance that her offspring will get leukemia. During the
accident at Three Mile Island, the owners crowed that the meltdown’s
radiation was equivalent “only” to a single X-ray administered to all
area residents.
Meanwhile, if the airborne fallout from Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl could do that kind of damage to both infants and the nonhuman
population on land, how is Fukushima’s continuous gusher of radioactive
water affecting the life support systems of our oceans?
In fact, samplings of 15 tuna caught off the coast of California indicate all were
contaminated with fallout from Fukushima.
Instant as always, the industry deems such levels harmless. The
obligatory comparisons to living in
Denver, flying cross country and
eating bananas automatically follow.
But what’s that radiation doing to the tuna themselves? And to the
krill, the phytoplankton, the algae, amoeba and all the other
microorganisms on which the ocean ecology depends?
Cesium and its Fukushima siblings are already
measurable
in Alaska and northwestern Canada. They’ll hit California this summer.
The corporate media will mock those parents who are certain to show up
at the beaches with radiation detectors. Concerns about the effect on
children will be
jovially dismissed. The doses will be deemed, as always, “too small to have any impact on humans.”
But reports of a “dead zone” thousands of miles into the Pacific do persist, along with
disappearances of salmon, sardines, anchovies and other ocean fauna.
Of course, atomic reactors are not the only source of radioactive
fallout. Atmospheric bomb testing from 1945 to 1963 raised background
radiation levels throughout the ecosphere. Those isotopes are still with
us.
Burning coal spews still more
radiation into our air, along with mercury and other lethal pollutants. Fracking for gas draws toxins up from the earth’s crust.
Industry apologists
say reactors can moderate the climate chaos caused by burning those
fossil fuels. But fighting global weirding with atomic power is like
trying to cure a fever with a lethal dose of X-ray.
On a warmed, poisoned planet, the synergistic impact of each new radioactive hit is multiplied. All doses are
overdoses.
In 1982, Adm. Hyman Rickover, founder of the
nuclear navy, put it this way:
"Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to
have any life on earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth
you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything.
Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on
this planet ... reduced and made it possible for some form of life to
begin, and it started in the seas. ..."
On a warmed, poisoned planet, the synergistic impact of each new radioactive hit is multiplied. All doses are
overdoses.
In 1982, Adm. Hyman Rickover, founder of the
nuclear navy, put it this way:
Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to
have any life on earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth
you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything.
Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on
this planet ... reduced and made it possible for some form of life to
begin, and it started in the seas. ...
We know from Dr. Alice Stewart the dangers of even a single X-ray to a
pregnant human. And from Dr. John Gofman, former chief medical officer
of the Atomic Energy Commission, that nuclear power is an instrument of
“premeditated mass murder.”
At Three Mile Island, the mutated vegetation, animal and human infant deaths still remain a part of the
immutable record.
Chernobyl still lacks a permanent sarcophagus, leaving the
surrounding area vulnerable to continued radiation leakage. Fukushima
daily dumps more than 300 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific.
The stacks and spigots are still gushing at more than 400 reactors
across the globe. The next disaster is already in progress.
The good news is that the same green energy technologies that can
bury nuclear power can take the fossil burners down with them. They
create jobs, profits, ecological harmony and peace. They’re on a steep
trajectory toward epic success.
As the reactor industry’s lethal isotopes gut our ecosystems, from
bottom to top, our tolerance for these “safe doses” falls to zero. We
may not fall over dead from them immediately, but the larger biospheric
clock is ticking. We need to act.
Harvey Wasserman edits Nukefree.org and wrote “Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth.”
