Nuclear Energy: Not A Solution #3

The Nuclear Industry has spent gobs of money advertising, lobbying, propaganda and recreating the history of an industry fraught with problems, missteps, accidents and waste for which no solution exists.

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The success of those industry investments was visible in the most recent Presidential election, promoting a fairy tale that doesn't exist.

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Supporters of the nuclear fallacy often point to the myths of Three Mile Island as reason to promote safety publicly.

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The 30th Anniversary of the catastrophe just passed and the promoters would have you believe "All is well."

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It was April Fool's Day, 1979 -- 30 years ago this week -- when Randall Thompson first set foot inside the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa. Just four days earlier, in the early morning hours of March 28, a relatively minor problem in the plant's Unit 2 reactor sparked a series of mishaps that led to the meltdown of almost half the uranium fuel and uncontrolled releases of radiation into the air and surrounding Susquehanna River.

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Today, [Randall Thompson] story about what he witnessed at Three Mile Island is being brought to the public in detail for the first time -- and his version of what happened during that time, supported by a growing body of other scientific evidence, contradicts the official U.S. government story that the Three Mile Island accident posed no threat to the public.

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Wing reanalyzed the Columbia scientists' data, looking at cancer rates before the TMI disaster to control for other possible risk factors in the 10-mile area. His peer-reviewed results, published in 1997, found positive relationships between accident dose estimates and rates of leukemia, lung cancer and all cancers. Where the Columbia study found a 30 percent average increase in lung cancer risk among one group of residents, for example, Wing found an 85 percent increase. And while the Columbia researchers found little or no increase in adult leukemias and a statistically unreliable increase in childhood cases, Wing found that people downwind during the most intense releases were eight to 10 times more likely on average than their neighbors to develop leukemia.

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Dr. Wing reflected on his findings at a symposium in Harrisburg marking the 30-year anniversary of the Three Mile Island disaster last week.

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"I believe this is very good evidence that releases were thousands of times greater than the story we've been told," he said. "As we think about the current plans to open more nuclear reactors, when we hear -- which we hear often -- that no one was harmed at Three Mile Island, we really should question that."

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The article in its entirety can be found in SouthernStudies (its lengthy, but worth reading)

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Nuclear is expensive --

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$7,500 per kilowatt to build

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That’s more than double the capital costs for solar power and three and a half times the cost for wind.

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As noted in Offshore Oil Drilling Scam ---

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Wind

is already more competitive

than electricity generated from

new nuclear and coal-fired power plants.

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