Week of June 26, 2008, Issue #662
FRONT
Well, Well, Well - Health risks from radiation make nuclear power an unsafe option
CONNIE HOWARD / health@vueweekly.com
Although those in the industry have recently been pulling out all the stops to convince us otherwise, nuclear power makes little economic or environmental sense, and even less health sense. Can you tell I’ve been reading nuclear guru Dr Helen Caldicott?
The politicians drafting energy bills are of course both bought and informed by industry representatives, and though it is advertised and presented as green and safe, that isn’t likely how the almost 10 000 thyroid cancer victims of Chernobyl would describe it.
Nor is “safe” exactly how residents of Port Hope Ontario would choose to describe the industry. Pat McNamara says the radioactive waste contaminating their air, water and soil has resulted in four times the expected numbers of brain cancers in children, twice the provincial rate of female brain cancers and five times the provincial numbers of nasal cancers. Radon tests that found kindergarten classrooms to have 125 times the permissible levels of radon are what turned him into a researcher and anti-nuclear activist, and I’m guessing that even an industry insider would experience some kind of fundamental change of outlook in the face of those realities for his or her family.
Then there are moms living near leaky waste sites giving birth to babies with birth defects, uranium miners living with leukemia, lung and bone cancers and countless victims of the Gulf Wars, both of which have in essence been nuclear wars. (Depleted uranium weapons burst into flame on impact and then disintegrate into radioactive mist with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.)
The thing is that all radiation is cumulative, and all radiation has the power to mutate our genetic code. Spent fuel rods, which if exposed to air for more than a few hours combust and spew highly toxic radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere, are “hot” for 10 000 years. Other nuclear waste, for which we have yet to figure out a safe and long-term solution, seeps into our water and soil, where it becomes part of the food chain, some of which will live on for the rest of time.
How is that a risk anyone would agree to in their back yard? But then, I don’t suppose those arguing in favour of nuclear power very often have to deal with it in their back yards. It tends to end up in the back yards of other, less powerful groups of people in the Northwest Territories, northern Saskatchewan or northern Ontario.
Aside from the fact that nobody wants it in their own backyard, nuclear power holds very little potential to combat climate change. Caldicott point out that even hundreds of new nuclear plants and elimination of all fossil source forms of energy would achieve only a fraction of the carbon reductions we need to stabilize atmospheric CO2, that high-grade uranium supplies are very limited and that there is a point at which uranium grades become so low that the energy cost is greater than the energy yielded by the reactor. All of which will ultimately leave us having to harness renewable energy sources anyhow.
Tapping just 20 per cent of the world’s wind energy alone could provide all our electricity needs according to researchers Christina Archer and Mark Jacobson of Stanford University. So why not harness renewable energy sooner rather than later, and stop the devastating health repercussions that nuclear power always leaves in its wake?
Or we could keep listening to the wrong people, just like we have on other health fronts, and see how long it takes to tire of our toxic and illness-riddled existence. Plutonium, one of the 200 radioactive materials that comprise nuclear waste, wasn’t named after the Greek god of hell for no reason—just the tiniest and most microscopic exposure causes lung cancer, bone cancer, leukemia, liver cancer and birth defects, and it remains radioactive for 500 000 years. All of which is good business for Pharma of course, at least until they run out of new drug options. V
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