It seems even greenies are now saying it is the "least worst" option. And a possible 'band-aid' solution to help us immediately deal with the Greenhouse Gases.
Having grown up not far from the first British nuclear reactor at Sellafield (explains a lot of things about him I hear you say), I am mindful that I am one of the few people who have actual experience....well one of 100000 maybe. But I do keep my ear to the ground.
The Sellafield experience has been a litany of accidents, some of which are known and some not. Only now are we bold enough to check them with prosecution (see here)
But there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence which is not fully appreciated:
- there is a belief in my family that the incidences of leukemia in Western Cumbria is higher than it should be (see for example this article and its equivocal conclusion:
CONCLUSIONS--During 1963-83 and 1984-90 the incidence of malignant disease, particularly lymphoid leukaemia and non-Hodgkin lymphomas, in young people aged 0-24 in Seascale was higher than would be expected on the basis of either national rates or those for the surrounding areas. Although this increased risk is unlikely to be due to chance, the reasons for it are still unknown.
- I married a girl once whose father was dairy farmer in Moresby outside Whitehaven and he told me that on numerous occasions in the 50s and 60s massive quantities of milk were dumped because there had been contamination issues.
- for a long time in the 70s and 80s the West Cumbrian coastline was regarded as unsafe for swimmers because of waste pumped into the Irish Sea. (when we were children we used to find orange floating buoys which if you returned them to their owner you would get a pound for....we used to think all our Christmases had come....of course they were actually detecting the flow of radioactive waste...so they were telling us we were swimming in poison!)
What concerns me is that we are more cautious now because we know we need to be. The same will be true in 50 years time...we will realise we should have been more careful then...only it's too late.
2 comments:
I think you may wish to update your knowledge before entering into this debate...
It is true that I would indeed like to "update my knowledge"(which is one reason why the original post is so tentative...and I did qualify my comments as anecdotal)
But it is also clear that a lot of comment about the disposal of nuclear waste, for example, is now being dismissed as "the least worst"(the point of my post)because we are overshadowed by the looming crisis to do with Greenhouse gases.
It doesn't seem to me that the imminence of another crisis is reason to say that we should therefore dismiss our caution about nuclear energy.
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