Thirty years after Three Mile Island
New Nukes? No Way.
I got a phone call from Philadelphia soon after the near-meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. My friend asked if I could host a family that was leaving the accident area. I told him I lived in a four-room attic apartment with my kids, but I could find them another location.
This was March 28, 1979, thirty years ago this weekend. Today the nuclear industry is trying to claw its way out of the grave. Using the current economic crisis to sneak back onto the public payroll, the industry hopes we won’t remember that commercial nuclear power is a failed, dangerous, and outrageously expensive technology.
Three Mile Island was a frightening event. No amount of industry or government spin can make its consequences disappear. As energy activist Harvey Wasserman reports, the radioactive gas releases at TMI may have been 100 times what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC, the federal “watchdog” agency) claimed. There has been unexplained death and disease of the local wild animals and farm livestock. The infant mortality rate tripled in nearby Harrisburg. The nuke’s owners paid out millions in damages to area residents whose children were born with genetic damage and other problems. Those who received the payouts had to sign confidentiality agreements.
But since the nuke builders and their government defenders deny the danger of the Unit Two core meltdown, independent researchers and their troubling findings have been largely ignored. Except, of course, by the folks in and around the plants. They voted 3 to 1 in a referendum to shut down TMI’s other unit, and 2400 families have filed a class action lawsuit to recover the damages they have suffered.
What’s wrong with nukes? Here’s the short version: The insurance industry won’t insure them, too risky. The financial industry won’t give them construction money, and refused loans even before the recent crash.
There is no place to store the dangerous waste, and that shit is really piling up.
What is called the “nuclear fuel cycle” simply produces tons of fossil fuel pollution in the mining, milling and shipping of uranium (not to mention the deaths of miners who are contract lung cancer from the radon gas produced by the process). Uranium fuel is limited, just like coal and gas reserves are.
And nukes are easy terrorist targets. The planes that flew into the World Trade Center passed over New York’s Indian Point nuclear power plant with its stored waste. The connection between “peaceful” nuclear power and the development of nuclear weapons is one of the major threats to the world (ask Iran).
After more than 50 years of commercial nuclear power in the United States, the fundamental problems have still not been solved.
“Where there’s dirty power, there’s dirty players”
There are currently applications in to the NRC to build 26 more nukes. As the industry gears up to revive its image, so has the re-energized peoples’ movement for safe and clean energy. Activists have three times defeated the nuke industry’s attempt to give the industry $50 Billion in loan guarantees for the construction of new nuclear plants, but so far most of the radioactive pork has been eliminated.
In the tradition of the 1970-80s direct action campaign of the Clamshell Alliance to stop the Seabrook nuke, young climate change activists converged on Washington, D.C. this past March 2nd to shut down the power plant that heats the Capitol Building. The target is a coal-fired plant, but the activists have rejected nuclear power as an alternative to dirty coal’s contribution to global warming. And this weekend at the G20 meeting, thousands will march for “jobs, justice, and climate”, linking the need for safe affordable energy with the fight for economic justice.
Radioactive Nutmeggers
Here in Connecticut you have to ask: are we in danger today? Our state used to have four operating nuclear power plants. Today, Millstone 2 and 3 in Waterford are the two nukes that still operate in our back yard. The catastrophic cost of a meltdown at those plants could cause 40,000 early fatalities, 71,000 cancer deaths, cost $300 billion in cleanup and healthcare and leave large parts of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Long Island uninhabitable.
Higher than normal uranium levels in the drinking water found in Madison’s public schools last November. Massive killoffs of fish each year are attributed to Millstone’s antiquated cooling system. And Millstone’s home, New London County, has the highest cancer rate for females in the state of Connecticut, according to a March, 2006 study by the Connecticut Tumor Registry.
A little research goes a long way, so check out Time Magazine (March 4, 1996) cover story to read their chilling expose of Millstone dangers and industry cover ups.
I flew over Three Mile Island in 1981 exactly two years after the TMI accident on my way to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Along with other labor activists I had helped organize the first trade union conference against nukes. A march of 15,000 union members that weekend challenged what was then the AFL-CIO’s position that “rapid development of nuclear power is a must without which the nation’s economy would falter.”
The economy is faltering, for sure. But bringing nukes back into the mix will only add to the problem.
