Fukushima… Wasn’t that a movie about… no… hmmm….
The day after the disastrous level-nine earthquake that triggered the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear crisis, March 12, an Israeli expert on air quality and poisoning, Professor Menachem Luria, told Israeli Channel 2: “From what we can gather, this disaster is even more dangerous than Chernobyl.”
At the time, his was a minority opinion in the scientific community; very few believed that a nuclear accident as bad as the 1986 meltdown in Ukraine would occur again. “I think that’s basically impossible,” said James Stubbins, an expert at the University of Illinois, and many others agreed.
Yet, as we are now slowly coming to realize, Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl. In a revealing recent feature article published by al-Jazeera, Dahr Jamail conveys the comments of Arnold Gundersen, a senior former nuclear industry executive in the United States.
“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Gundersen asserts. “We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl … The data I’m seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man’s-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can’t clean all this up.”
#61. Because coal will ultimately be the death of us. It’s worse than nuclear, in the aggregate, from what I hear.
It is. If you were to do a soil survey around nuclear power plants and then around coal plants (they’ve been done, I helped do some), you would find the radiation level at the lignite powered plants is multiple times the level from around nuclear power plants. Lignite gives off radiation when burned.
Very bad.
They’ve come a long way but they still aren’t as clean as properly running NPP.
>the cost of renewables 30 years from now. But, you can be sure it will be much lower than now.
Then better to wait 30 years and save money.
#60 – 30 years from now is not now. Now is what matters. Americans must have 4×4’s and SUVs – not little go-karts. Americans must hafve big houses and urban sprawl. Americans must have long drives on freeways in their 4×4’s and SUVs. This is why the human race exists.
Research into alternate power is fantastic. Forcing us to lower our lifestyle by switching over prematurely is evil.
MikeN,
That is arguable one of the stupidest things I have read today. The reason it will be cheaper in the future is because of research and product development TODAY. (If you were shooting for sarcasm the statement is even more stupid.)