A Disastrous Combination

From cradle to grave, indigenous peoples worldwide have born the brunt of nuclear contamination and the lethal diseases that accompany the nuclear power industry. From mining uranium to dumping nuclear waste, tribal communities in North America, Southern Africa and Australia have suffered most from radioactive land, air and water, while nuclear promoters on Wall Street bask in the sunshine of government-subsidized financing.

Yet, while nuclear power has never produced a single sustainable watt of energy, the US and Canada continue to pursue this boondoggle as though Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island never happened. Never mind that the largest Superfund site at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation remains uncontainable with no viable waste repository on the horizon; when there’s free money from the US Treasury on the table, why worry about the next billion years of carcinogenic crisis?

In 2008, the state of the art nuclear reactors in France — the poster child for a nuclear power renaissance in the US — started leaking. Then, a few years later, Fukushima melted down. Now, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US has started fast-tracking nuclear plants in Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina.

When we defeated the nuclear power industry in Washington state in the 1970s, the well-documented cancers from living near nuclear plants was a strong argument against this madness, but the most interesting fact unearthed was after partially built plants were already in mothballs. Contractors were shown to have falsified records to conceal the fact that they had omitted reinforcing steel in order to cut costs and increase profits.

No matter how you cut it, human greed and nuclear power are a disastrous combination–now, and for the next four and a half billion years.