Chernobyl demands a REAL climate bill
By: Harvey Wasserman
April 26, 2010
This week 24 years ago, untold quantities of lethal radiation began
pouring into the atmosphere from the catastrophic explosion at
Chernobyl Unit 4. Nearly a million people have died because of it.
And on this horrific anniversary we have now seen the stumble of a
very bad climate bill. The events are directly related.
Chernobyl’s death toll has been bitterly debated.
But after nearly a quarter-century of industry denial, the New York
Academy of Sciences has published, Chernobyl: Consequences of the
Catastrophe for People and the Environment, the definitive catalog and
analysis. Drawing on some 5,000 studies, three Russian scientists have
placed the ultimate death toll at 985,000.
The authors include Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former
environmental advisor to the president of Russia; Dr. Alexey
Nesterenko, a biologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a
physicist who was, at the time of the accident, director of the
Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of
Belarus. The book has been edited by Dr. Janette Sherman, a
toxicologist expert in the health impacts of radioactivity.
As Karl Grossman has shown, Chernobyl’s death toll stretches
worldwide. Its apocalyptic cloud blanketed Europe and blew across the
northern tier of the United States. Sheep in Scotland and milk in New
England were heavily contaminated, along with countless square miles
of land and sea.
Ohio’s Davis-Besse may have come within a fraction of an inch of such
a disaster, and has again been found with potentially apocalyptic
structural flaws. Michigan’s Fermi I and the infamous Three Mile
Island Unit 2 did melt.
Now the brand new Toshiba-Westinghouse AP-1000 design has been deemed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as unable to withstand
earthquakes, hurricanes or tornadoes, and has turned up with a
critical generic flaw that could cause it to explode.
Which is where the climate bill comes in.
Widespread reports of what it contained were to be clarified with its
planned introduction on Chernobyl Day. But co-sponsor Lindsay Graham
(R-SC) abruptly withdrew, apparently amidst partisan wrangling over
immigration.
By all accounts this bill included a fossil industry wish-list, with
big money for “clean coal,” off-shore drilling, a disembowelment of
the EPA and much more. With oil fires raging at sea and miners being
buried in the coal fields, how this bill would actually solve the
climate crisis remains unclear.
What WAS clear were subsidies that John Kerry (D-MA) said would put
taxpayers on the hook for at least a dozen new reactors, and possibly
far more.
The details are temporarily moot, but the portent is not.
It’s precisely that dangerously deficient AP-1000 design that the
Obama Administration wants to fund first, for construction in Georgia.
America’s leaky fleet of 104 aging clunkers meanwhile staggers toward
disaster at places like Vermont Yankee and New York’s Indian Point,
Ohio’s Davis-Besse and California’s Diablo Canyon.
Chernobyl exploded in a remote backwater of an impoverished region.
But by official accounts from Ukraine and Belarus, it did $500 billion
in damage just there. Nowhere in the US would the property damage be
remotely that small. The near-million death toll would be a mere
fraction of how many would die here.
Nothing in any known draft of this now-in-limbo climate bill demands
private insurance against such a catastrophe. Nor does it have a
solution for what to do with 60,000 tons of high-level radioactive
waste, or thousands more yet to come.
Nor does it begin to answer the reality that every cent thrown down
the reactor rat-hole could quickly save far more energy than such a
reactor could produce — if it ever did come on line after the
seven-to-ten years it would take to license and build such a
boondoggle.
No sane attempt to save the global ecology could ever include more
money for precisely the most dangerous, destructive, dirty and
deficit-ridden energy technology ever devised.
Let’s hope this bill’s yank away from Chernobyl Day will take it to
the desperately needed safe haven of a Solartopian plan built around
renewables, conservation and efficiency.
Neither the planetary ecology nor the US economy can afford anything less.
Nothing else would deserve the label “Climate Bill.”
Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, is at
www.harveywasserman.com. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this was first published.
