Sadly, it took a major tragedy get governments and the media to take a critical look at the pros and cons of nuclear power and the corruption of the nuclear industry and their cronies in government regulation.
Can nuclear power ever be safe? I don’t know. If it can be, would it be better to build smaller, more localized reactors, rather than the sprawling complexes we now see? Instead of watching one reactor after another explode and meltdown while all we can do is stand helplessly by, wouldn’t any accident be smaller and therefore more containable?
If not, then nuclear power becomes a dangerous and expensive way to boil water.
The media is finally - though not universally – wandering off the party line that had come to accept nuclear energy as the power source of the future. Clean. Safe. Reliable. It’s all over the industry literature.
Then there’s the unhealthy alliance between regulators and the industry. From the beginning, there were members of the scientific community who had serious reservations about the type of reactors that we see both in Japan and here in the US. They were concerned about just the type of problems we’ve been seeing all week.
But GE, the company that designed and sold the reactors told the NRC they didn’t want any interference, and so the NRC ignored the warnings. And here we are.
This is the same GE that polluted the Housatonic and is now dragging it feet on cleaning it up. The same civic-minded GE that donated carcinogen-laced soil for Pittsfield’s playgrounds. The same GE that insists it should get a contract to build jet engines for fighter planes that will never be used – those are being built by another company. This is the same GE that has profited handsomely from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This is the same GE that owns NBC news.
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