Nuclear amnesia
Take three countries, over three days: Russia, Sweden, and Spain. Guess what they have in common? It’s not football, nor ice hockey, but the outrageous way they handle hazardous radioactive materials.
And all three sadly ignored the fiftieth anniversary of the Mayak catastrophe and the plight of people still living there today. 50 years ago, in Mayak a large nuclear complex in Southern Urals, a tank of highly radioactive sludge lead exploded. People were evacuated from their homes in a thousand square kilometres from many towns and villages. Yet today, thousands of people still live in the highly poisoned area on the banks of Techa River.
I could hardly believe my friends from Greenpeace Russia, when they told me how 50 years later, the Russian authorities launched their relocation plan moving people in highly radioactive Muslyumovo village just two kilometres, to the other corner of the very same village, near its graveyard. Check out this 10 min documentary.
Maybe this is typical of the short memories of governments. But more disturbing is that the dangerous Mayak complex still operates today and there are even plans to expand it. Russia is actively negotiating with a dozen other countries to bring their unwanted spent reactor fuel to this out of sight factory. A nice option for all the governments who don’t know what do to get rid of their nuclear waste. Not such a great gift for the people of Mayak, who have surely suffered enough. This is why we decided to call for a ban on imports of deadly waste to Mayak on Saturday’s anniversary. Our activists pulled out all the stops to make a brilliant laser projection happen in the regional capital Chelyabinsk, on the memorial of Kurchatov – the father of Soviet nuclear bomb.
On the same weekend, the Swedish government started to ship five tons of spent reactor fuel to the notorious UK reprocessing complex Sellafield. A plant known for its catalogue of accidents, broad range of incompetence and for dumping its liquid waste into the Irish and North Sea. This very contamination lead Scandinavian countries to successfully push for its closure, expected now in five years time. Another case of governmental amnesia, that shows the hypocrisy of sending nuclear waste elsewhere. Reprocessing is a deadly technology wherever it takes place. Again, our activists were on the scene to block the cargo ship, Atlantic Osprey.
Then on Monday morning, in my email, was yet another example of the mismanagement of dangerous nuclear materials. In Spain, police discovered a bucket with pellets of obviously stolen nuclear reactor fuel nearby a Spanish factory. Nobody knows yet how it was possible to take them away from strictly controlled factory, or why the missing material was not detected, and most disturbingly, they have no idea how many pellets are actually missing.
How many more accidents and safety failures do we need, before we acknowledge that it is just impossible to safely run nuclear energy in our complicated world?
Jan Beránek,
Greenpeace Nuclear Campaigner
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Comments
It's going to take a lot more than accidents and safety failures to convince governments that nuclear energy is never a good idea. Take Chernobyl as an example. Even though the initial death toll was small, the number of people dying as a result of the radiation are climbing astronomically. It's a clear example of the disaster that can occur at a nuclear power plant. And yet what do we do? We keep building plants. We convince ourselves that the Chernobyl reactor was built flawed, and with the new technology we have, it could never happen to us. It's going to take a major CATASTROPHE to convince people that nuclear power is bad.
Posted by: Lily | October 2, 2007 5:58 PM
There seem to be a number of major logical flaws in your argument. I'll point out 3 big ones. You've accused Sweden and Spain of not heading lessons from the Mayak accident which was within the USSR. You give absolutely no argumentative support for your conclusion "Reprocessing is a deadly technology wherever it takes place". Lastly, your final conclusion seems to be that because the world is complex we need very simplistic methods of power generation. Needless to say this is both unsupported in your argument but also a gross oversimplification.
Posted by: Concerned Citizen | October 3, 2007 7:34 AM