On May 26, 1958, President Eisenhower waved a wand with a little light bulb on the end of it in front of an electric eye, starting up the first commercial reactor, located three hundred miles away at Shippingport, Pennsylvania.

That was as close to it as he wanted to be.

            We are told that nuclear power is being used to generate electricity. That is not correct. Nuclear power is being used to boil water, and the resulting steam is being used to generate electricity in variants of the same way it has always been generated. What the enormously expensive nuclear plants do is generate heat in the most dangerous way imaginable, with waste products that are, so far, unmanageable. Conversion of the energy of nuclear fission or fusion directly into usable power would be a new and different kind of process. Perhaps it can be done; maybe people are working on it; but the present system is not it. The present system is a fancy steam engine.

We are told that nuclear plants are pollution-free. On July 9, 2002 Senator Trent Lott, then Senate Minority Leader, said, "Nuclear power is a clean, efficient source. We need to deal with nuclear waste." By "clean" the Senator evidently meant that nuclear plants do not give off air-polluting smoke. Indeed, it is impossible for them to give off air-polluting carbon-based smoke, as they do not burn any carbon-based combustible substance. But clean they are not. They pollute in three ways:

            1. Normal emissions. There are emissions from these places and all the other kinds of nuclear manufacturing and storage places. A study states that "...nuclear power accounts for a very small fraction of the radiation experienced by the U. S. population - less than 1.6% of total artificial radiation, and less than 0.3% of all radiation. One source estimates that ... nuclear power plants cause ... roughly ... between 8.3 and 30.2 annual statistical cancer deaths nationally, plus a comparable number of survivable cancers. However, individuals in contact with various segments of the nuclear fuel cycle may have much higher exposure with correspondingly higher effects: the same source notes that nuclear workers bear 99.9% of the risk of fatal cancer from normal nuclear operations."

When the plants have worn-out, broken or defective parts, their more abundant emissions, if "not very dangerous" before, may become quite dangerous. (If they were dangerous before, how much more dangerous?)

            In 2003 a big hole was found in the reactor head of the Davis-Beese plant in Toledo--a plant, already well-known for bad safety, belonging to FirstEnergy Corporation, a company that the Government blamed for the infamous blackout of August 2003. Leakage of tritium from Reactor No. 1 of California's San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was discovered during demolition, long after the reactor had been retired; similar leakage has occurred in at least nine other plants. Numerous plants in the United States and elsewhere are old, worn out, suffering corrosion problems, emission problems, and still permitted to run.

2. Accidents. Inevitably, accidents happen. When a nuclear plant has a catastrophic accident, people die immediately and a lot of people die slowly over years. Many unborn descendents will remain unborn, or be deformed at birth, or have fatal cancers at rates greatly above the rates elsewhere.  

Chernobyl is famous for its catastrophic breakdown on April 27, 1986; the eventual toll is still unknown, unknowable. Famous as well is the cover-up of the disaster for more than two weeks by the Soviet army and Government, a cover-up that included failure to inform neighboring countries and failure to evacuate and otherwise protect inhabitants of the region. Even several years later, it is believed, relevant information, such as the amount of radiation actually released, had not been divulged. (Time Magazine, May 18, 1986 and Nov. 13, 1989)

The March 23, 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania was just barely prevented from getting as completely out of hand as Chernobyl. The data on damage it may have caused to present and future human beings and animals are not yet cleared up. Files were placed behind a stone wall. Quite high State employees were fired, apparently for reporting embarrassing information about the disaster, etc.[1]

In a symposium held in Harrisburg, Pa. on March 26, 2009 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Three Mile Island disaster, Arnie Gunderson, a former nuclear industry executive turned whistle-blower, stated, "I think the numbers on the NRC's [Nuclear Regulatory Commission's] website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000." Data presented in the symposium by nuclear engineers supported Gunderson's statement.

Besides the few catastrophes or near catastrophes, there are many accidents at "nuclear plants" that do not produce many fatalities, but nevertheless suggest that--industry and Government protestations notwithstanding--the safety of these complicated artifacts is not what one might wish; that, indeed, they are disasters waiting to happen.

The world's largest "nuclear power plant" in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, Japan, was damaged in a 6.8 magnitude earthquake on July 16, 2007. Water containing radioactive material leaked into the Sea of Japan; drums containing nuclear waste fell over, many losing their lids, 800 liters of turbine oil leaked from a reactor, and small amounts of radioactive materials were emitted into the atmosphere. Industry spokesmen (who had, on the day of the earthquake, stated that no leaks occurred) claimed that "the emissions, although inadvertent, had been within legal limits."

"Japan has a history of cover-ups and accidents at nuclear power plants..." For example, on December 8, 1995, three tons of liquid sodium coolant spilled from a pipe at the Monju reactor at Tsuruga, 200 miles west of Tokyo, Japan. At a news conference on January 13, 1996, "...officials acknowledged that a video of the accident had been heavily edited before it was given to news media to make the leak appear less serious." (Reuters, Jan. 14, 1996)

And so forth.

3. Waste. These reactors produce tons upon tons of radioactive and otherwise poisonous waste. No satisfactory way to dispose of it has yet been discovered. Typically, the radioactivity in it will last, not a short while, but thousands of years. As Senator Lott said, we certainly need to deal with the waste. Waste from all nuclear installations, including the power plants--radioactive trash of all kinds--is part of an impending disaster. Nobody knows what to do with it, really. Nobody knows how to make it safe. Everywhere it has ever been put, it is causing trouble. The barrels will not last as long as the half-life of the stuff in them; the stuff will leak out, is leaking out.

Barrels of it have been thrown in the deep ocean.[2] Some of the people in charge would like to throw more of them there. Who knows what those substances are doing or will soon do to life on the abyssal plain, to the entire food chain for that matter? For the waste will outlast the barrels by thousands of years.

They bury it in the ground. It gets into the water table. It gets into the water people drink, as it is alleged to have done in Pensacola and Gulf Breeze, Florida.

From 1952 to 1970 the people in charge of the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory dumped 16 billion gallons of waste into wells that feed directly to the water table. It wasn't even in barrels, didn't have to leak out, already out.[3]

Transport of nuclear waste, as well as other nuclear materials, seems to be handled rather well nowadays. It is different from other types of toxic waste, which are often shipped to and unceremoniously unloaded in countries whose people, it is felt, are not as valuable as Americans and whose governments are willing for a price to let their land be a dump for hazardous, perhaps mortally dangerous garbage. On the contrary, nuclear waste is often shipped for recycling from other countries to the United States, the United Kingdom, France, or Russia. It is shipped all over the United States on the highways and by rail. The containers used are accident-proof; successfully so until now; the difficulty is at the destination..

Most nuclear waste is kept where it was generated or "temporarily" stored somewhere else, waiting for somebody to figure out what to do with it. This is a considerable problem. In Scientific American, June, 1996, Chris G. Whipple wrote: "In the half century of the nuclear age, the U.S. has accumulated some 30,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods from power reactors and another 380,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste, a by-product of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.  None of these materials have found anything more than interim accommodation, despite decades of study and expenditures in the billions of dollars on research, development and storage." That statement was written in 1996. In 2009, only the numbers have changed.

"Currently, only temporary storage areas exist for the disposal of radioactive waste.  The U.S. government is working to devise a plan for the safe storage and permanent disposal of nuclear wastes." That statement was written in Environmental News Online in 1999. Ten years later it is still true.

In a September 5, 2001 public hearing of the U.S. Department of Energy, Governor Guinn of Nevada, furious about the U. S. Government's desire to make Yucca Mountain a depository for enormous quantities of nuclear waste, declared the scientific evidence was not complete, yet the DOE had called this meeting to gather public comment on that evidence "prematurely" and over "our reasonable and faithful objections." The Governor remarked that United States Government agencies denied "until just a few years ago" the illness and death their atomic folly caused to thousands of Nevada and Utah citizens. Nevada, it seems, did not want "the most deadly substance on earth" to be buried in the Yucca Mountain site, which would happen, said the Governor, "if the DOE has its way."

In 2003, President Bush signed a joint resolution into law, officially designating Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository site. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified 293 technical issues DOE must solve before submitting the license application. The State of Nevada filed major lawsuits against the plan.

On April 6, 2009 the New York Times published an article with dateline March 31, 2009 entitled: "Yucca Mountain Plan for Nuclear Waste Dies."

The people who invented the nuclear power plant for generation of electricity didn't plan for it to be mortally dangerous. They thought it was a pretty good idea and would solve many problems. Unfortunately, it has solved few problems and created new, threatening ones. The response of official people to these problems is not encouraging.

Scientists that prepare reports that mention unusual levels of fatalities, cancers, birth defects, fetal death, anomalous births of farm animals, and so forth, find themselves marginalized, maybe out of a job, their reputations damaged, no funding for their research. Government people and the people in the "nuclear power" business like reports that explain that the danger is minimal or that it does not exist.

For many years U. S. government people and business people (and some science people; for example Dr. Teller) suppressed information contained in their own reports of studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[4]

They also lied about the harm from exposure to radiation suffered by American servicemen sent into Nagasaki in September, 1945.[5]

They said, continued to say, insisted, that the exposure of 45,000 servicemen ordered to the 1946 "Operation Crossroads" atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands was within "allowable limits", and steadfastly refused for many years to admit that the multiple grave ailments many of these men suffered came from that exposure. The servicemen were a few miles from the explosions, were splashed with water from them, could see the bones in their hands when they covered their eyes, were irradiated. Were moved up to where the blasts had occurred. The government's people refused them treatment, but it's a dead issue now, because most of the people affected are dead.[6]

More than 700 nuclear bombs have been tested by the United States since World War II.[7] At least 317 of these were atmospheric tests, 208 of which were in the continental United States.[8] Government people and their hired help insisted that the fallout from these artifacts did not harm the people that it is alleged to have harmed, cause the leukemia, the cancers that it seems to have caused, produce the birth defects and fetal deaths that it is reputed to have produced, create in livestock the anomalous births and strange maladies that it is claimed to have created. Recently they have relented a little on this issue.

In the 1950s, U. S. Army people ordered thousands of their soldiers ever closer to atmospheric nuclear explosions. At first they were placed seven miles from ground zero, then four, then two miles from ground zero. They were ordered to move toward the blast center several hours, two hours, one hour, even immediately after detonation--just to see what would happen to them.[9] Army and Government people refused to admit radiation was the cause of many of these soldiers' multiple grave ailments--radiation that army people had sent the soldiers to absorb!

Their faithful servants were denied both help and comfort.

"People." Not "the Government," not "the Army," not "the Atomic Energy Commission," not "Business." People do this, make these decisions, make these statements, write these letters; people, male and female human beings, mostly male, not some abstract metonymy like "the Government," "the Army," "the VA," "the AEC," "business," etc. They do it because they are told to, or because to do otherwise would be job-threatening, or because it's their duty. Like Eichman. Call them eichmen (occasionally eichwomen). Or because they believe in a "greater good."

Maybe some of them believe what they say.

What's to be done? A few suggestions for people who cause things to be done in the U. S., Russia, Britain, India, China, Japan, Pakistan, Israel, France, Brazil, :Korea, and so on:

Admit the danger.

Stop using fissionable material in large quantities for anything whatever. This is not a frivolous suggestion. Besides the emissions of radiation and besides the danger of meltdowns, nuclear waste is making more and more pieces of the earth irreversibly unsuitable for living creatures. Having proved yourselves unable to solve this problem, you should stop these dangerous activities.

Develop practical fusion technology and find out how to use it to make electricity without hazardous waste--with or without a steam engine.

Develop practical alternate methods that do not use nuclear fission or fusion.

Don't make new kinds of nuclear weapons.

Don't make old kinds of nuclear weapons.

Don't claim that Uranium 238 doesn't do any harm, and stop calling it "depleted uranium" when it's used to make shells, bullets and armor, or made into commercial products. It is uranium. When uranium dust (an inevitable product of the military use of U-238) gets into the human body it makes the body sick. To say that Uranium 238 emits very low levels of gamma radiation is correct; to say this makes it innocuous is disinformation. It is poisonous--a question of biochemistry, not nuclear physics. And as for radiation, once inside the body, the alpha and beta radiation (which, it is quite true, will not pass through paper) have no shield, for they are right there with the cells. There are numerous sources for this information, by both science professionals and journalists; for example, the presentation by Doug Rokke, PhD at the UN-UNESCO International Conference, Athens, May 24-25, 2001, and Dr. Helen Caldicott's article on "Medical Consequences of Depleted Uranium.")

Take proper care of the people your folly has made sick, and compensate the survivors of the dead; do not say that what made them sick was something else, and that you aren't responsible for their problems. And don't put people into this kind of danger. For more than sixty years you have sent your soldiers into places full of radiation and poisonous materials; most recently, because you use uranium to make bullets, shells, and armor that vaporize into poisonous dust, full of U-238.

Don't use cheerful slang for the things made to kill people, things that contaminate earth, sky, and sea. "Nuke," "Boomer," "Star wars," "Bunker-buster," and so on.

Be trustworthy. If you would become trustworthy, after a while you could be trusted and respected without suspension of disbelief. Wouldn't you like that?

[1] Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon with Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Waters, , Killing our Own--the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, Chapters 13 and 14 (Published in 1998 as a Delta Book by Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017. (The entire book can be downloaded in various formats.)

[2] Ibid.., page 162

[3] Ibid.. Page 139

[4] Ibid.. Chapters 4, 5

[5] Ibid., Chapter 1

[6] Ibid., Chapter 2

[7] Ibid.. p. 7 (Introduction by Dr. Benjamin Spock)

[8] Gallery of U. S. Nuclear Tests: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/index.html , last updated 6 August, 2001

[9] Ibid., Chapter 3