News & Articles

A fair review

Steve Donahue’s review of Midnight in Chernobyl was surprisingly fair to nuclear power. Why surprisingly?

Because most writers, including John Laforge, habitually use the anniversary of Chernobyl  to spread fear about nuclear power. However, the article could have been improved by including the fact that Chernobyl, had no reinforced concrete containment dome, which all non-Russian reactors had, and that the Chernobyl design was deemed "dangerous" by Western standards.

Neither did it reveal that the facility  was producing plutonium for bombs while generating electricity for local communities, which allowed it to masquerade as a "civilian" reactor .  

Furthermore, it didn't mention the fact that the plant operators were ordered by Moscow to run a test with the safety systems disabled. Bad idea!  

It also didn't explain that, even if you include the deaths from non-civilian plant at Chernobyl, which number fewer than 70, civilian nuclear power has the best safety record of all means of producing electricity. If you exclude Chernobyl, and you should, the worldwide death print for civilian nuclear power stands at zero.  

No one died from radiation at Fukushima, but two plant workers were drowned by the tsunami.  

Finally, in the 1960s, we had a fully functional, super-safe reactor like those that the author of "Midnight" mentions, but the project was terminated by the Nixon administration. If we had expanded the use of these reactors there would have been no meltdowns, the spent fuel that we store would have been decreased by 90%, and climate change would be less of a threat because nuclear reactors create no greenhouse gases, unlike the carbon burners they would have replaced.    

For a free PDF of Unintended Consequences: the Lie That Killed Millions and Accelerated Climate Change, email tundracub@mediacombb.net or download it from tundracub.com  or tinyurl.com/yas7x2ok  or tinyurl.com/yy2zydl9.

George Erickson, Eveleth