Raise Your Hand for Nuclear Power
It’s time to stop. Stop procrastinating, stop being frightened, stop making things difficult, stop believing in falsehoods. Nuclear power is a good thing. Good for eliminating fossil fuels, good for decreasing CO2 emissions, good for helping the environment. It’s the best and fastest way forward to reduce man’s influence on global warming. Period. End of story.
So, now you can throw your hands up and protest, “What, are you nuts?!” No, I’m not. I’m being rational.
Environmentalists and Journalists have poisoned our brains with their sensationalist ideas and reporting about the dangers of nuclear power plants, radiation and radioactive waste. Most of it isn’t true. Some are outright lies; delusions meant to appeal to our emotions and fears.
For instance, remember the 2011 nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima, Japan after a powerful earthquake and destructive tsunami? There were claims everywhere thousands of people would die, get cancer, produce deformed offspring. That the area around the plant would have to remain desolate and unoccupied for hundreds of years as a result of radioactive pollution. It was all false. The facts prove it.
No one died from the accident. No one experienced lethal doses of radiation. Radiation levels surrounding the plant are near normal, with the current levels less than what naturally occur in many parts of the inhabited world, or what people receive for a CT scan. In the fourteen years since, studies show no increase in any radiation-related health issues, not even among the 20,000 people who worked at the plant during and after the accident.
We’ve been fooled by hysteria, duped into believing nuclear power, its waste by-products and anything associated with it is dangerous and evil, an unseen, unstoppable menace. It’s all been a lie.
My father was a Health Physicist, meaning he wrote safety procedures and determined safe exposure levels for humans when dealing with materials that emitted radiation. He was a well-known and respected peer of the radiation safety industry, authoring sections of the Atomic Energy Commission’s safety and procedures manual, serving as president of various professional organizations and as an advisor to the governor of Washington State.
He was a leader during the adoption of radioactive materials in industry for 35 years, beginning in the late 1950s. I learned from him how the news media sensationalized and propagandized the subject – like, unfortunately, they do many things. Now there are others beginning to voice the real value and safety of nuclear power.
Originally published in Dutch in 2022 and English in 2024 by none other than an award winning environmental journalist, Marco Visscher’s The Power of Nuclear is a good read on the history of how and why we have been duped. Visscher shows how “we are all paying a heavy price for having let irrational anxiety over nuclear power turn us away from one of the world’s most powerful (and efficient) decarbonizing tools.”1
Some still believe we need to abandon our hedonistic, materialistic, and energy hungry ways. That we should become luddites, revert to simpler lifestyles they assume will shrink our carbon footprints and save the planet. It’s misguided, and completely improbable people will give up a chance for a safer, more comfortable lifestyle that can free them to pursue higher causes. Get real. The answer for progress is more efficient, less environmentally costly and carbon free forms of energy.
Wind and solar are not the answer. They generate the need for workarounds, like battery farms, to efficiently incorporate them into the electrical grid. Batteries, along with the mining and manufacturing required to produce wind turbines and solar panels, require lots of carbon generating energy to build. In the end they are not carbon efficient; they are carbon hogs and environmentally damaging. Wind turbines kill thousands of birds every month. Mining rare earth elements for batteries is extremely polluting, harming agriculture and depleting water supplies.
Lastly, the concern over radiation from nuclear waste is also greatly overblown. We can safely store these materials. They are small in quantity. Studies have shown the threat of them polluting water supplies to the point it would affect health and welfare are virtually non-existent. Not only that, most of the waste materials can be recycled and used for medical or other purposes.
We know how to build and run nuclear power plants safely. The technology is proven. A properly built plant, to current international standards, will automatically stop the nuclear fission reaction and self-contain any radioactive pollution in the event of a meltdown. The hazards of meltdowns and any escaping radiation have been grossly overstated. International studies show the facts disprove our fears.
Yes, nuclear power requires care, but we know how to do this safely. Nuclear power is a solution that is right before us, that we can implement now with great positive impact. What are we waiting for?
- Testimonial from Jonathan Symons, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the Macquarie School of Social Sciences. Sydney, Australia, and author of Ecomoderism: Technology, Politics and Climate Crisis. ↩︎
