March 24, 2011
When nuclear reactors blow, the first thing that melts down is the truth.
Just as in the Chernobyl catastrophe almost 25 years ago when Soviet authorities denied the extent of radiation and downplayed the dire situation that was spiraling out of control, Japanese authorities spent the first week of the Fukushima crisis issuing conflicting and confusing reports.
We were told that radiation levels were up, then down, then up, but nobody aside from those Japanese bureaucrats could verify the levels and few trusted their accuracy.
The situation is under control, they told us, but workers are being evacuated. There is no danger of contamination, but stay inside and seal your doors.
Here’s what I took away from that experience: the nuclear industry is a snake-oil culture of habitual misrepresentation, pervasive wishful thinking, deep denial, and occasional outright deception. For more than 50 years, it has habitually lied about risks and costs while covering up every violation and failure it could. Whether or not its proponents and spokespeople are dishonest or merely deluded can be debated, but the outcome — dangerous misinformation and the meltdown of honest civic discourse — remains the same, as we once again see at Fukushima.
Hidden Costs and Wasted Subsidies
The true costs of nuclear power are another subject carefully fudged and obscured by nuclear power advocates.
From its inception in federally funded labs, nuclear power has been highly subsidized.
A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that "more than 30 subsidies have supported every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle from uranium mining to long-term waste storage.
Added together, these subsidies have often exceeded the average market price for the power produced."
When it comes to producing electricity, these subsidies are so extensive, the report concludes, that "in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy the kilowatts on the open market and give them away."
Finally, nuclear power boosters like to proclaim themselves "green" and to claim that their industry is the ideal antidote to global warming since it produces no greenhouse gas emissions. In doing so, they hide the real environmental footprint of nuclear energy.
It’s quite true that no carbon dioxide comes out of power-plant smokestacks.
However, maintaining any future infrastructure to handle the industry’s toxic waste is guaranteed to produce lots of carbon dioxide.
So does mining uranium and processing it into fuel rods, building massive reactors from concrete and steel, and then behemoth repositories capable of holding waste for 1,000 years.
Radiation from the Fukushima meltdown is now entering the Japanese food chain.
How green is that?
Risk Is Not a Math Problem
That culture of secrecy is a logical fit for an industry that is authoritarian by nature.
Unlike solar or wind power, nuclear power requires massive investments of capital, highly specialized expertise, robust security, and centralized control.
Any local citizen facing the impact of a uranium mine, a power plant, or a proposed waste depository will attest that the owners, operators, and regulators of the industry are remote, unresponsive, and inaccessible.
They misinform because they have the power to get away with it. The absence of meaningful checks and balances enables them.
They are serial killers. Stop them before they kill again. Credibility counts and you don’t need a PhD or a Geiger counter to detect it.
CHIP WARD was a founder of HEAL Utah, a grassroots group that has led the opposition to the disposal of nuclear waste in Utah and the construction of a new reactor next to Green River. He is the author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West.
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.
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