Nuke Reactors Could Kill Us All

May 4, 2022

The latest stab at reviving nuke power is mocked by the actual reactors.

Today 93 are allegedly operable in the US, more than 400 worldwide….including the 15 in Putin’s Ukraine crosshairs, plus four lethal corpses at Chernobyl.

Every atomic reactor is an apocalypse in progress, set to explode at any time from error, terror, age, nature.

Every nuke spews heat, radiation, carbon, gases. They all kill birds, fish, people, eco-systems, the planet. They all create unmanageable wastes, untamable fire, unconscionable inequity, uninsurable danger.

All US reactors are more than 25 years old. They can’t get private insurance. Nobody can guarantee their individual safety.

A dozen-plus earthquake faults could shatter California’s Diablo Canyon, says former NRC site inspector Michael Peck. So could the San Andreas.

Diablo is embrittled, cracked, decayed, under-maintained. Its radiation, heat and chemicals fry the planet and the seascape. Its owner killed eight people in San Bruno with an avoidable gas explosion, then eighty more torching northern California.

Any atomic reactor can explode at any time. But at Diablo—-as at all nukes—-the owners and Governor refuse public pleas for independent inspections.

PG…E’s infamous incompetence and greed threaten millions of Californians with radioactive death and ruin. Like all other US reactors, Diablo has no comprehensive private insurance covering a catastrophe from which the US would never recover. The feds exempt its owners from liability.

Ohio’s Davis-Besse is crumbling, as did parts of Perry when struck by a 1986 earthquake. Their owner bribed Ohio’s Legislature with $61 million for a billion-dollar bailout; no one has yet gone to jail.

Intake pipes at South Texas froze. Nebraska’s Fort Calhoun has been flooded. A worker set an Alabama nuke ablaze with a candle. The NRC is a Soviet Agency best witnessed in the HBO series on Chernobyl.

Of the last “new” US nukes, South Carolina’s V.C. Summer died after blowing $10 billion; Georgia’s yet-to-open Vogtle has wasted $30 billion.

Small Modular Reactors—-“mini Putin bombs”—-are theoretical and can never be protected. Thorium and fusion reactors—-also theoretical—-suffer cost, heat, radiation, waste issues.

Proven wind, solar, batteries and efficiency technologies are cheaper, cleaner, safer, faster to build, more reliable, more democratic and more job-creating than fossil/nukes.

Some 750,000 Americans now work in renewables, nearly twenty times as many as coal, some seven times more than nukes.

There are no black box nukes that can't blow up and don’t emit heat, carbon or radiation. The real “nuclear industry” is a rotting array of old reactors poised to blow.

We need to shut them all asap…starting with Diablo Canyon.

Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the weekly Election Protection 2024 ZOOM. His People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org.

[Top photo: A flock of goats walk on a hillside above Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant at Avila Beach, California in this June 22, 2005 file photograph. (photo: Phil Klein/Reuters)]