Nuclear Disaster Was of Our Own Making, Murakami Says

Americans have been told there were no casualties as a result of the Three Mile Island (TMI) plant meltdown on March 28, 1979. Yet some 2,000 Harrisburg area residents settled sickness claims with operators' General Public Utilities Corp. and Metropolitan Edison Co., the owners of TMI.

Their symptoms included nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from the nose, a metallic taste in the mouth, hair loss, and red skin rash, typical of acute radiation sickness when people are exposed to whole-body doses of radiation around 100 rads, Caldicott said.

David Lochbaum, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, believes nuclear plant safety standards are lacking and before Fukushima predicted another nuclear catastrophe, stating, "It's not if, but when."

"The magnitude of the radiation generated in a nuclear power plant is almost beyond belief," Caldicott writes. "The original uranium fuel that is subject to the fission process becomes 1 billion times more radioactive in the reactor core. A thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant contains as much long-lived radiation as that produced by the explosion of 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs."

Each year, operators must remove a third of the radioactive fuel rods from their reactors because they have become contaminated with fission products. The rods are so hot they must be stored for 30 to 60 years in a heavily shielded building continuously cooled by air or water lest they burst into flame, and must afterwards be packed into a container.  "Construction of these highly specialized containers uses as much energy as construction of the original reactor itself, which is 80 gigajoules per metric ton," Caldicott says.

What's a big construction project, though, when you don't have to pay for it? In the 2005 Energy Bill, Congress allocated $13 billion in subsidies to the nuclear power industry. Between 1948 and 1998, the US government showered the industry with $70 billion of taxpayer dollars for research and development -----corporate Socialism if ever there was any.

Caldicott points out there are truly green and clean alternative energy sources to nuclear power. She refers to the American plains as "the Saudi Arabia of wind," where readily available rural land in just several Dakota counties "could produce twice the amount of electricity that the United States currently consumes."

Unless we take the road of the safe, green alternatives---which contrast starkly with the nuclear-despoiled Fukushima environs---we may, as Murakami warned, "inevitably repeat the same mistake again, somewhere else."