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Nuclear Meltdown in Japan

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Stephen Lendman
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Just the opposite, in fact. Although a nuclear power plant releases no carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary greenhouse gas, a vast infrastructure is required. Called the nuclear fuel cycle, it uses large amounts of fossil fuels.  

Each cycle stage exacerbates the problem, starting with the enormous cost of mining and milling uranium, needing fossil fuel to do it. How then to dispose of mill tailings, produced in the extraction process. It requires great amounts of greenhouse emitting fuels to remediate. 

Moreover, other nuclear cycle steps also use fossil fuels, including converting uranium to hexafluoride gas prior to enrichment, the enrichment process itself, and conversion of enriched uranium hexafluoride gas to fuel pellets. In addition, nuclear power plant construction,  dismantling and cleanup at the end of their useful life require large amounts of energy. 

There's more, including contaminated cooling water, nuclear waste, its handling, transportation and disposal/storage, problems so far unresolved. Moreover, nuclear power costs and risks are so enormous that the industry couldn't exist without billions of government subsidized funding annually.

The Unaddressed Human Toll from Normal Operations

Affected are uranium miners, industry workers, and potentially everyone living close to nuclear reactors that routinely emit harmful radioactive releases daily, harming human health over time, causing illness and early death.

The link between radiation exposure and disease is irrefutable, depending only on the amount of cumulative exposure over time, Caldicott saying: 

"If a regulatory gene is biochemically altered by radiation exposure, the cell will begin to incubate cancer, during a 'latent period of carcinogenesis,' lasting from two to sixty years."  

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