Thomas A. Bass's new book, Return to Fukushima, makes an overwhelming case for the absolute idiocy of pursuing nuclear energy, reveals the disaster at Fukushima to be worse than you've probably heard, and disturbingly establishes the likelihood that many of us will eventually be living in Fukushimas if humanity doesn't get rid of the nukes.
The case against nuclear energy that is made here can be roughly divided into six points.
One, "What today are called civilian reactors began -- like Chernobyl -- as bomb-making plants with added features for producing heat and electricity. They can always revert to their origins." Some facilities, such as Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility, are publicly promoted as having something to do with energy, but are actually for testing weapons. But even those nuclear facilities actually for energy are also useful for weapons.
Two, nobody knows what to do with the eternally deadly waste. Hundreds of thousands of tons of it have been dumped into the Earth's oceans. Japan is adding over 300 million gallons of radioactive water.
Three, nuclear energy is three to five times more expensive than renewable energy, only exists because of government support, and cannot find a single insurance company that will come near it -- so the risk is also picked up by governments. So is paying fishermen not to fish after seaside catastrophes -- and the social problems created by stripping people of their professions even while paying them to do nothing. So is the ongoing quixotic quest for a solution for the waste. So is the eventual admission, if it finally comes, that Fukushima will have to be covered with three giant concrete pyramids. So is addressing the lawsuits from people forced to flee their homes. Eventually Japan may spend a trillion dollars on the Fukushima disaster, even while pretending the water at the plant cannot be stored or treated but must simply be dumped into the dying sea.
Four, the disasters. Ten examples: 1952 Chalk River, 1957 Kyshtym, 1957 Windscale, 1959 Santa Susana, 1966 Fermi 1, 1969 Lucens Reactor, 1979 Three Mile Island, 1986 Chernobyl, 2011 Fukushima, 2021 Taishan. Did your school system teach you these? What about the abandoned uninhabitable zones surrounding some of those locations and the testing and manufacturing areas: Bikini, Hanford, etc.? There are millions of people who have been harmed or killed by nuclear energy or weapons in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, the Marshall Islands, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, and Fukushima. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) wanted to abandon Fukushima, allowing it to melt down and burn, which could easily have led to the evacuation of Tokyo. Naoto Kan, then-Prime Minister of Japan, who denied permission to abandon Fukushima, now says nuclear energy is based on myths and that Japan should do away with it. Meanwhile people who were forced to flee Fukushima have faced fear and prejudice, as well as economic hardship, elsewhere. And abandoned items in Fukushima, such as automobiles, have been shipped and sold around the world, spreading the disaster beyond any study or measurement.
Five, Tepco, which created the disaster at Fukushima, has a long history of hiding problems, faking reports, blatantly lying, admitting its lies, and telling new lies, which only makes it typical of the nuclear industry that is founded on basic lies. Tepco alone has tested the water it is dumping into the ocean, and admits that most of it is highly contaminated, after previously having claimed otherwise. Tepco's the-water-is-fine stunts would make Obama drinking Flint water proud. While simple preventative measures could have averted the Fukushima disaster, it is routine for such measures to be lied about, and not just in Fukushima. Without a basic culture of lying these facilities would not exist at all. The lies that the purpose is not weaponry, that the cost is affordable, that the waste problem is solvable, and so on, are not only routine, but also apparently often believed by those telling them.
Six, the people living in the exclusion zones of Chernobyl and Fukushima are developing (and sharing) skills for coping and surviving. Public demands focus, not around a sane energy policy, but around the power to do one's own radiation monitoring or the right to do one's own remediation of radioactive farm soil. Catastrophe is gradually being normalized. Part of coping involves installing tight windows and otherwise shutting air out of one's life.
