Clean nuclear energy idea all propaganda?

The article “Uranium deposit found near Nunavik park” (Apr. 28) contained the sentence, “Nuclear energy is seen as a cleaner alternative to diesel or coal produced energy — and nuclear energy needs uranium.”

It would have been more accurate to state that “The nuclear industry maintains that nuclear energy is ‘clean and green,’ the solution to global warming, inexpensive, and safe — but critics maintain that the facts belie the current barrage of nuclear industry propaganda.”

Every step of the nuclear fuel chain, from uranium mining to the decommissioning of reactors, produces radioactive pollutants. Billions of taxpayers’ dollars have yet to find a safe way to dispose of the highly radioactive nuclear waste that nuclear power plants produce. Just last week, the California Energy Commission recommended that the state continue the moratorium on construction of nuclear plants that was put in place in 1976. The commission disagreed with President Bush, and concluded that the U.S. still has no adequate facility in which to store the waste from nuclear power plants. Neither does Canada.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, now chair of the environmental think-tank Global Green International, recently urged the leaders of the industrialized world to invest massively in renewable energy sources rather than nuclear or oil. Nuclear power “doesn’t add up economically, environmentally or socially,” Gorbachev said. “Nuclear power is neither the answer to modern energy problems nor a panacea for climate change challenges.”

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, recently stated that he “would have been prepared to back a nuclear gamble if it could have been demonstrated that it was the best or only solution to tackling global warming. The truth is that, if you ask the question properly, nuclear power is definitively not the answer.”

Australian Dr. Helen Caldicott, the founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, sums up the case against expanding the nuclear industry in her new book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer: To Global Warming Or Anything Else. Anyone inclined to believe the propaganda of the nuclear industry should read it.

Jack Hicks
Iqaluit