Nuclear Power and America

From the outset, let’s be perfectly clear about one thing: The nuclear tragedy unfolding hour by hour in Japan is a nightmare of unimaginable horror for the hundreds of thousands of victims of last week’s Sendai earthquake and the ensuing tsunami.

But the dramatic stories coming out of Japan on an hourly basis are no reason for the public or politicians to panic over the general safety and efficacy of nuclear power.

It’s been a quarter of a century since the Soviet Union’s reactor at Chernobyl experienced a meltdown. And was on March 28, 1979, that the Three Mile Island disaster occurred in Pennsylvania. Those two incidents, coupled with the ongoing emergency at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, make a total of three — three — major incidents in three decades.

Nuclear reactors have been safely generating power around the world for more than four decades, and for any other industry, three disasters in more than 40 years would be a safety record to be envied.

But today, many people in the general public, environmental activists and timid politicians are wringing their hands over the future of the nuclear industry, which was experiencing a “renaissance” just eight days ago.

The public needs to calm down; the environmentalists need to quit trying to make political hay of a grave crisis; the politicians simply need to grow a spine.

Just consider these facts:

» Not a single person died as a result of Three Mile Island; one scientific study after another in the following years showed no increase in cancer rates in the population around TMI as opposed to the general population.

» Chernobyl was a horrific event, but only 56 deaths were directly attributable to the reactor explosion itself. The Chernobyl Forum and the International Atomic Energy Agency, in 2005, issued a study prepared for the United Nations that concluded the accident could contribute up to 4,000 deaths over the long run, far fewer than estimates thrown out in 1986.

» Nuclear power is, today, safely generating electricity in countries around the world: France (76 percent), Lithuania (73 percent), the United States (20 percent), Belgium (54 percent) and Switzerland (40 percent) are just a few examples.

An Associated Press story earlier this week about the number of U.S. nuclear plants near fault lines played into feeding the public’s irrational fears of the nuclear industry. After all, the idea of a nuclear plant near the site of a possible earthquake would scare just about anyone. But in Japan, it was not last week’s earthquake that caused the current crisis; it was the ensuing tsunami that severely damaged the coolant systems at the plant.

Modern society is increasingly power-hungry. That power needs to come from clean, renewable sources. And right now, there is no cleaner, safer, more renewable source of power than nuclear.

That’s as true today — in the middle of this crisis — as it was March 10, the day before the quake hit.