Fukushima Shows Us Perils of Nuclear Power Three Years On
If nuclear power is so safe then 1) why does the industry and their apologists have to lie to us, and 2) who won't the insurance industry cover the plants, resulting in taxpayers having to provide insurance?
http://www.progressive.org/fukushima-shows-us-perils-of-nuclear-power-three-years-on
Japan’s inability to fully recover should be of huge concern to us in the United States, especially since many of the same factors are at play here. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was so unnerved by the disaster that it deliberately downplayed its relevance for the United States, an NBC News investigation reveals.
“The e-mails, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, show that the campaign to reassure the public about America’s nuclear industry came as the agency’s own experts were questioning U.S. safety standards and scrambling to determine whether new rules were needed to ensure that the meltdown occurring at the Japanese plant could not occur here,” NBC reports.
For example, officials refused to divulge to reporters that the commission was nervously analyzing whether the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California could withstand a similar-sized tsunami as the one that hit Fukushima.
“The U.S. nuclear industry has claimed that our nuclear power plants are not vulnerable to severe earthquakes and tsunamis,” states Beyond Nuclear’s Paul Gunter in a press release. “In reality, thirty-four U.S. reactors located downstream of fifty major dams could suffer a prolonged and potentially catastrophic loss of power caused by a dam break and the resulting inland tsunami.”
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