FILTHY LUCRE – NUCLEAR WASTE COSTS LIVES
The nuclear industry uses interesting words to promote its product, like: “renaissance” (or rebirth) when all the nuclear industry has brought is suffering and death. It uses words like “disposal” when there is no way to “dispose” of nuclear waste – it is just moved around to different storage sites. The nuclear industry also likes to use words like “monitor” and “mitigate” when it comes to radioactive disasters.
The nuclear industry is allocated millions every year in the South African government budget, so that it can continue to lumber onwards, pulling modern society into its momentum of destruction. Using taxpayers’ funds the nuclear industry remains a technological dinosaur, with a multitude of problems that remain unsolved, making it a crucial threat to the health of human beings and the environment.
Since there is no way to “dispose” of nuclear waste, governments around the world have been trying to dig holes the size of subway tunnels to bury football fields full of highly radioactive waste. These sites have been proposed in Siberia, Yucca Mountain in the US, in Canada and even in South Africa’s Karoo desert. One would have thought that with so many rocket scientists on board and so many millions in hand, they would have come up with a real solution – but it seems that the minds that have created the mess, cannot clean it up.
For many years, European nations that like to promote picture-postcard, chocolate-box image of themselves exported their nuclear waste to Russia – as if Russia was the sinkhole down which all waste would somehow magically disappear. But populations of sick and dying Russians were clear evidence that the nuclear waste was still very much there and poisoning their water. It seems that European nations did not particularly care how many Russians were permanently irradiated, as long as they did not get to hear about it.
However, Russian environmental group Ecodefense protested long and loudly about their government’s plans to continue importing nuclear waste. So nations around the world continue to tunnel into the earth looking for sites to dump their nuclear waste that are not riddled with earthquakes or connected to underground water systems. No luck yet.
The United States has been insisting that they will deposit waste at Yucca Mountain. But recent reports have shown that there is seismic activity in this area, as well as connections to water sources. So the American government would be successfully poisoning its own population if they sited a waste dump there. Law suits are already piling up in the United States – almost as thick and fast as the waste.
An international meeting on nuclear waste was held in Cape Town, South Africa in July. Necsa had already announed its plans to tunnel into the Karoo desert and build a deep repository there for nuclear waste. Whose nuclear waste? Because according to the Canadian parliament, unless legislation is passed that forbids the import of nuclear waste, unscrupulous companies may do just this – and import nuclear waste into the country purely to make money. And this filthy lucre would be paid for by lives when it leaches into water sources.
According to the IAEA each year the world´s 441 nuclear power reactors create enough nuclear waste to fill a football field to a depth of 1,5 metres – 10 500 tonnes of heavy metal. This waste is hot and can stay radioactive for thousands of years. Because it is solid and does not readily dissolve in water, the fuel wastes are typically stored in water pools on site at the nuclear reactors for many years.
Environmental Impact Assessment meetings are being held around South Africa now to plan for the building of nuclear reactors in this country. If South Africa does not want to become yet another nation with football fields of nuclear waste that will be highly toxic to its people for thousands of years, South Africans must protest this industry. It is not a solution to energy needs in any way. With all the nuclear waste the US has piling up around the country, the nuclear industry only provides 7 per cent of its electricity. This is very little energy, for so great a cost – in money and lives.
Yours sincerely
INGELA RICHARDSON
