I sure hope the nuclear industry will institute some professional education programs for its workers. None of them know anything about Chernobyl when you’d think that topic would be required reading for the industry...if they cared about human life. Reading up on Chernobyl, they’d learn people died; at the start of Fukushima there WERE nuke apologists insisting that NO ONE died as a result of Chernobyl. Can you imagine? Being in the nuke industry and thinking not one person died as a result of Chernobyl???
If the nuke industry educates its workforce, they’d learn that the Soviet Union made it illegal for deaths to be attributed to radiation for two years following the event. They’d find out all about the pattern of mortality and suffering and come to realize that people alive today are still contracting illnesses (and dying as a result) from radiation released by Chernobyl more than 25 years ago and they will continue to do so for countless generations. Nuke apologists would be shocked to discover the genetic damage that ravages or ends infant life and that people living near the contamination can have babies with birth defects today due to that explosion almost a quarter of a century ago.
Oh the nuke industry workers are some of the most ignorant people I’ve ever posted comments to. I have tried hard to bring them up to speed by telling about state of the art research in the National Academy of Sciences BEIR and the composite report created by a group of scientists compiling all the known medical research for the region. Here’s a description of that report:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment
Here’s the actual report:http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf
I think the very least the American public should demand from it’s nuclear workers is a)basic science information so that they no longer try to scare the public with bananas, air travel, medical x-rays etc. b)thorough knowledge of the BEIR VI and c)one read through of the PDF report I linked and d) an analysis demonstrating that the nuclear industry has intentionally deceived the public before, during, and after nuclear ‘events’ with particular focus on their abuse of the excuse “we didn’t want the public to panic.”
If we had an educated nuclear power workforce, they’d know that the horrible ramifications for human life in Japan are yet to come. They’d understand that the Japanese government is working hard to conceal and diffuse medically relevant information. The nuke force would not waste my time pretending that you really can coat the landscape, air, food, and water with radioactive waste and not have resulting human suffering.
Believe me, I know that nuke apologists are being intentionally deceptive each and every time they ask “How many people died as a result of the damage to the reactors at Fukushima?” But, the public isn’t fooled by it because of information sharing made possible by the internet. In fact, it just makes us furious to witness the absolute refusal and denial of responsibility on the part of nuke power advocates. Lie to my face about Fukushima while celebrating the announcement that the US will build new reactors; it makes nuke pimps feel good but doesn’t do the PR job they actually want.
Does anyone know a nuke pimp who admits and regrets the role that bad management played in Chernobyl? Anyone ever hear “I can’t believe the industry I love so much is responsible for such catastrophic human suffering in the Ukraine! And to think, it will continue for generation after generation...”? And now the nuke pimps are using the same deny and lie routine re Fukushima because it worked so well for them in Chernobyl??? I think the US deserves better from ‘so-called’ Americans in the nuke industry; let our US nuke force at least state publicly the truth about non-existant ‘cold shutdown’ in Fukushima because the longer they are silent in the face of obvious lies and deceptions, the clearer their primary loyalty to their industry to the detriment of their country becomes.
The fact that nuke pimps breezily deny the existence of the human toll in Chernobyl and are already hard at work distancing themselves from a disaster that isn’t even over yet in Japan infuriates me.
Oh and WHY would even waste my time asking me to compare the death toll from Fukushima, which was avoidable (had they retrofitted fuel tanks, responded to research indicating the tsunami risk, warned the public to shelter or flee, distributed potassium iodide, developed a ‘safety’ oriented work force instead of the one that got them reprimanded for falsifying safety reports, declined to build the plant on a seismically active area, etc.) and is yet to unfold, with the tsunami and earthquake? We just can’t trust nuke people; they simply have no conscience, no integrity.