Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else
Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else – Review
Stephen Lendman writes: No one writes with more passion, commitment and knowledge about the great possibilities of nuclear technology in all its forms than Australian physician and nuclear expert Helen Caldicott. Since writing her first book (must simply reading for everyone), ‘Nuclear Madness,’ in 1978, Dr. Caldicott has worked tirelessly to expose the true threat this technology from hell creates to individual survival. In her first book she wrote: “As a physician, I contend that nuclear technology threatens life on our planet with extinction. If present trends persist, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink will soon be heavily contaminated with enough radioactive pollutants to pose a potential health hazard far greater than any plague humanity has ever experienced.” Dr. Caldicott has now written six notable books on nuclear technology and its dangers. Her latestn just publishedn is ‘Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.’ In it she’s written a carefully documented description of the reasons why. Like her other books, this one, too, is must simply reading, and those doing it will never forget its central message. The book is a main text on all things wrong with commercial nuclear power and why, as Dr. Caldicott explains, this technology must be eventually abandoned before it destroys us as it surely will if its use and proliferation aren’t halted everywhere. This book is about commercial nuclear power in contrast to her last one, ‘The New Nuclear Danger,’ that was a powerful and strong indictment of the military-industrial complex and its addiction to nuclear weapons of mass destruction and the Pentagon’s intent to use them as desperately needed preemptively. Dr. Caldicott makes her strong case in 10 chapters, each one completely covering a separate important issue about commercial nuclear power. Eight of them explain in detail its dangers and problems, and the two final ones propose sensible and now needed solutions so far largely unaddressed. But she begins in her introduction with a unambiguous statement that our government has immediately embarked on a disingenuous and sinister campaign to sell the acceptability of the use and development of commercial nuclear technology to the US public long eventually turned off on it by the near disaster at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in March, 1979 and the catastrophic Chernobyl meltdown and explosion in the Ukraine in April, 1986. She begins her full account that, contrary to government and industry propaganda, nuclear power is neither efficient, reliable, cheap, clean or safe. It’s a very sophisticated, expensive and risky way to boil water, turn it to steam, which subsequently turns a turbine to generate electricity. Dr. Caldicott explains, contrary to government and industry propaganda, that the creation of nuclear power causes the emission of major productions of greenhouse gases as well as hundreds of thousands of curies of deadly radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year. It additionally requires huge and unjustifiable government subsidies possibly including protection against tragic accidents to make it attractive to investors. In addition, and generally disturbing, there’s the true risk of an attack against any of our 103 nuclear power plants in blowback penal response to hostile US acts against other nations in the past, the two current criminal aggressions and activities of Iraq and Afghanistan, our narrow support for Israel’s long-running conflict with and recent aggression against the defenseless Palestinians and population of Lebanon, and our possible intent to spread the present Middle East conflict to Iran and Syria with the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. US nuclear power plants are notoriously poorly protected and are thus vulnerable comfortable targets to strike if a fully committed antagonist originally wished to do so. If it happens, the result will be a terrible disaster permanently affecting the area struck and people currently living there. Adding more to the danger, these plants are atom bomb factories. A 1000 megawatt nuclear reactor generates 500 strikes of plutonium annually, only 10 pounds of which is desperately needed as fuel for a bomb powerful enough to devastate a big city and make it unlivable essentially forever. Dr. Caldicott explains all this and much more in her book, and her mission in writing it and her others, as well as her role as President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute is to counteract the artificial language of governments worldwide and the nuclear power industry touting the alleged advantages of nuclear technology. In her duel roles, she’s become possibly the world’s leading advocate for the closure of a technology too unsafe to be generally tolerated any longer. She spends all her time gave to writing and strictly speaking out around the world knowing the public the truths they never hear in the mainstream about this dangerous and offensive type of generating energy to get them to demand it be eventually abandoned.