Nuclear power - who wants it now?
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The effects of the earthquake and Tsunami in Japan were horrendous enough without the added complication of a couple of nuclear reactors going critical. The reactors were designed to withstand the effects of an earthquake - at least up to magnitude 7 : This one registered 9. It was also protected from a Tsunami up to 6m high - this one was bigger, and so although it shut down safely, the backup power to pump water failed. Tokyo is a city of 35million people, living only 150 miles south of the stricken 4 reactors. Statistically the chances of an earthquake of this magnitude close to the coastline must have been pretty small, but it happened. Shifts of workers are now risking their lives to try to bring the temperatures of the reactors down without causing more explosions. Can lessons be learnt for the UK energy policy?
I really do hope that if one good thing can come from this disaster, it must be to undermine the commercial confidence and any public support for new nuclear plants in this country. We certainly dont have regular or severe earthquakes like Japan, but with rising sea levels and increasing incidence of severe weather and freak storms and floods, a 'one in a thousand year' event has to be envisaged when you are dealing with material that can be hazardous to human life for thousands of years. People may not like wind turbines, but one wonders how keen will they now be to see nuclear plants being built even 50 or 100 miles away? So far the radiation in Japan is not on the scale of Chernobyl in 1986, when the radioactive cloud was carried across the whole of Europe even rendering Welsh sheep to dangerous for human consumption. But it surely must strengthen a healthy mistrust of nuclear power as a viable safe option for our future energy needs.
see http://www.greenfeed.org.uk/feeds/?p=332424#more-332424 for more on this issue ,including what is happening with the Chernobyl mess 25 years on after the disaster that nearly irradiated half of Europe.
And also
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/24/nuclear-waste-storage scary!!
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