In April 1986, now more than a quarter century ago, an explosion and fire rocked the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union, in what is now the Ukraine. The explosion released a huge plume of smoke, dust and particles laced with dangerous long-lived radionucleides such as strontium and cesium which spread over parts of central Europe. In the following days it drifted west over Poland, Germany, and even as far west as the UK. Close to the plant, more than 330,000 people had to be evacuated from severely contaminated areas. Though the results are still being tabulated, it is widely estimated that there were over 4000 deaths directly attributable to the event. The effects in other areas less severely affected are more subtle and have been showing up over time. (The well-understood effect of how radionucleides can slowly bioaccumulate in odd places and unexpected plants and animals was manifested in the dangerously radioactive wild hogs in Germany's Schwartzwald, as one example.)
Scientific evidences now indicate that the accident is or will be responsible for 25,000 to 60,000 excess cancer deaths (though some groups like Greenpeace put this number at more than 200,000). The total cost in dollars to the nation of Belarus, center of the disaster, is estimated by some economists to be more than 250 billion US dollars for a thirty year period.
The zone of exclusion, an area which is so radioactive that no inhabitants can return to it for the next 20,000 years(!) extends about 20 miles in all directions from the center--the ruin of the nuclear power plant. This zone covers an area of 1257 square miles. It is scattered with abandoned villages, towns and cities. Its farms and homes lay in isolated ruin. In the more than quarter century since 1986, this area including more than one milllion acres of rich agricultural land, and an equal area of original forest, all heavily contaminated by fall-out from the plant explosion with cesium and strontium radionucleides, have reverted to nature--though a nature which is laced with lethal radioactivity. In this region, radioactive forests have continued to grow unaltered and much of the former rich farm land has also reverted to forest. These mostly pine forests in the excluison zone are untended and unharvested. Larger trees blow down in storms and brush and undergrowth accumulate to form fire hazards in dry weather.
Now in the late summer of 2012, the region of central Europe, possibly as a result of global warming and climatic trends, have experienced more frequent droughts and are subject to frequent summer and late fall thunder storms and lightning strikes---and lightning-generated forest fires. The excessive accumulation of brush, dead-falls and persistent drought makes forest fires more likely. If small fires are not contained and extingusihed promptly, they could engulf the entire exclusion zone in an all-consuming forest fire---a massive conflgration. But this would not be an ordinary big fire, with its relatively innocuous gases, and particulates. The particles rising on the hot air of this conflagration would be radioactive---a radioactive fire storm! Russian scientists estimate the huge cloud of particulates and gases from such a fire storm would be equivalent to that produced by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in the heart of central Europe! We are not passsed the threats and problems of Chernobyl!
Which brings up the question of the actual costs of nuclear power.
In the last quarter century, we have witnessed the frightening obverse of the nuclear power coin. The side nuclear power proponents always want to hide from us. The always present and all too likely consequences of human error and chance---nuclear disaster, distruction, radioactive contamination, long-term exclusion zones, and cancer deaths. After Chernobyl in 1986 we became wary and unsure of nuclear power saftey, but last year's disaster of Fukushima in Japan --- still smoldering since its March 11, 2011 earthquake-inundation-and-meltdown, followed now by the threat of a nuclear-forest fire in Chernobyl has (or should) convince the critical thinkers among us that a cost-to-benefit-ratio analysis of nuclear power falls much too heavily on costs and long-term negative effects. Recall that the Fukusima tragedy resulted in the rupturing of the containment vessels and releases of massive amounts of radioactivity into the air, and when the plant operators were forced to use sea water in a vain attempt to cool the melting reactors --releases of radionuclides into the Pacific ocean. Today, with Fukushima still a smouldering radioactive ruin sitting in a 12 km exclusion zone, and Chernobyl, its threat renewed as a result of its potential for a radioactive fire storm, the world is threatened by sources of nuclear contamination which can effect us all.
Is it not time now to revisit the actual costs of nuclear power? In retrospect what was presented to us as a safe, nay even desirable alternative to fossil-fuel power generation was the nuclear alternative....but today it is clear in view of Fukushima and the continuing saga of Chernobyl that those cost benefit analyses were flawed. It is time to make plans, as Germany has ,and now most recently, (Setember 2012) France, under Socialist Prime Minister Hollande has too, of retiring it's nuclear generators and moving toward cheaper and safer alternatives.
Get the picture?
rjk
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