France, W. Germany and the USA.
Apparantly the near-catastrophe that shook the U.S.A. last month doesn't worry them. A bubble of explosive gases formed inside a reactor near Harrisberg, Pennsylvania, blocking the cooling system and threatening a 'melt-down'.
Thousands fled in panic and an alert was given that a forced evacuation might be needed.
As the US Atomic Energy Commission pointed out back in 1957, if the explosion had occurred:
* 50,000 people would have been stricken by radiation sickness;
* 4,000 would have died on the spot; and * increasing incidence of cancer would have developed over the next 10 years, leading to another 45,000 deaths.
Safety?
Perhaps the 'safety levels' are higher in Britain? Not on your life. Accidents of the Harrisberg type are not confined to the USA. At Windscale, for example, there have been at least 11 accidents -the 'reported' ones that is - since the fire in 1957. These include 6 leaks of radioactive waste, 2 more fires and high levels of radiation Over the past month, the Tories have been rushing headlong, to expand Britain's nuclear energy programme. Worried by the so-called 'drain' on oil reserves, they have made no secret of their interest in the nuclear death-traps already underway in release.
It is not just the horrendous possibility of a 'melt-down' that makes reactors like Windscale a potential time-bomb. Scientists nave admitted that radiation leaks cannot be completely eliminated and that the incidence rate of cancer among the workforce will therefore be high. A report by Dr. Alice Stewart at the Hanfold Atomic Energy the USA, confirms this. She discovered a 26% increase in cancer among the workforce there.
Moreover, there are the dangers of 'atomic waste'. As scientists at the Windscale Enquiry revealed, the waste from a nuclear reactor with a lifespan of thirty years lasts, in its deadly effects, for 30,000 years. Where is it going to be contained? In lead-lined canisters buried in the ocean or the bowels of the earth, as in Scotland? But what guarantees are there that the canisters will remain intact for 30,000 years -or that natural accidents won't burst them asunder?
Question The obvious question is - why should the Thatcher government be rushing into building reactors which, as experience shows, are a potential time-bomb? Perhaps give us a tew clues.
Before the 1974 recession, Upper Rhine, an area close to other industrial regions and wellserved by motorways. Oil, as an and the political 'instability Works, in the Middle East which made supplies 'insecure'.
& France - rapidly invested in nucmore 'secure' than oil and which offered massive returns on capital.
nuclear energy field is, obviously, motivated by the same considerations. Health and safety? What do that they are even replacing the "safer air-cooled reactors of the Harrisberg type by the more profitable water-cooled reactors.
Spineless ging the mad gamble with death nuclear plants represent, both the previous Labour government and