Anti-nuclear campaigns
There can be little doubt that one of the greatest threats to human existence comes from the dangers associated with nuclear energy. The danger is not confined to acts of warfare or terrorism resulting in the detonation of nuclear explosive devices. There is also significant potential danger from nuclear power plants and nuclear processing facilities. These have the frightening potential to radioactively contaminate vast swathes of the landscape as well as oceans and rivers.
It is hardly surprising then that millions of people throughout the developed world have serious reservations about the spreading menace of nuclear power and that many organisations have sprung up for the purpose of opposing nuclear development and educating people as to its inherent dangers. Concern grew initially with continued development of nuclear weapons and more specifically the testing of these weapons, which many people perceived was itself a great danger.
As the world of science became more aware of the problems associated with exposure to radiation more and more groups were formed to try and bring about a cessation of nuclear weapons testing and many of these groups also expressed concern at the expansion of the nuclear power industry. Protest marches took place all over the world. In the US up to 50,000 marchers in 60 cities took part in a protest campaign against nuclear weapons called Women Strike for Peace in 1961.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was founded in the UK in 1957 to protest against Britain’s participation in nuclear weapons testing. It objected to development, testing and transport of nuclear weapons and campaigned against the sale by Britain of nuclear materials to other nations. The following year CND commissioned a logo which has been adopted as the international peace symbol. Its membership reached its highest level in the early 1980’s when tension increased between east and west over American deployment of missiles in European bases. Conversational Hypnosis CND is still active today and organizes an annual protest march from Central London to the nuclear research facility at Aldermaston.
Friends of the Earth International is a loose network of organizations from many different countries around the globe. The organization is opposed to developments which adversely affect the environment and includes opposition to nuclear power in its portfolio.
Another international organization opposed to nuclear power is Greenpeace which is headquartered in Holland and has branches in more than 40 countries including the US and the UK. As with Friends of the Earth it is not exclusively concerned with opposition to nuclear power. Greenpeace received worldwide publicity in 1985 when a special operations unit of the French foreign intelligence service blew up the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand. The Rainbow Warrior was in New Zealand en route to lead protests against France’s testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific.
One of the longest anti-nuclear protests to take place was at the Greenham Common air force base in England. The protest began in 1982 and eventually a number of small encampments were set up around the base and remained there until 2000.
Nuclear power plants are dangerous neighbours
The near-disaster at the Fukushima power plant in Japan in early 2011 following an earthquake and tsunami highlighted once again the dangers associated with nuclear power plants.
It is less than sixty years since the first nuclear power plant opened in Russia and in that relatively short time there have been numerous accidents ranging from what scientists label “not too serious” to potentially devastating disasters. And there have been many,many more incidents which could chillingly be described as near misses.
To understand why nuclear power plants are dangerous it is necessary to know what goes on inside a nuclear power plant. A nuclear plant is designed to generate electricity from turbines which are powered by steam. Fat Loss 4 Idiots The steam is created by using energy released during nuclear fission to heat water. Nuclear fission refers to the splitting of atoms of uranium and the process results in the release of very high amounts of radiation.
Radiation contaminates everything it comes in contact with and apart from generating electricity, the nuclear power plant is also generating lots of potentially harmful radioactive material and this material must be contained safely within the plant and managed safely after its removal from the plant. It is the presence of so much radioactive material that makes nuclear power plants so dangerous because once radioactive material is released there is very little that can be done to prevent contamination of people, animals and the environment.
If the release of radioactive material is into the air, that material can distribute contamination for thousands and thousands of miles. It is literally in the laps of the gods as to how the wind blows and carries its deadly cargo with it. Following the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, scientists throughout Europe were able to detect radioactive particles from the plant and their colleagues in Canada and Japan could do likewise.
The accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were down to human error while the one at Fukushima was due to a natural disaster. In all three cases it is clear that despite making safety a top priority in designing and building nuclear power plants these plants remain a hazard to the public. Recognising this hazard, the Italian people voted in a referendum in 1987 to close down Italy’s nuclear power plants and reaffirmed their opposition in 2009 when rejecting attempts by the government to commission new nuclear power plants.
The death toll from nuclear accidents is impossible to calculate because radiation can be a slow and insidious killer. People can develop cancers a long time after being exposed to the radiation. Added to this is the fact that contamination takes decades to disappear and there is no precise way to link a radiation triggered illness to an event that happened many years in the past. The Power Of Conversational Hypnosis There is also evidence that the children of exposed people who were not even conceived at the time of the exposure have a higher tendency to develop life-threatening conditions but these would never be included in any official death toll.
Nuclear power is bad for the environment
Nuclear power simply cannot exist without compromising the environment. The manufacturing of electricity by using nuclear energy requires the creation of continuous nuclear reactions in a controlled environment. Nuclear energy plants create steam to drive turbines, but they also create, as a by-product of the process, tons of radioactive material. Apart from the risk of an accident causing the release of dangerous radiation into the environment, a nuclear power plant has to manage the disposal of radioactive waste which is created during the process. The risk of contaminating the soil and water supply is very real and even steps such as growing fruit in an orangery or housing animals in sheds won’t protect against exposing vital food supplies to hazardous material.
The world’s first nuclear power plant opened at Obninsk in Russia in 1954 less than ten years after the United States had demonstrated the awful power that could be created by nuclear chain reactions. Argan Oil Many countries around the world were quick to follow suit, with the United States opening its first nuclear power plant in 1958. Nuclear power was seen as a better, more economical means of generating electricity than traditional methods.
The nuclear power lobby was commercially driven and when money is the bottom line attention to safety and adopting a cautious approach are not high priorities. Billions were spent on marketing campaigns to convince people that nuclear energy was clean, efficient, commercially cheaper than other forms of energy and most of all that it was safe.
Many of the facts about the dangers of radiation published during these campaigns were based on expert opinion about safe levels of radiation at the time. But hindsight is a wonderful teacher and many of the so-called safe limits for exposure to radiation have been drastically reduced since the first plant opened. Gossip Column Unfortunately, many people have lost their lives or contracted serious illnesses and many communities have suffered the dreadful side effects of radiation exposure and still the issue of safety in the nuclear industry does not appear to be at the very top of priorities.
When a nuclear power plant goes wrong, it tends to go spectacularly wrong and the outcome is often massive and widespread environmental damage. Ledome Aruba It is not an exaggeration to say that the extent of the environmental damage caused by a nuclear accident can be global.
Most types of man-made environmental crises tend to be correctable. They may cause extensive damage and take many years to put right but the environmental damage can be repaired. Emergencies like the BP oil-well explosion in the Gulf of Mexico cause extensive damage, but that damage is repairable. The oil that escapes can eventually be mopped up and is unlikely to cause any problems on the other side of the globe.
Environmental damage caused by radiation leaks is far more difficult to repair. Radiation will contaminate everything it comes into contact with. This means that a leak of radioactive water into the sea will contaminate fish and marine plants and every creature that eats or comes into contact with these will also be contaminated. This contamination continues right up through the food chain. Rise Up Inc The only way to clean up is to track down and remove every radioactive particle – an impossible task.
Treaties to stop the use of nuclear weapons
Almost immediately after using nuclear weapons to bring about the surrender of Japan in the Second World War, the United States, recognizing the awful destructive power of the technology it had developed, set about trying to make sure that such weapons would never be used again.
President Truman commissioned a report into how the US could arrive at a situation where it could safely dismantle its nuclear weapons facilities. Apartments Miami The report team came up with the suggestion of an international authority which would supersede the authority of every government and could impose sanctions on any country found to be developing weapons or trying to manufacture fissionable material (such material is required to make a nuclear weapon).
The proposal was presented to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission where it was rejected because the Soviet Union vetoed it. But it did lead indirectly to the formation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957. This agency was formed by and is financed by the UN, but is supposedly autonomous in nature. Its brief is to promote peaceful applications of nuclear science. Nowadays its main concern is with nuclear safety and the promotion of best practice in nuclear applications.
Despite the setting up of the IAEA, development, testing, deployment and stockpiling of nuclear weapons continued apace with the Soviet Union, Britain and France soon joining the US in the nuclear arms race. As relations between the US and the Soviet Union became more and more strained as the Cold War escalated, efforts to encourage dialogue between the two nations with a view to encouraging disarmament grew in intensity but to little avail. Instead, the nations carried on regardless eventually arriving at the situation whereby each had a sufficient arsenal of nuclear weapons to obliterate the other entirely. This scenario came to be known as mutually assured destruction with the very appropriate acronym MAD.
When China successfully detonated a nuclear weapon in 1964 it served to kick-start efforts to produce an international agreement that would limit the development of nuclear weapons and hopefully lead to disarmament. These efforts led in 1968 to the formation of the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee, which presented a proposal to the United Nations General Assembly. The proposal led to the drafting of the Non-Proliferation Treaty which was eventually signed by the US, the UK, the Soviet Union and 40 other countries in 1970. Today the treaty has 189 signatories. North Korea did sign the treaty but then broke the terms and withdrew form the treaty in 2003. Israel, a country many people believe has nuclear weapons, never joined the treaty. Neither did India or Pakistan, both of whom have detonated nuclear weapons since the treaty came into existence.
The most effective treaties to stop nuclear weapons have been the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties drawn up by the US and the Soviet Union, later Russia. The first treaty was signed in 1991 and the second in 2010. Texas High School Football Hall Of Fame The first treaty led to the gradual removal of nuclear weapons over the duration of the treaty and at the end had resulted in an 80% reduction in weapons.
Preventing nuclear disasters – the impossible task
Prevention of nuclear disasters can only be achieved by the dismantling of all nuclear weapons and halting all research, decommissioning all nuclear power plants, seeking environmentally friendly alternative power generation options and establishing an international monitoring body with real powers to ensure that every country is genuinely nuclear free. It is necessary for global laws to be introduced to ensure the adherence of all countries to anti nuclear policies; just as an injury lawyer is needed to ensure that large companies honor the rights of their injured workers according to the law. Nothing short of “nuclear free” status is ever going to provide insurance against nuclear disasters. Incidents like that at the Fukushima plant in Japan prove that man is incapable of building safe nuclear power plants. Fukushima is one of the newer nuclear plants designed to remain safe in the face of human error and damage due to external factors, yet it demonstrated graphically that a common geological problem which Japan was fully aware of and has faced since time immemorial clearly had not been taken fully into account when the plant was commissioned.
Even if global nuclear free status were to be achieved, as a global society we have already stashed enough nuclear waste in holding areas around the world to give ourselves the potential for a disaster and that potential is set to last for hundreds of years. However, to continue down the path we are now on will only make the prevention of disasters an ever more difficult goal to achieve.
There has never been a time in written human history when there was not a conflict between tribes somewhere in the world. As our species became more inventive, the weapons of choice used in conflicts became ever more deadly, culminating in the most deadly weapons of all – the nuclear bombs and missiles. In the brief history of the nuclear weapons age, we have seen how deadly these weapons can be. We have also seen that in the nuclear age, nuclear facilities themselves become prime targets in offensive missions. So we now live with the dreaded scenario of a nuclear missile being dropped on a nuclear silo or a nuclear processing plant thereby magnifying the damage caused by the attack.
This type of scenario can never be prevented by improving defenses or adopting strategies such as never keeping weapons at the same location for long periods but moving them to different locations on a regular basis. Trying to move missiles undetected is essentially impossible in the modern era and nuclear generating stations by definition have to be static. Therefore, both these types of nuclear installations are always going to be vulnerable to attack and the only safe option is to remove them completely.
The very transportation of nuclear weapons, nuclear fuel and nuclear post poses its own substantial risks. Those responsible try to reassure us that every possible precaution is taken to ensure maximum safety from crash-proof storage of nuclear material to the prevention of terrorist attacks. The trouble is that no system can be proved safe until it has been subjected to every possible form of attack and history has shown that it is attacks, whether by nature or humans, in unexpected areas or by unexpected means that have revealed the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in defensive systems.