"And what about nuclear power?" That was the question posed by Senator McCain, speaking in Iowa some time ago on the issue of Global Warming. Now why didn't anyone think of that before? Here we all are generating our electricity from those pesky fossil fuels and contributing to Global Warming when the answer was staring us all in the face. Nuclear Power!
Now hold on just a darn a minute. I think I see a problem with Senator McCain's plan. This nuclear stuff is dangerous! It damages the environment, and I like the environment, it's where I live. Not to worry though. According to John McCain our fear of nuclear power is unfounded: "It's not a technological problem, it's a psychological problem!" Oh, a psychological problem you say. I see.
According to Senator McCain there is a magical place where they've worked out all those nasty little problems caused by nuclear power. A place where they don't have cancer clusters, radioactive leaks and increasing stockpiles of nuclear waste. So what's the name of this mystical land where children frolic with miniature ponies in the shadow of the cooling towers? Well it ain't Iowa, or even Kansas. No, it's France. Yes, I was as surprised as you are, but not as surprised as the 64 million people who live in France. They really had no idea they had it so good.
"My dear friends nuclear power is safe!" McCain declared. Now here is where I have to really take issue with Senator McCain, because nuclear power is not safe, in France or anywhere else. Don't believe me? Well, just ask the French. As the British guardian newspaper reported in July 2008 Areva, the French nuclear giant was forced to admit that one of its nuclear plants in south-eastern France had discharged radioactive material from a broken pipe. Areva, a firm that manufactures nuclear reactors and is involved in uranium reprocessing, confirmed that the crack in the underground pipe used to carry liquid uranium was "several years old". The French nuclear authority ASN said that luckily the leak did not reach the ground water.
Unfortunately, the French aren't always that lucky. Just one week earlier, another Areva plant polluted the public water supply with uranium. Drinking well water, irrigating crops, and water sports were all banned in the immediate area of the radioactive contamination. This, and other similar incidents, forced the French government to order tests on the water tables around all of its 59 nuclear reactors. Although, exactly how they were meant to distinguish between this radioactive pollution and that emitted in 2003, when the French government gave permission to nuclear plants to discharge contaminated water at higher temperatures than normal directly into the country's rivers, is unclear. The permission was granted in a desperate bid to avert power cuts as nuclear plants struggled to cope with rising temperatures. Isn't it lucky then that the heat wave we experienced in Europe in 2003, which claimed the lives of 35,000 people, was just a freak anomaly and not part of some "Global Warming" trend?
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Senator McCain continues to insist that nuclear power is safe. He insists that we shouldn't think about the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl, which resulted in a release of radioactive material that cost over 300,000 people their homes, and which the countries of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are still paying for in ongoing decontamination and healthcare costs. The human cost of this disaster was so great that in 1991 doctors in the effected area were forced to launch an international appeal. "SOS appeal. For god's sake, help us to get the children out." Doctors wrote this to have children temporally relocated to allow their young bodies to recover from the ravages of their radioactive environment. Some however, will never recover.
"We should find places to store nuclear waste, or we should reprocess it." McCain says. Wherever these "places" that John McCain's talking about are, let's hope that they're in low rent areas, because that nuclear waste will have to remain there for a couple of thousand years. Or, here's an even better idea. Let's not produce it at all.
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