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If Nuclear Wants To Be Seen As Safe Energy, Fukushima Needs To Clean Up Its Act
The world needs clean energy alternatives. So far, solar, wind and nuclear are likely candidates. No real sustainability issues exist with solar and wind, which have been nature’s way of helping humankind for millennia.
Nuclear, on the other hand, exhibits systemic problems. Some of which are being staged right now as Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been given approval to dump one million tons of radioactive nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean on or about April 7.
(Remember: Fukushima Daiichi is the nuclear facility that gave us the Chernobyl-sized disaster in 2011. 5,321 square miles were evacuated around the plant.)
Since its origins in the 1950s, the nuclear energy industry has been engaged in a high wire act between safety and disaster. Existing beneath the shadow of the atomic bomb, the industry has weathered disasters at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union, and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011 — when a tsunami swamped the nuclear plant, owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).
Since then, storage of radioactive waste water at Fukushima has been a chronic problem. Seepage of heavy metals has occurred and fisheries off the Fukushima coast have been off limits ever…
