Buerkle's has never taken environmental issues seriously. She isn't curious about why people might be protective of the Skaneateles watershed against horizontal hydrofracking. She doesn't seem to associate the disaster, still unfolding today in Japan, with developing more nuclear power here, much less what to do with the existing plants, all tattered and degrading.
There are a couple of easy ways to figure out whether your current "expert" knows what they are talking about when it comes to nuclear power. One is, do they pronounce it "nuculear"? Another is do they address the problems associated with storing and guarding waste from nuclear power plants for 250,000 years? That is the length of the half-life of plutonium.
Washington can't even deal with a snow storm.
Below is an excerpt from a recent excellent and honest analysis of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima and what that means for the future of nuclear power. The entire article in Common Dreams is here.
Published on Thursday, June 16, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The Big Fukushima Lie Flies High
The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “The big lie flies high,” comments Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear.
Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.
Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plantsand U.S. government officials.
Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.
Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?
Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?
Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.
No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in Washington last week.
"They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Blueskygirl heartily recommends the longer article at Common Dreams.
Also, if you have never listened to Australian doctor and nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, find her on YouTube. Blueskygirl first heard her speak at Seabrook in New Hampshire before that notorious nuke was built.
