Why nuclear power will never be safe.

• Author: Grossman, Karl

With the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant continuing to unfold--with radioactivity still being discharged over Japan and carried by the winds spreading all over the world including to the United States--and with the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe having passed in April, some people ask: can nuclear power be made safe? The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.

This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the "father" of the US nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power--and urged that "we outlaw nuclear reactors."

The basic problem: radioactivity.

"I'll be philosophical," testified Rickover. "Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn't have any life--fish or anything." This was from naturally occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. "Gradually," said Rickover, "about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet ... reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.

"Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible," he said. "Every time you produce radiation" a "horrible force" is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. "And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself," Rickover stated.

This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.

The problem is radioactivity--unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn't matter whether it's a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westing-house pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the "new, improved" nuclear plants being touted by US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology. All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have -been--and continue to be--spewed from the Fukushima plants.

Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they're produced in a nuclear plant to when they're...