Urbin Report

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Another Greenie for safe, clean Nuclear Power

By way of Hot Air is this Wired story about Gwyneth Cravens, an environmentalist who now supports clean, safe Nuclear Power.





WN: People still fear Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. You say neither of these catastrophic events was as harmful as widely believed.

Cravens: Chernobyl's reactor had no containment building. If they had had that reactor in a containment dome, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we are. But there was a radioactive release, and people were affected. So far about 60 people have died, most of them -- almost all of them -- from immediate exposure when they were fighting the fire in the reactor, and the emergency workers.
Three Mile Island really scared people, partly because it was so badly bungled by nuclear industry and regulatory commissions. The psychological effects were real, but in a dozen independent studies, no health effects have been found as a result of the Three Mile Island event.

Radiation was never a risk at Three Mile Island. People in New Mexico, every day of their lives, get from nature maybe 100 or 300 times more exposure than citizens around Three Mile Island got during that event.

Bryan reminds us of the old joke, "more Americans have died in Ted Kennedy’s car than from nuclear accidents."