Reply #18: Unlearned lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima [View All]

[Octafish]

Unlearned lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima

Do we collectively care about our planet, our home, this Earth, or don't we? When the economic bottom line rules decision-making, losses elsewhere can be staggering.


By Henry Shukman
Op-Ed
Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2011

EXCERPT...

After Reactor No. 4 blew up at Chernobyl power station on April 26, 1986, the resulting disaster took two years and 650,000 people to clean up. Except it will never really be cleaned up. Nuclear fallout and waste can be moved and sequestered, but not deactivated. Even today the meltdown at Chernobyl leaks radiation through cracks in the vast "sarcophagus" of steel and concrete that was intended to seal it. The whole area around it is still deeply, if unevenly, contaminated.

And that contamination isn't confined to Ukraine. A quarter-century later, there are farmers in Wales whose lamb is too radioactive to sell, and just last summer thousands of wild boar hunted in Germany were declared unfit for human consumption for the same reason.

In 1973, the ecological prophet E.F. Schumacher wrote, "No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an intangible danger to the whole of creation." He was talking about nuclear waste from the relatively young nuclear power industry. To pursue nuclear power, he declared, meant "conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all."

Does anyone still read Schumacher's "Small Is Beautiful"? It came out nearly 40 years ago, but it might as well have been written last year for its relevance today. Its central thesis is that we have allowed economics to overtake philosophy, religion and morality as the dominant ideological force in our world. Does it make sense to do X or Y? The answer will be found in the numbers, in the bottom line. No other concerns need be considered.

CONTINUED...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-shukman-chernobyl-20110403,0,1898317.story

You are welcome, Overseas. It is strange to see a world abandoned due to an invisible danger. Going from what Schumacher wrote, man's greed portends a dark future for humanity.