Green. Not New. Deal.

The actual science about the dangers of nuclear power – or lack thereof – is not “settled” so much as it is  very, very convincing:

“By now close to one million people have died of causes linked to the Chernobyl disaster,” wrote Helen Caldicott, an Australian medical doctor, in The New York Times. Fukushima could “far exceed Chernobyl in terms of the effects on public health.”

Many pro-nuclear people came to believe that the accident was proof that the dominant form of nuclear reactor, which is cooled by water, is fatally flawed. They called for radically different kinds of reactors to make the technology “inherently safe.”

But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.

It’s a long read, but an excellent one…

…whose conclusions show that any “Green New Deal” that doesn’t include nuclear power, isn’t about saving the environment.

One thought on “Green. Not New. Deal.

  1. For Fukushima, wasn’t there a guy or two who went in there knowing the radiation would kill him? So there may be a few deaths, but point well taken otherwise.

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