Nuclear Power Plants

We all know the saying “Guns don’t kill. People do.” It is becoming evident that the same can be said for nuclear power plants.

What we have learned from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the Japanese reactors at Fukushima is that the people that build these plants and manage these plants are, just as in the case of the recent Gulf Oil disaster, more interested in their bottom line than in safety which costs money.

“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” is not acceptable for nuclear power.

Everywhere in the world, including in your country, evidence shows that those managing our nuclear reactors continuously file false safety reports, hide relevant information and have insufficient backup systems. Similarly regulatory agencies both national and international are complicit for protecting the industry rather than the public, all with impunity.

A nuclear reactor is a potential WMD. A Weapon of Mass Destruction and yet we build them over geological fault lines, in earthquake zones, and with discernibly inadequate backup safety systems.

You have only to look at the Japanese reactors. They lost power as a result of the earthquake and tsunami which caused the cooling pumps stopped working. Isn’t losing power a reasonably foreseeable event? Japan, sitting on the Ring or Fire, isn’t an earthquake even of massive proportions - a reasonably foreseeable event?

I am not advocating that the President of Tokyo Electric Power Co, the company that manages the Fukushima plant, or the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency should commit Hari Kari, but their negligent management should carry both public humiliation and criminal negligence penalties. The plant workers, working so hard trying to prevent a nuclear meltdown, shouldn’t be the only ones exposed to life altering consequences.

Japan’s parliament should hold Tokyo Electric civilly liable for all the direct and indirect costs of this disaster just as BP was held financially accountable for the Gulf Oil Spill. Someone should pay for the damages caused and it should NOT be the victims OR their tax dollars.

As much as I hate to admit it, we need nuclear power plants. But we also need standards of construction and maintenance that must be observed and vigilantly managed. We need standards that foresee natural disasters, human error and even terrorist attack to computer systems and physical containment.

Look how far we have gone to protect air travel since the era of hijackings and 9-11. Shouldn’t we apply a similarly vigilant system to our nuclear facilities?