I am sending the following to local, state, and federal officials, the media, and others regarding the important facts about Japan’s nuclear power disaster, which have been grossly neglected.
The disaster in Japan regarding their old nuclear plants has been devastating. The disaster has generated the greatest media attention to radiation leaks from the older nuclear plants. It is a travesty that the most important item has been neglected.
Japan’s older plants affected by the earthquake and tsunami have much less containment than plants in the United States. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant had no containment structure. In comparison, California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant has 3-foot-thick, concrete, dome-shaped containment structures. Each reactor’s concrete structure is embedded with six layers of 2 1/4-inch rebar.
It is my understanding that other United States nuclear plants have containment requirements similar to the Diablo plant. There needs to be an understanding that there is virtually no risk for a similar disaster in California and the large majority of nuclear plants in the United States.
It is unfortunate that a large segment of the media and the public do not understand the natural and produced radiation that we live with every day. There is a threshold level, and levels beyond that have no health effect. All x-rays and other medical devices produce radiation. An airplane flight or living in a mile-high region exposes people to more natural radiation than those living at sea level, due to being closer to the sun.
The United States is fortunate to have nuclear plants that are safely operated and protected under multiple redundancies, and we need to build additional nuclear power plants as part of our program to become energy independent. Renewable energy sources—such as wind, solar, ocean waves, and others—will not provide the quantity needed for energy independence.
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 7, 2011.
