One of the curious features of the modern civilized world is that the health, safety, and lives of the MANY are put at risk to salve the egos of the FEW.
“The training wheels are off!” promised the admiral at the helm of a Tennessee company that has resumed production of nuclear fuel for the Navy after two incidents in 2009 shut the plant down.
Subsequent inspections turned up falsified inspection records and “multiple and repetitive performance issues.”
Dear Rep. Chris Murphy:
Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) is introducing new legislation – the Nuclear Power Plant Safety Act of 2011.
As your constituent, I am writing to urge you to co-sponsor his bill to ensure a safer future for all Americans. Rep. Markey said:
A nuclear disaster could happen here in America just as it has in Japan, our technological equal. This legislation will ensure that the lessons to be learned from the nuclear meltdown in Japan are incorporated into U.S. regulations to ensure the safety of our nuclear power plants in the United States.
As these catastrophic events have unfolded, it has become clear that the meltdown did not occur primarily because of earthquake-related damage; rather, it occurred because of a prolonged loss of electricity to the reactor cores and their spent nuclear fuel pools. Such events could be caused not just by earthquakes or tsunamis, but by severe storms, terrorist attacks or other events.
The Nuclear Power Plant Safety Act of 2011 will impose a moratorium on ALL new reactor licenses, reactor designs or license extensions until new safety requirements are in place.
If you or your staff have questions or need more information – or if you would like to cosponsor the legislation, please contact Dr. Michal Freedhoff of Markey’s staff at 202-225-2836.
Yours truly,
Charlie Keil
PS: People in Connecticut will be chernobylized and fukushima’d by Indian Point, geologically the most dangerous nuke plant in America! There are plants on fault lines in California that are less likely to “blow” or go “china syndrome” than Indian Point. Haven’t heard you say one mumblin word about the dangers of Indian Point. Do you know which way the wind blows most of the time? From the West to the East?
Don’t think I will vote for a Senator or a Congressman who doesn’t know which way the wind blows.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says that if the current situation continues for a long time, with accumulation of more radioactive substances, there will be “a huge impact on the ocean.”
From a summary of the current state of the disaster in The New York Times, 04/04/2011. A special issue of Nature is devoted to the disaster.
Alexis Rowell tell us why in this post at Transition Culture. Here’s the list:
Here’s what we need to do:
Read the full post to find out more.
That’s the title of an article Francesca Rheannon has published in Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire. Some of the workers have been hired by subcontractors and have been poorly paid, poorly trained, and poorly outfitted. And some of them have been, in consequence, badly injured. In some cases radiation levels were not being monitored in areas where workers were operating.
What’s the link between injured workers battling to contain the worsening nuclear disaster in Japan and the hundreds of thousands of Japanese residents as far away as Tokyo who are worrying about the radiation spreading invisibly into their air, water and soil? It’s not that the former are trying to protect the latter, although that is true. It’s that a company that takes worker health and safety as cavalierly as TEPCO does is one that takes the health and safety of the environment just as cavalierly.
Rheannon goes on to note: “In the case of Fukushima-Daiichi, the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster a year ago and upper Big Branch Mine disaster before that (just to mention the most famous accidents in recent history), all the companies involved had been cited for poor worker health and safety records before the disasters.”
Truth and Traditions 