Green Party Says No New Nuclear Plants

The nuclear disaster in Japan is still posing a danger to the people there (and possibly in many other places as radioactive water keeps pouring into the Pacific Ocean). They just upgraded the disaster once again (from a level one to a level three continuing danger), after finding that contaminated water continues to leak from the plant -- water that is radioactive enough to give a worker five years worth of radiation in just one hour.

And in spite of this continuing disaster, some people in the United States continue to think the answer to our energy problems is to build more nuclear power plants -- plants that could easily cause this same kind of disaster in this country. Personally, I find it amazing that after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, anyone could still want to build more nuclear plants. How many disasters must happen before people realize that nuclear energy is just too dangerous?

There is at least one political party that sees the truth -- the Green Party. They know that building more nuclear plants is sheer insanity, when we have so much potential for clean and renewable energy sources -- sources that we have barely begun to tap. Here is what Harvey Wasserman (a member of the Green Party Shadow Cabinet) has to say on this matter:

As the horror show at Fukushima worsens by the day, our opposition to atomic energy becomes ever more vital. Now more than ever, we advocate a total "solartopian" shift to renewables for our planet's energy supply.

That transition has become even more essential as the nightmare at Fukushima deepens.

For decades the nuclear power industry has vehemently denied that a commercial reactor could explode.  When Chernobyl exploded, the industry said this could happen only to a Soviet reactor. But three reactors have now exploded at Fukushima. There are some two dozen reactors in the U.S. virtually identical to Fukushima Unit One. The three melted/exploded cores are missing. Steam emissions indicate there might still be fissioning going on at the site.

Meanwhile the spent fuel pool at Unit Four is perched 100 feet in the air.  If it loses coolant, or comes crashing to the ground, thousands of times more radiation will be released than was at Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Already Fukushima has emitted at least 20 times more radiation than those two bombings, most of it into the Pacific Ocean. Contaminated tuna have been caught as far away as California.  

Today we also know that at least 300,000 tons of highly radioactive liquid has leaked from at least one of the 1,000 or more storage tanks hastily constructed at the Fukushima site. We know that hundreds of thousands of gallons of contaminated groundwater has been pouring steadily through the site and into the ocean.  

It has been shown for many years that wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, ocean thermal, sustainable bio-fuels, increased efficiency and conservation and much more in terms of green energy can power this planet cheaply, cleanly and safely while creating millions of jobs and taking root far more quickly than any "new generation" of reactors.

We therefore urge that the nations of the world immediately focus their best energies on containing the horrifying contamination radiating from Fukushima while devoting all the technical, scientific and economic resources necessary to transition our global economy onto a Solartopia green-powered basis as rapidly as possible.