BeardedBruce has succeeded in finding a current article which greatly understates the impact of accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. I really hate to see the PR people for the nuclear industry get away with this.

I worked as an anti-nuclear organizer for over ten years on this issue, from 1982 to the early 1990's based in Maine. There's nothing like being involved to make one aware of skillful editing. My parents spent 5 years challenging the siting of the Maine Yankee nuclear plant from 1968 to 1973. It's an issue with a long half-life.

First of all the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 was in fact a partial melt-down of the reactor core. A year or so after the accident plant worker and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff were able to determine that the melted fuel rods had eaten their way through the containment vessel and then pooled beneath it. The public in the immediate vicinity and those downwind were very lucky that more radioactive gas didn't escape from the plant than did. The reactor engineers at the time of the accident had no clue that the reactor containment vessel had been breached. Even today there are few people aware that there was a partial meltdown of the fuel rods.

The Chernobyl accident in 1986 was much worse. While the immediate deaths from radiation was limited to a few dozen emergency workers, hundreds more have died since then from radiation poisoning, and the final toll will probably be in the thousands. The children in the Ukraine were the most vulnerable, thousands are still under treatment for thyroid cancer. The estimates of mortalities and illness are mitigated by the fact that hundreds of thousands of residents were evacuated from the contaminated areas and are difficult to track long term. With the exception of a few senior citizens, very few people have moved back into the areas from which they were evacuated. The economic costs of this accident were catastropic to the economy of the Ukraine.

In additional to the risk of catastropic accidents, there is also the lingering issue associated with successful nuclear power generation: what should be done to safely store the highly radioactive spent fuel for hundreds of thousands of years? Nor do the nuclear power advocates mention the massive low level radioactive contamination that happens when the uranium ore is concentrated into nuclear fuel.

What a disgusting shell game!

Charley Noble