This situation with nuclear power reminds me of another ill-fated energy issue: the recent recent BP disaster on one of their deep water drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico that spread 205 gallons of crude oil along 280 or so miles of the Louisiana coastline just last year. Not enough redundant safety systems, and those that they had were probably never going to be sufficient.
Where there's money involved, we will apparently find it impossible to err on the side of safety or sanity.
Despite how unlikely an event is judged to be, if the worst case scenario is an unremediable disaster that we can't figure out how to prevent, then it seems to me we shouldn't do it. Economic benefit/cost analyses be damned, particularly where the economists involved have an economic interest in the venture, whether they rely on employment in the oil company or the governmental agency regulating it.
The value they place on things like clean air and water are just made up numbers anyway. Sort of like the valuation of life years involved in the Pinto (Ford) debacle. The "fix" to their fuel system would have cost them $11 per car, but the cost/benefit analysis came out on the side of not fixing the design flaw ($50 million dollars' value placed on deaths versus the $137 million dollars it would have cost them to fix their cars). At least jurors had the right idea, awarding $128 million dollars in damages in the first court case, which was trimmed back by $125 million by the appellate judge, as a "matter of law."
If I had to bet on endeavors of the human race versus acts of nature (or chaos) I'd go with nature/chaos every time.
But I digress:
In pondering, writing, speaking to friends and researching the effects of nuclear radiation, I came across information that led me to believe that my mother, a cancer survivor might be eligible for compensation for living near nuclear testing sites. Apparently if you lived in certain counties in Nevada from 1951 to 1958 for 2 years and you got cancer (from bladder to brain to breast-- there's a list) you're called a "downwinder" and there's a trust set up for you by the US government to compensate you for being exposed to their 200 some nuclear tests --and, bonus, you get $50,000. My mother-- who had breast breast cancer twice, lived in Reno, NV in the county of Washoe in the early 1950s. Alas, too far to the west.
Here is the website for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Fund:
http://www.justice.gov/civil/torts/const/reca/about.htm
The "downwinders compensation fund" was only established via an amendment to a federal statute for miners and military employees, in the year 2000.
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| Here is my family Atlas. The yellow areas are those where the "downwinders" can receive compensation for radiation exposure from nuclear testing |
Another friend just suggested that mom might have been exposed to radiation from nuclear waste from the Hanford Plant that has seeped into the water tables in Oregon and Washington. My mother was raised in Grays River, WA and lived in Portland, OR for most of her life. And it is true that all of our proximate neighbors on 23rd Street in Portland had cancers, mostly breast cancers that weren't fatal. However, our neighbors to the rear of us were stricken with breast cancer (the mom) and a lymphoma (the son, my age) that caused both of their deaths.
Post Script:
Now the Japanese press is saying that the wind is blowing toward the ocean and not toward the populace in the vicitinities involved. That's supposed to be good news. What a consolation. What about my people on the West Coast?
