This article is an excerpt from Chapter five in my new book The Chicken Little Agenda – Debunking Experts’ Lies. You can find out more about the book here, and can order the book from this link. This is the fourth of five parts for Chapter five that will be presented here sequentially. Read part three here.
Chapter 5
When Nuclear Goes Wrong
The Chernobyl Aftermath
A plume of radioactive fallout swept across Europe, leaving measurable contamination as far away as Finland. There was a veritable continent-wide panic. Whole towns were evacuated, and strange symptoms popped up in places where the fallout could not have reached, no matter what the circumstances.
In the final analysis, however, the health consequences were relatively small. According to the Nuclear Energy Agency (a specialized agency within the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental organization of industrialized countries, based in Paris), as of April 2001, a total of thirty-one persons had died as a direct consequence of the accident; they were all either plant personnel or directly involved in fighting the fire following the explosion. One hundred forty individuals from these same groups had suffered varying degrees of radiation sickness and health impairment, but all of these individuals recovered fully with no permanent consequences. Between 1990 and 1998, in the regions affected by the explosion and subsequent fallout, 1,791 cases of thyroid cancer were diagnosed and assumed to have been caused by the radiation release.
The deaths and injuries are tragic, of course. But this is a far cry from the misinformation contained in a Greenpeace Web site commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, which stated flatly that 2,500 people were killed, millions were affected, and hundreds of thousands displaced.
This was a stupid, completely unnecessary accident resulting from gross criminal negligence and total managerial incompetence, but it was not caused by a nuclear problem. This problem could only have happened within a political system that was completely out of contact with the real world. There is not the slightest possibility such an accident could ever occur anywhere else, first because the RBMK reactor is not used anywhere else and second because the controls in place everywhere else would absolutely prevent such a situation from developing, even if it could somehow commence.
The entire tragedy hinged upon the reactor becoming unstable when the coolant slowed, but this can only happen in the RBMK reactor, and nobody, absolutely nobody else, uses this model. All other reactors would have shut themselves down, period. The physical laws of the universe make it so, no matter what Greenpeace and the other Chicken Little nuclear fear mongers say.
© 2006 – Robert G. Williscroft
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