{"id":625,"date":"2009-03-28T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2009-03-28T11:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/?p=625"},"modified":"2013-03-01T00:46:51","modified_gmt":"2013-02-28T22:46:51","slug":"thirty-years-after-harrisburg-time-to-let-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/2009\/03\/28\/thirty-years-after-harrisburg-time-to-let-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Thirty years after Harrisburg, time to let go."},"content":{"rendered":"

Thirty years ago to the day of this article, the so far worst nuclear accident in a power plant the world had ever seen took place. Unit number 2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,\u00a0suffered a loss of coolant accident<\/a>. This led to that most infamous of nuclear failure modes: a core meltdown.<\/p>\n

But despite that “everyone knows” a meltdown supposedly is the worst that could ever happen, with millions of dead and entire states rendered uninhabitable forever and ever, the effects of the TMI-2 accident are well documented with\u00a0no deaths, no injuries, no cancers. The only casualty that came from accident was said by nuclear physicist Edward Teller to be his heart attack, caused by the stress of seeing Jane Fonda using the event\u00a0to unjustly trashtalk nuclear power. With this in mind, maybe it’s time we had a little reality check when it comes to our nuclear fears, wouldn’t you say?<\/p>\n

Don’t get us wrong,\u00a0a nuclear meltdown still is no laughing matter.\u00a0Having a\u00a0vital energy producing unit that is\u00a0supplying hundreds of thousands of citizens with electricity unexpectedly becoming permanently disabled is of course not good. But there is a huge different between “not good”, and “the end of normal life as we know it”.<\/p>\n

Deriders of nuclear energy try to abuse the event by saying “They said it couldn’t happen, and yet it did”. This is simply not true. Noone ever said a nuclear accident cannot happen. The proof of this is in the accident itself, or rather its non-existing harmful effects. How can such a serious nuclear meltdown not harm anyone? The answer is simple: because we expected it might happen and prepared for it.<\/p>\n

The promise that was made was not that an accident wouldn’t happen, but that nuclear power would not harm anyone in the public. This promise has been kept for 55 years all throughout the world in all places except one, Chernobyl, for reasons obvious: the Soviet Union did everything <\/strong>wrong in ways that would have been considered appalling and shocking to the entire world, even before the accident, had we but known about them. Everywhere else, nuclear power has not harmed a single individual in the general public by cause of radioactive release. And in the\u00a0thirty years that has passed since the accident, we have only become better at enforcing this promise.<\/p>\n

It is definitely time to let go of the past and Harrisburg. The lessons have been learned. We are\u00a0moving on towards creating a sustainable future for ourselves and the next generations where all forms of clean energy has their given place in the energy mix. With\u00a0each coal plant we exchange for a nuclear fission reactor, we save\u00a0approximately 15 000 human lives over the course of the reactor’s lifetime.\u00a0\u00a0Nuclear power has never been safer and cleaner that it is today. Of course we shall stop being afraid of using it, instead having a healthy amount of respect for it, \u00a0especially if the only reason we have for\u00a0worrying is a thirty year old accident that didn’t harm anyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thirty years after the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, we are still not seeing any injuries from it. It’s about time we let go of old fears of nuclear power and look to the future. Harrisburg is history. <\/p>\n

Continue readingThirty years after Harrisburg, time to let go.<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,57],"tags":[90,104,166,106,145,88,165,89],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7303,"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/7303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuclearpoweryesplease.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}