Op-Ed Contributors

Debate: Nuclear energy

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-23 08:01

Is nuclear energy clean and safe? A scholar swears it is, while another says we should think twice.

It's clean, it's safe, it's the future

Facts don't affirm popular belief

It's clean, it's safe, it's the future

By M.D. Nalapat

Western forces are striking Libya on the pretext of fighting a "tyrant", once again underscoring that oil is the primary cause of much of the modern world's conflicts. Iraq was attacked by United States-led forces in 2003 for the same reason and because Saddam Hussein refused to follow the example of many other countries in the region and favor the US and the European Union.

Not many people know that the US Department of Defense consumes close to 500,000 barrels of oil a day. Modern warfare is fuelled by oil, which is needed to keep aircraft, ships, tanks, trucks and other fighting vehicles moving, and to power missiles and rockets.

Since the end of World War II, the US and the European powers have stitched together a network of alliances to ensure cheap and easy access to oil. In countries whose leaderships are not close to them, such as Venezuela, they support regime change, as they did in Iraq - and now want to do in Libya.

And let us not forget the immense damage caused to the environment by fossil fuels, which emit pollutants that in turn cause many diseases and the deaths of millions of people. Yet despite such an abysmal record, the oil lobby in developed countries continues to ensure that the spotlight is trained on the only energy that can become a substitute within a decade, that is, nuclear energy.

After the man-made nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986, several theories were floated about the number of people who died because of radiation and radiation-related diseases. Some estimates put the death toll from radiation-related diseases at more than 175,000, while even the lowest estimates spoke of 10,000.

As US writer Gwyneth Cravens says, the group of 226,000 workers active in cleaning up the Chernobyl facility surroundings "received an average body dose of 1,000 millirems, less than they would have received from nature if they had moved to (the US) northeastern (state of) Washington for a year". She says that studies conducted on more than 500,000 workers involved in the cleanup "failed to find any correlation between the increased exposure to radiation and a rise in cancer or death rates". Ten years ago, a United Nations committee concluded that at Chernobyl, "there is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality".

But thanks to the immense reach of the oil lobby, such facts are kept hidden from the public, which is given daily doses of stories on the "dangers of nuclear power".

In India, foreign agencies which eager to ensure that the country does not develop into an economic superpower have been known to clandestinely fund protests and agitations against nuclear power and uranium mining. People living around nuclear power facilities - or a newly selected nuclear power plant site - are told that their lives are at risk, and that they should oppose nuclear power plants and uranium mining. India suffers from a serious shortage of uranium because powerful, hostile lobbies prevent the mining of this essential metallic element.