Comment & Debate
Patrick Moore, the Founder of Greenpeace. “Going Nuclear A Green Makes the Case.” Washington Post. April 16, 2006: “[Myth:] Nuclear plants are not safe. Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up.”
Mark Brandly. “The Case for Nuclear Power”. Virginia Viewpoint. October, 2001: “We should also acknowledge the Chernobyl accident in the Ukraine. The Chernobyl plant explosion released radiation into the surrounding area. Such an explosion would have been contained in a U.S. plant. The Chernobyl plant lacked a fundamental safety structure found in western plants, a steel-reinforced concrete shell that completely encapsulates the nuclear reactor vessel. The Chernobyl tragedy exhibits the failure of government planners, not an inherent danger of nuclear power.”
Max Schulz. “Nuclear Power Is the Future”. Wilson Quarterly. Fall, 2006: “Chernobyl was different. The 1986 accident spiraled out of control partly because of human error by the Soviet-trained engineers, but more because of the nuclear plant’s tragically flawed design. Many reactors built in the Soviet era, as Chernobyl was, did not feature the containment buildings found at virtually every other facility around the world. A toxic plume of radioactive fallout drifted across the Soviet Union, the rest of Europe and Asia, and even as far as North America. Hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine and Belarus were forced to relocate permanently. Several dozen people perished in the first few months after the accident. A recent United Nations report suggested that as many as 4,000 people will die from radiation-induced cancers tied to the disaster. Had Chernobyl been built with the containment structures standard in nuclear reactors the world over, that tragedy could have been avoided.”