By far the worst catastrophes related to energy production have been brought about by hydroelectric dams. In his account of the most dangerous source of electricity, Lawrence Solomon also presents some very important, yet little known, perhaps even studiously overlooked facts about nuclear accidents. He comes up with very good news that unfortunately most people have been immunized to by the miseducation & media complex. Many people will be outraged at the surprisingly low death toll and the rather insignificant long-term health hazards (not to mention the inadvertent health benefits) associated with nuclear accidents. I apologise for causing them severe disappointment.
When the [the gigantic hydroelectric, G.T.] dams [of China, G.T.] failed, they unleashed a tsunami six meters high and 12 kilometres wide that inundated 29 counties and municipalities [costing more than 200,000 lives, G.T.]. The scale of the disaster compares to that of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. It cannot compare to the consequences of the radiation leaks from Japan’s Fukushima reactors, which, though dangerous to nuclear workers, are likely to cause no casualties among the general population.
Neither can it compare to either of the two other serious nuclear accidents that have occurred, at Three Mile island, which led to no deaths, and at Chernobyl, where United Nations agencies such as the World Health Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation have been steadily decreasing death estimates with the passage of time. Because the dead bodies have simply not materialized, the UN agencies now outright dismiss the very high estimates of death that came from organizations like Greenpeace, saying of them, “These claims are highly exaggerated.” The maximum number of deaths that the UN agencies estimated in 2005 was “a few per cent…. Such an increase could mean eventually up to several thousand fatal cancers.” Even here, the UN agencies expressed doubt that these predicted deaths could be substantiated. “An increase of this magnitude would be very difficult to detect, even with very careful long-term epidemiological studies,” it reported. The difficulty stemmed from the theoretical model that the UN was using to project deaths — known as the “linear no threshold” model, it amounted to a guesstimate that even the scientists who uphold it acknowledge to be unproven and unprovable.
Three years later, the UN distanced itself even further from claims that the Chernobyl accident could have killed many in the general population — the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation found only 15 fatalities from thyroid cancers. “Among the general population, to date there has been no consistent evidence of any other health effect that can be attributed to radiation exposure,” it reported. Because the theoretical models diverged so much from reality, it decided to set them aside. “The committee has decided not to use models to project absolute numbers of effects in populations exposed to low doses because of unacceptable uncertainties in the predictions,” it stated.
While deaths from nuclear accidents are hard to find, those from dams are not. Italy lost 2,000 people in a 1963 dam failure, France 400 in a 1959 failure. Smaller dam failures have led to lower losses of life in the U.K., the United States and Germany. The future will likely make the hazards of dam building more evident still, particularly in China, the world’s most aggressive dam builder.
According to the Chinese government itself, some 37,000 dams — 40% of its total — are at risk. In the decade ending in 2008, 59 dams were breached either due to torrential rains or shoddy construction. In 2008, Sichuan, home to 90% of China’s dams, suffered a devastating earthquake that damaged some 1,800 dams and left 69 of them in danger of catastrophic collapse.
Near Sichuan, situated atop two fault lines and upstream of Wuhan, population 10 million, lies the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest. If the Three Gorges dam failed catastrophically, as dam experts fear it might, the tsunami that would be unleashed would precipitate the world’s largest man-made disaster, with a death toll in the millions.
Make sure to read the entire article.
See also Chernobyl Revisited, Hiroshima Victims Live Longer, The Daily Media Meltdown, Fukushima - A Blessing in Disguise?, and Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant - Five Essential Pages on What Is Going On.
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