It's to recognize that this is simply the nature of humans attempting to manage a material that's not, in practical terms, manageable. Japan’s (and Vermont Yankee's) recent problems are not episodic events of a leak here, a lie by a plant official there, a mistake there. They indicate the much deeper reality that is atomic energy.
How can
atomic industry be anything other than catastrophic? Human decision
making and management is imperfect. Unfortunately, nuclear energy
management requires perfection. And its impacts are often lethal,
carcinogenic and mutanagenic, for hundreds of lifetimes. Luckily we don’t
need nuclear energy – only one percent of the sunshine landing on earth is the
amount of energy humans currently use and about 45 percent of that is
flagrantly wasted (lighting parking lots at night and the like). And, as
has been noted before, we already have the best nuclear reactor we could ever
want; it's a safe distance of 90 million miles away and is called the sun.
The Greek's wrote the story of Pandora and the box Zeus gave her to warn people
against unending curiosity. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a similar attempt to warn society against making those things that we
cannot control.
The worst thing that could happen on a legislative end here is if the
politicians and regulators see these problems as “management mistakes,” as
episodic incompetent actions that "could have been
prevented." No new management scheme or reactor design will prevent
myriad other unforeseen mistakes at another time in the future.
Nuclear
energy has no tolerance for imperfection. We’d be wise to not throw more
good money, time and energy after bad. Let’s close Vermont Yankee,
finally, and get on with the development of renewing long-term sources of
non-lethal energy and attempt to manage the 1.2 million pounds of high-level
waste that already exists in Vernon. Isn't this enough of a challenge?
Ben Falk
Moretown
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