From Life Comes From Life, Introduction: “..For instance, despite the recent outcry over their masking the difficulties of maintaining safety standards at nuclear power plants, the scientists and the government remain committed to nuclear power and even make light of the fact that there is no safe way of dealing with radioactive waste…”
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“Nuclear Power is the wrong path, Mrs. Merkel!”
12 September 2010, Germany: ‘Nuclear Power is the wrong path, Mrs. Merkel!’ was the message Greenpeace sent to the German Chancellor by projecting it on the Emsland nuclear power plant. Greenpeace is calling on German Chancellor Angela Merkel not to extend the operation time of nuclear power plants in Germany.
We need an energy system that can fight climate change, based on renewable energy and energy efficiency. Nuclear power already delivers less energy globally than renewable energy, and the share will continue to decrease in the coming years.
Despite what the nuclear industry tells us, building enough nuclear power stations to make a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gasemissions would cost trillions of dollars, create tens of thousands of tons of lethal high-level radioactive waste, contribute to further proliferation of nuclear weapons materials, and result in a Chernobyl-scale accident once every decade. Perhaps most significantly, it will squander the resources necessary to implement meaningful climate change solutions. (Briefing: Climate change – Nuclear not the answer.)
The Nuclear Age began in July 1945 when the US tested their first nuclear bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico. A few years later, in 1953, President Eisenhower launched his “Atoms for Peace” Programme at the UN amid a wave of unbridled atomic optimism.
But as we know there is nothing “peaceful” about all things nuclear. More than half a century after Eisenhower’s speech the planet is left with the legacy of nuclear waste. This legacy is beginning to be recognised for what it truly is.
Things are moving slowly in the right direction. In November 2000 the world recognised nuclear power as a dirty, dangerous and unnecessary technology by refusing to give it greenhouse gas credits during the UN Climate Change talks in The Hague. Nuclear power was dealt a further blow when a UN Sustainable Development Conference refused to label nuclear a sustainable technology in April 2001.
The risks from nuclear energy are real, inherent and long-lasting.
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