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MELTDOWN: A RACE AGAINST NUCLEAR DISASTER AT THREE MILE ISLAND

Page history last edited by RichiesPicks 14 years, 7 months ago

10 July 2002 MELTDOWN: A RACE AGAINST NUCLEAR DISASTER AT THREE MILE ISLAND by Wilborn Hampton, Candlewick Press, October 2001

 

God bless my public library. I'm curled up in front of my computer at 6:30 A.M., marshaling my thoughts about nuclear power--a topic which monopolized my life for several years during the late 1970s--and I'm wondering how I can locate a copy of Amory Lovins' seminal essay on energy in the October 1976 issue of Foreign Affairs. Turns out it takes just five little key-steps from my library's homepage (http://www.sonoma.lib.ca.us/), and I am able to view a pdf file of the 32 page article! I utilized that article, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken," back then as the foundation to my own argument--that the electricity from the twin nuclear power plants, then proposed for eastern Long Island, was unnecessary.

 

If our years of protests and legal intervention hadn't already killed plans for constructing those twin nuclear plants, they were officially pronounced dead after the nation spent a scary few days awaiting the outcome of events in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

 

MELTDOWN: A RACE AGAINST NUCLEAR DISASTER AT THREE MILE ISLAND, by Wilborn Hampton, is a great introduction for young adults about what it's like to be a journalist. More importantly, it's a chronicle by a journalist on the scene of the events at Three Mile Island in the spring of 1979, where we got lucky--a catastrophe that would far outweigh that of 9-11 was narrowly averted. A full understanding of the extent of that potential disaster can only be grasped when viewed in relation to the 1986 nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl, which is the subject of MELTDOWN's final chapter:

 

"There is no official death toll for Chernobyl. At the time, the Soviet government reported that 31 people died in the accident. But since the breakup of the Soviet Union, more honest assessments of the extent of the tragedy have come out. The Ukraine, which is now an independent nation, has aid that more than 4,300 people died there. Nearly all the firemen who battled the blaze that first night are now dead, most from cancer or other radiation-related illnesses...Deaths among the soldiers and workers who built the concrete shell around the [damaged and contaminated] reactor are estimated to number at least 6,000...

 

"The land around the Chernobyl plant is a wasteland. Ukrainian officials say that 160,000 square kilometers [approximately 62,000 square miles] were contaminated with radioactive fallout at a level forty times greater than the level of radiation that Hiroshima or Nagasaki received from the first atomic bombs...Pripyat is now a ghost town...Bulldozers have buried most of the houses, and the old apartment blocks are deserted, the possessions of the former inhabitants too radioactive to reclaim...

 

"In Gomel, a town about sixty miles north of Chernobyl that received perhaps the heaviest concentration of radioactive fallout, the local orphanage is full of infants and young children as a result of what has become an epidemic of birth defects now being born to women who received large doses of radiation."

 

A young adult reading such awful facts and considering the root causes of why such potentially catastrophic technology is "necessary" may well be a young adult who, at the very least, decides to turn off their light the next time they leave the room.

 

Furthermore, MELTDOWN provides a comprehensible introduction to nuclear power for the young adults who are growing up facing the world's aging inventory of nuclear power plants--and the ever-increasing quantities of highly radioactive nuclear waste from those power plants (which has been a hot topic just this past week).

 

Common sense dictates that many of these plants will need to be abandoned in the not-so-distant future. Face it: it's one thing for me to keep my 1980 Datsun station wagon on the road, but I can afford to have something break down on it. (Actually that thought makes me a bit nervous.) We expect someone to be watching out for us when it comes to such things as geriatric commercial airliners. But who is going to going to make the decisions regarding the antiquated nuclear plants that currently produce such a significant portion of our nation's electric supply? MELTDOWN gives young adults a head start on considering this dilemma.

 

Its readability and the significance of the subject matter, combined with a fine glossary and a list of recommended resources, make MELTDOWN: A RACE AGAINST NUCLEAR DISASTER AT THREE MILE ISLAND a must-have. It provides today's young adults an opportunity for examining a pivotal episode from our energy past and an incentive for contemplating their energy future.

 

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com

 

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