Chernobyl
(Santa Barbara, California) -- New technologies may change our lives for the better, but sometimes they have risks. Communicating those benefits and risks to the public, and developing regulations to deal with them, can be difficult -- particularly if there's already public opposition to the technology.
Thirty years ago today, March 28, 1979, with a former nuclear engineer in the White House and a newly-elected governor in Harrisburg, PA, the United States faced a crisis when a cooling system failure at a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island (TMI) power plant just south of the Pennsylvania capital threatened the safety of millions of people. Less than two years earlier, I had left a job in the nuclear power industry, disenchanted with my particular management but not with the technology itself.
The risk of thyroid cancer rises with increasing radiation dose, according to the most thorough risk analysis for thyroid cancer to date among people who grew up in the shadow of the 1986 Chernobyl power-plant disaster. The incidence of thyroid cancer was 45 times greater among those who received the highest radiation dose as compared to those in the lowest-dose group.
''This is the first study of its kind to establish a dose-response relationship between radiation dose from Chernobyl and thyroid cancer.''
The Nuclear Policy Research Institute (NPRI) today called on the Bush administration to reassess its commitment to the expansion of nuclear power; based on new study reported in the June edition of the International Journal of Epidemiology. The study documents a dramatic increase in thyroid cancers following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
A space-saving method for storing spent nuclear fuel has dramatically heightened the risk of a catastrophic radiation release in the event of a terrorist attack, according to a study initiated at Princeton. Terrorists targeting the high-density storage systems used at nuclear power plants throughout the nation could cause contamination problems "significantly worse than those from Chernobyl," the study found.
