Fallout

Over the weekend I went to the gallery in the Oxo Tower on the South Bank of the Thames. They have a striking and heartbreaking collection of photos of those affected by the Chernobyl disaster and other nuclear disasters/mistakes in Russia. Children with mental retardation and multiple cancers. Older people who have recovered from cancer, only to be struck down by it again - and knowing they will only get the treatment until one of their major organs fails. Whole villages of people desperate, but too ill and poor, to move on.

It is, I think, impossible to view this collection and not be affected by it. The gut reaction is to turn against nuclear power, and Greenpeace were at the gallery, tacitly asking others to sign a petition to get Blair to promise the he will not build other nuclear power plants in the UK. But the question remains - with oil and coal supplies dwindling, and the NIMBY campaigns stopping the likes of wind and solar energy, is there anyway we can turn our backs on nuclear power?

Because reading between the lines of the locales depicted in the exhibition, and what happened at Chernobyl, it is less about nuclear power itself being the problem, but rather carelessness and negligence on the part of those involved in the Nuclear power stations. Take Mayak, for example. As the link shows, Mayak pumped radioactive waste into a local river. That does not imply that nuclear power itself, is wrong, but rather that human ignorance and negligence is the problem. Nuclear power is fine as long as those responsible for the plants know what they are doing. The problem arises when they don't.

Also you can compare nuclear power to air travel - generally it is perfectly safe, but when it goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong. A nuclear plant goes up, you have a holocaust. A plane goes down, and no-one survives. But people still use air travel, because they sum up the risk and decide it is worth it. The same applies to nuclear power. If there are real, usable alternatives then fine, let's not use it. But whilst there aren't real alternative solutions, we have to take the risk.

But as with any risks we also need to minimise the chance of things going wrong. And if you look at the nuclear industry in Russia, far too much focus is on making money, and far too little on the local people.