eg magazine sustainability, resource efficiency & climate change

Comment from European Women’s and Environmental Network WECF

Japan has recently been hit by the biggest earthquake in its history – devastating lives and profoundly impacting the country.  To make matters worse, its nuclear power plants have also been affected, radiation levels have surpassed the maximum allowed levels and populations are being evacuated, demonstrating once more that nuclear industry is unsafe.

WECF has been working with victims of nuclear disasters since 1994, including communities living near uranium mines and nuclear test sites, and Chernobyl and Mayak victims. Currently, plans exist to build 60 nuclear power-plants worldwide, often with the argument that nuclear energy is needed to mitigate the effects of climate change through reducing the quantity of greenhouse gases released into the atmposhere.   What is often overlooked, however, is that nuclear plants are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. They require large amounts of cooling water, and need to be taken off the grid in times of drought – a climate condition which countries are likely to increasingly experience due to climate change. As the severe forest fires in Russia last summer showed - which almost reached their nuclear power plants – climate change can lead to nuclear disasters similar to Chernobyl.  Nuclear power plants continue to remain a radioactive threat after they have stopped operating, but what if the entire plant ends up under water because of rising sea levels – as would happen to the planned new power plants in the Netherlands?

As Sabine Bock, director of WECF Germany says “There is not one insurance company which will insure nuclear industry for the immense damage which can occur in the case of a disaster. In the end, it is the taxpayers and the future generations which pay – with their health, lives and land”. We can only try to imagine the current situation is in Japan, and hope that such a disaster will never be repeated. The country is reeling from the effects of the disaster, and our best wishes go out to those effected.

WECF partner Natalia Manzurova, nuclear scientist and one of the few remaining liquidators of Chernobyl still alive, explains what happened 25 years ago: “try to imagine if a similar nuclear catastrophe would happen here, in this city, and that all of us would be requested to leave our job places immediately and would be transported away in buses. We would not know what had happened to our families, or our children. We would be asked to undress and put on new strange clothes. We would know that we would never be able to go home and live in our former town again – we would have lost our past, and our future.”

WECF believes that this is unacceptable, and calls for a phase-out of nuclear energy as soon as possible, and a halt to nuclear ‘research’ subsidies.  It finds it unacceptable that the European Commission has further increased the research budget for the nuclear industry, which already accounts for more than 50% of the total research budget. Sabine Bock of WECF states: “Export guarantees for the nuclear industry, as is practiced by France, among others, should also be terminated. We also objects to the proposals by Japan and other countries in the last year to make nuclear energy eligible for climate funding under the UN climate convention (UNFCCC)”.