Nuclear power greener/a critique of Nuclear power: renaissance or relapse? Global climate change and long-term Three Mile Island activists’ narratives.

(Review Paper) Cited in Nuclear power greener/a critique of Nuclear power: renaissance or relapse? Global climate change and long-term Three Mile Island activists’ narratives.

Many Warnings

A survey was conducted on activists of Three Mile Island (TMI), the site of the worst nuclear power plant disaster in US history. Activists gave numerous reasons why nuclear power is an unsafe source of energy.

Methods

The survey was conducted on 26 long-term, operative TMI activists who could be considered "key informants". Interviews were conducted and recorded over telephone, and participants were asked simply what their thoughts were about new initiatives to build nuclear power plants based on their experiences as long-term TMI activists. The question was open-ended so that each participant would have the opportunity to include experiences and perspectives that the researches may not have previously considered.

It is ultimately the public who fund, pay for and inherit all the risk of a nuclear power plant. It is only approriate that the people who have lived through a "worst case" scenario be surveyed. Of course the public will be emotional when weighing in on nuclear power and bias is part of that emotion because people care for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, just as the companies that want to build nuclear reactors are biased because they care about money and profit and subsidies. In the case of nuclea power, the public should be consulted and should be the deciding factor.Tlouc287 (talk) 03:11, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Results

This research showed that nuclear power is not green because of the consequences that the use of nuclear power implicates. some of these consequenses are:

Nuclear waste: 85% of the TMI people said that nuclear waste is hard to keep and in their case after the disaster in TMI it is kept in the region and consequently continues to affect their environment with all that lives there.

Nature of risk/consequences: 77% of them said that compared to other source of energy, nuclear energy is highly dangerous to use.

Management and government: 73% of the participant said that because the people who manage the nuclear energy are unable to correctly inform and protect the population of the risk that nuclear energy has.

Health: 69% of the participant were concerned of the health effect that are linked to nuclear activities. One participant mentioned that Pennsylvania had the highest rate of thyroid cancer in the US.

Economic; 65 % of participant said that because the private sectors refuses to contribute to funding of nuclear power, it is subsidies with people taxes.

Environmental; 62% of participant said that nuclear power risk are high. One of them sustained this and said that the regular use of nuclear plants releases radiation.

Evacuation; 54% of participant said that there wer not a clear plan for evacuation in case of a nuclear disaster. however, some of them said that since the TMI disaster better strategies have come up.

National security: 46% of participant said that as the knowledge of nuclear energy increases, it may become more easily accessible to politically unstable nations. Hence, creates potential for a global terror.

Nuclear power is nuclear power, there is no way around it except getting rid of all these technology that has and had already taken people's lives.Bomor394 (talk) 02:50, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Aging plants/re-licensing issues:38% of the participant said that nuclear plants have a limited time of usage and that aging plant were not good to use. However they were concerned about the re-licenced of some of the aging plants.