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Doom List – Listing the Worst Prophecies of Environmental Catastrophe, Part Seven: Nuclear Power’s China Syndrome


At GreenWatch we now have archived an interactive list of the “worst environmental prophecies of catastrophic doom.” It is a list of eleven of the most interesting and pointed cases of environmental activists raising the red alert, and the unintended fall out from it.

Today we look at some of the misconceptions about “carbon free” Nuclear Power. For much greater detail please check out our May 2008 edition of Organization Trends, by Tom Csabafi.

The horrors of nuclear power depicted in the 1979 film The China Syndrome seemed to come true twelve days after the film’s release when an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant ignited a nationwide panic. Although there were no injuries and no short or long term health consequences, anti-nuclear activists combined fact and fiction to frustrate the development of nuclear power. Since then, the success of modern design “passive safety” systems has meant that, compared to other power sources, nuclear power produces the least number of injuries per million megawatts of electricity produced annually: Coal (342), Natural Gas (85), Hydro (883), and Nuclear (8).  Natural gas, the next safest mode of electricity production, is 10 times more dangerous than nuclear power.  Environmentalists, such as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore conclude that nuclear power offers a safe, clean, carbon dioxide-free sustainable energy source that can help America avoid long term energy crises. 

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