The Ecologist articles from November 1999

The Ecologist archives from November 1999

Ending The Nuclear Century.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... The nuclear issue is one that has all but disappeared from the public consciousness. The majority of people could not name the nearest nuclear reactor to their own home. Fewer people understand how these reactors work, and even fewer are aware...

Nuclear Power: Time to End the Experiment.(Statistical Data Included)
November 1, 1999... The new millennium presents the ideal symbolic opportunity for a final shutdown of nuclear power - a technology that has failed us in every arena since it was first conceived. As we enter the 21st century, we carry with us an outmoded,...

The Final Boltholes.(nuclear industry)
November 1, 1999... Industry arguments justifying the continuation of nuclear power are largely spurious - the last boltholes of a dying industry. The decline of nuclear power is not a new phenomenon: it started almost as soon as the industry began its path to...

The Politics of Mox.(mixed oxide fuel)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... In the UK, Sellafield's ever-growing stockpile of weapons-useable plutonium could double to 100 tonnes by 2010. British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) has two options for dealing with this legacy. Firstly, plutonium could be declared a 'waste', as...

Climate Change - the New Saviour of Nuclear Power?
November 1, 1999... Faced with worldwide stagnation, and possibly decline, the nuclear industry is spinning itself a new image; as an environmental saviour prepared to rush to the aid of a planet threatened by human-induced climate change. Like its previous...

Poisoning in the Name of Progress.(Statistical Data Included)
November 1, 1999... The Earth's population has been exposed to unnaturally high levels of radiation now for over 50 years. And in increased cancer rates, childhood leukaemia and other deadly effects, the results are becoming clear. It is vital to understand that,...

A Sea of Troubles: How Plutonium Came Back to Plague Us.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... Since 1952, the Irish Sea has been the repository of very large amounts of radioactive waste from Sellafield. The philosophy behind this mass disposal was summed up in the Proceedings of the 1958 Conference of the Peaceful Uses of Atomic...

Even The Pigeons Are Radioactive.(Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant, United Kingdom)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... For 20 years feral pigeons had routinely winged from roosting sites at Sellafield to a sanctuary at Seascale, where they were guaranteed food and care from the two lady owners. Routine this may have been, but in February 1998 the birds...

What a Dump.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... A nuclear contamination scandal in Oxfordshire has put the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority into a bit of a hot spot. Last year, when developers sought planning permission for a business and housing development around an old nuclear...

It Couldn't Happen Here.
November 1, 1999... Nuclear power is safer than ever. The chance of an accident happening at a nuclear plant is virtually nil. Windscale and Three Mile Island were a long time ago, and Chernobyl was a result of lax safety standards and primitive technology. Modern...

CHERNOBYL: The Great Health Cover-up.
November 1, 1999... The nuclear catastrophe that had been long feared by anti-nuclear activists finally occurred in April 1986. The explosion at the Chernobyl reactor in the Ukraine, and the resulting release of radioactivity, turned a large part of the Soviet...

Three Mile Island -The Legacy Lives On.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... Twenty years after the core melt-down at Three Mile Island in March 1979, people who were there at the time are still seeking redress. In 1996, more than 2,000 residents in the region around the plant put in claims for damage to health, for...

The Woman Who Knew Too Much.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... When, during the Second World War, 150,000 people took part in a secret scientific project that spanned the US and Canada, even Congress and the Vice-President remained ignorant of what was being produced. It was this project that gave birth to...

The Millennium Bug and Nuclear Power.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... Next month we will know what, if any, nuclear accidents have occurred because of the 'Year 2000" (Y2K) software crisis - the 'millennium bug'. We could see nuclear accidents on the scale of Chernobyl, or we could see nothing at all. What is...

Victims of the Nuclear Age.
November 1, 1999... Up to 1,300 million people have been killed, maimed or diseased by nuclear power since its inception. The industry's figures massively underestimate the real cost of nuclear power, in an attempt to hide its victims from the world. Here, the...

Radioactive Reindeer: the Chernobyl Legacy.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... Fallout from the Chernobyl disaster has all but exterminated the last of Norway's original Laplanders. When reactor 4 of Chernobyl's nuclear power station exploded on the 26th of April 1986, the whole world panicked. Throughout the...

Body Language - The Leaf Bugs Speak Out.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... For 27 years, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, a Swiss zoological illustrator and artist, has been painting exquisite representations of leaf bugs. For the first 15 of those years, she painted the bugs out of sheer love of their beauty, but then she...

Nuclear Power - A Dead Loss.
November 1, 1999... Nuclear energy has never been economic, in any sense of the word. It has always needed massive subsidies and government support to keep it going. Now, the cold wind of electricity privatisation is blowing across it, and exposing this fact for...

Nuclear Privatisation: Voodoo Economics.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... It is only a matter of time before the UK nuclear sell-off of 1996 is seen as one of the worst deals that any government ever foisted on an unsuspecting public. At first sight, getting any cash back for an industry that was once considered...

Sellafield: The Ugly Duckling.
November 1, 1999... Much of the justification for the existence of the Sellafield plant is its role in used-fuel reprocessing. But reprocessing is dangerous and creates huge volumes of radioactive waste. Worst of all, it is wholly unnecessary. The mainstay...

Nuclear Skullduggery.
November 1, 1999... Cover-ups, conspiracies, falsified 'facts', hushed-up reports... all in a day's work for the nuclear industry. According to the BBC TV programme Here and Now the 'World's Greatest Liar' competition is held annually in West Cumbria. Pubs...

Bored with Cocaine? Try Plutonium.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... If cocaine seems passe, and heroin too dangerous, fear not: a potential new drug is doing the rounds. Plutonium-sniffing, it seems, could be the next big thing. But be warned: it could be an expensive habit. For two British scientific...

Richard Doll Falls into Plutonium Trap.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... Professor Sir Richard Doll is well known for using his considerable reputation as an epidemiologist to promote entrenched industrial and political interests.[1] This August, he made headlines with an intervention on the issue of Seascale, the...

Poacher or Gamekeeper?(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... The international bodies set up to regulate and monitor the nuclear industry, notably Euratom and the IAEA, have failed the world's people. At four minutes past midnight on a November morning in 1968, the Scheersberg A sailed out of...

Fiddling the Nuclear Books in Germany.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... Fiddling the books, preventing public access or indeed a combination of both, seems a perennial hazard of public health statistics. Following the Chernobyl explosion and the fall out of radioactive particles over western Europe in early May...

Jack Cunningham: Nuclear Politician.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... Dr Jack Cunningham has gone further than almost any other Labour politician in supporting nuclear power. As MP for Copeland (previously Whitehaven) since 1970, it is not surprising that Cunningham has developed a relationship with the nuclear...

Opening the Nuclear Dustbin.
November 1, 1999... They bury it, they send it abroad, and now they even 'recycle' it into household products. But there has never been a safe solution to the problem of nuclear waste. How much nuclear waste is in your house? Can you be certain that the steel...

A Renewable Future.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... The sun is the ultimate source of power underlying a family of renewable energy sources that ranges from solar electricity generation to biofuels and hydro, wind and wave power. Together, they constitute a vast resource. The total amount of...