September 29

There are a growing number of people who are clamoring for a resumption of the development of nuclear power as an energy source. I hope that those in positions to bring this about will make note of the incidents of failure in the nuclear arena. The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, on March 28, 1979 affected only 25,000 people and the effects remained localized; on the other hand the Chernobyl Disaster occurred over a number of days, beginning on April 26, 1986, and resulted in the relocation of more than 336,000 people and the abandonment of an entire city because of the meltdown of a nuclear reactor. Hopefully someone will remind the ‘powers that be’ what happened on September 29, 1957 when a non-nuclear explosion, which had the impact of 75 tons of TNT at a nuclear processing facility in the Russian city of Mayak, caused a failure of a cooling unit for a tank holding tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste. The explosion of this tank resulted in the relocation of well over 370,000 people and the total abandonment of an entire region, an area that may never be habitable at any point in the future. But, heck, we’ll be much more careful this time around, right?