Thirty years ago today, an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in eastern Pennsylvania released small amounts of radiation into the surrounding area. Fortunately, it turned out to be not nearly a disaster on the scale of the Chernobyl meltdown, but the incident showed that nuclear power - even though it's low-emission - still has its risks. (It also means I'll turn 30 next year...)
I can see how the Three Mile Island leak would freak America out to the point where people backed away from nuclear energy as a power source, even coming so close after the Arab oil embargo taught us that we couldn't always rely on foreign oil, either. But instead of shifting resources to developing yet another energy source - solar power, wind-generated power, geothermal - this country fell back to gas and coal, energy sources whose production and emission can be just as devasting as what could have happened at Three Mile Island. And now, 30 years later, we're still having the same debate. I think that's very sad.
Funnily enough, I'm re-reading a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs used in World War II. After the war, Oppie became an outspoken champion of atomic regulation and nuclear disarmament, to the point where the U.S. government stripped him of his security clearance in the 1950s. So, to re-cap, the guy who oversaw the science behind and application of the weapon that won us WWII (and possibly the Cold War) thought that very technology was too dangerous to exist. Shouldn't that tell us something?
(By the way, almost a third of the power in the Phillipines comes from geothermal. The frakking Phillipines. You're telling me America can't get it to work?)
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