BRATTLEBORO — Sometimes, lessons are not learned. Sometimes, it takes more than one warning to heed a lesson. Sometimes, we humans are slow and naive in our actions.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan continues to leak radionuclides into the air, water, and ground.
Then, a flood breached the levees surrounding the Fort Calhoun nuclear reactor in Nebraska, and the country learned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) could not control Mother Nature or the mighty Missouri river.
The largest wildfire in the history of New Mexico burned around (but not through) the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the place that has created more nuclear weapons than anywhere else on earth.
And fires now burn in Nevada, at the site of above-ground testing of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Really, I would like to think that someone would learn from all this besides the prognosticators: the Hopi Elders, Nostradamus, Edgar Caycee, the makers of the Mayan calendar, and others.
When will we learn? What will it take to stop this madness? The words “accident” and “nuclear” do not belong in the same sentence.
In March, the NRC approved the Vermont Yankee request for a license extension, the day before a nearly identical reactor blew up in Fukushima. The NRC could have, but has not, taken back the extended license to operate Vermont Yankee another 20 years.
If the NRC cannot stop Fukushima, or flooding, or wildfires, the NRC should admit failure and cease to exist.
Anyone can say that Fukushima's three reactors blew up from the earthquake and tsunami, but the truth is that they blew up from the loss of offsite power, from backup power sources that failed, from an infrastructure that was not robust enough, and from planning that was not farsighted enough.
The NRC has no plans for a spent fuel pool accident, nor does it plan for an event that causes a spent fuel pool to lose its neutralizing water. The service water pumps needed for backup diesel generators proved ineffective in Japan.
Mother Nature has multiple unimaginable events to toss at man and his follies. I find many examples of the NRC not enforcing its own regulations, and there is apparently nobody enforcing, supervising, or regulating the agency.
There is more cesium in the fuel pool at Vermont Yankee than was released from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima combined. And radioactivity, when released into the atmosphere, land, or water, serves as a biocide. It can alter chromosomes, changing life and harming health forevermore.
We have but one earth.