Dangers of nuclear power are real

IN his opinion piece ‘World takes the nuclear options while we turn our faces to the wind’, Matt Cooper says I have ‘conditioned’ the Irish people to the dangers of nuclear power (March 28).

My first anti-nuclear experience was when I heard my brother and his pregnant wife had to flee from their home in Pennsylvania when Three Mile Island nuclear power station had a serious breakdown. Then, in 1976, I caught the nuclear allergy bug more seriously at Carnsore, Co Wexford, when so-called ‘experts’ warned that unless Ireland went nuclear, we would be cast back into the darkness of the Middle Ages.

My most direct anti-nuclear experience was after 1986, when I walked around abandoned towns and villages of the Chernobyl-affected areas of Belarus, northern Ukraine and western Russia, watching my Geiger counter go wild with readings of intense radioactive contamination. I knew I’d never wish this technology for anyone, not in a million years. And that’s what radioactive poison does — it lasts forever.

The full effects of the Chernobyl accident may never be known. Of the 800,000 young men conscripted into the Chernobyl area in the aftermath of the disaster, at least 25,000 have died and many of the survivors became invalids. Chernobyl survivors are facing a demographic disaster in which science cannot yet completely assess the consequences.

We are now seeing genetic change, especially among those who were younger than six when the accident happened. According to the US National Academy of Sciences, most cancers from radiation exposure do not develop until up to 20 years after exposure. The highest incidence of cancer is expected to occur over the next decade, therefore no accurate assessment of the overall impact can be made yet.

The UN Report on Chernobyl has been highly compromised because it masks the International Atomic Energy Agency’s control and promotion of nuclear power. There are other significant reports on Chernobyl by eminent scientists which contradict the UN report. The authors of one of the most accessible reports on Chernobyl, The Other Report on Chernobyl (TORCH), report that more than 40% of the total quantity of radiation was deposited on mainland Europe (68% of Ireland’s land mass was contaminated). Included in the TORCH report were the findings of 1,000 previously ignored documents, revealing sobering statistics — 200% increase in birth defects since 1986; 30,000-60,000 excess cancer deaths predicted worldwide and predicted excess cases of thyroid cancer between 18,000-66,000.

How can we reassure people in those regions that their future is safe and that the impact of radioactive poisoning will not continue to affect the children of future generations.

Adi Roche

St Luke’s

Cork