Storytellers at the Columbia River by Nancy Danielson Mendenhall

The United States, by contrast, has 94 commercial nuclear power plants. That is just to contain the spent fuel from five nuclear power plants. I wish that there weren’t multiple uranium mining sites around the world with thousands of tons of uranium tailings abandoned and open to the elements, continuing toharm the health of generations born long after mining ceased. I wish that it didn’t take immense, carbon-intensive mining projects to extract uranium from the Earth, and then again to “deposit” the spent nuclear fuel from reactors back half a kilometer underground. Estimates before construction began at Onkalo spent fuel repository in Finland were that the site would entail a “half-billion-euro construction project will generate some 2,500 person years of employment,” and would take 100 years to complete. He continues: 'I too wish that the things that the nuclear industry says about itself were true-I wish it was green and renewable. Unfortunately, his arguments amount to little more than regurgitated industry talking points, in their traditional form of a Jeremiad.' In 'Nuclear Stockholm Syndrome' he writes: 'Bhaskar Sunkara is clearly motivated by his deep concerns over the dire impacts of global warming, which loom closer by the hour. In response to Bhaskar Sunkara’s 'recent opinion piece extoling the virtues of nuclear power and castigating its opponents as paranoid and ill-informed', Robert Jacobs of the Hiroshima Peace Institute ( ) wrote an article in Counterpunch that caught my attention, as it should catch all our attentions.

Storytellers at the Columbia River by Nancy Danielson Mendenhall