by Jonathan Hiskes
It gives me the willies
to think about it, but it’s probably a good time for a hard look at our
“backup” accident plans for nuclear power plants, now that we know how unbelievably
unprepared the BP/Transocean/Halliburton Dream Team was for an accident on
their Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig. I mean, BP’s worthless response plan involved protecting (Arctic) walruses in the Gulf of Mexico.
Our dirty-energy economy
requires us to undertake lots of enormous, risky endeavors that we keep happily
out of mind until something goes wrong. Few of us thought about the perils of
drilling into deeper and deeper ocean beds until the last month. Few of us
thought about coal-ash waste—the toxic sludge left over from coal-fired electricity generation—until a
retaining wall broke and a pond of it poured out near Kingston, Tenn., 18
months ago.
I hear from more people who say they’re concerened about the safety risks of factory meat and other
industrialized food. But with this, too, we’re largely at the mercy of
out-of-sight federal regulators with a lackluster record (see “ammonia
burgers”). The BP gusher is proving—again—that safety
regulators who are in hock to insanely lucrative industries aren’t going to do an adequate job of
protecting us.
I’ve been happily
clueless about backup plans for the nation’s 104 nuclear-power reactors (to say
nothing of military sites). Now I’m realizing how foolish that is.
Related Links:
What if the oil spill just can’t be fixed?
Fake BP Twitter account attracts lots of followers
The 7 dumbest things in BP’s spill response plan
