The news coming out about nuclear power can read merely like a series of isolated, unconnected events. But if you read the nuclear news often, as we do, patterns start to form.
A story from one part of the world is horribly similar to another from somewhere else. The nuclear industries around the world seem to have a shared behaviour that emerges when you take a step back. There’s the collective inability to get a nuclear reactor built on time or on budget. The same exploitation around uranium mines. Rigged public consultations. An infuriating inability to learn lessons. Separate but similar poisonings. It’s like being trapped in a time loop in some bad episode of Star Trek.
Then there’s the cover-up, deception and fraud. Workers at the UK’s Sellafield nuclear facility falsified safety records. Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Company falsified safety records. Falsified records. Falsified records. Falsified records. Falsified records.
And this week? You got it: falsified records...
Workers at BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam are being exposed to unsafe levels of radiation, according to a company whistleblower. BHP Billiton has been warned about the risks at Roxby Downs, but according to South Australian Upper House Greens MP Mark Parnell the company has failed to take action. Mr Parnell says the levels of polonium-210, the toxic by-product of uranium production, have breached health standards. The whistleblower produced documents that show BHP uses manipulated averages and distorted sampling to ensure the figures are below the maximum exposure levels set by government, he said.
At a time when you would think the nuclear industry would place a high premium on public trust, it’s caught yet again acting like small time gangsters and crooked accountants.
Imagine having a child repeating a cycle of this kind of behaviour – lies, deceit and stupidity. Would you tolerate it? No, you wouldn’t. So why tolerate it from the people responsible for mining uranium, building nuclear reactors, and disposing of nuclear waste? That’s three of the most dangerous activities on the planet. This is people’s lives we’re talking about here not to mention, with nuclear power’s much over-hyped and over-exaggerated ‘vital’ role in the fight against climate change, the very future of the planet.
Inevitably, this latest story will fit another depressing, horribly familiar pattern: it will be quickly forgotten and then repeated somewhere else. Karl Marx famously said ‘history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce’. With the nuclear industry, sooner or later and not forgetting the Chernobyl disaster, it’s going to be the other way around.