Kurtenbach: Nuclear Storm

[Oscar]

Nuclear Storm

by Leo Kurtenbach

May 13, 2009

To the Editor,

Would it not make Canadians proud to state: "We [Canadians] no longer encourage, support or want to subsidize the production and sale of uranium?

We now know that our Saskatchewan uranium has, in the past, and most certainly is still being utilized to construct nuclear bombs, and will be the uranium fuel for the proposed nuclear power reactors of the future.

The depleted uranium [DU] is also being used to enhance the deadly power of the weapons of war.

NATO forces have used DU in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Therefore, because of our claim to be democratic nations, we all are responsible for related health problems in the areas of armed conflict - particularly cancer among innocent civilians in the long term, especially children who are more vulnerable to the health risks due to the presence of DU. Of course, this is not meant to diminish the health risks to our own soldiers where DU weapons are in use.

Despite the propaganda and claims that nuclear power is "clean", there are over 100 separate chemicals produced and released into the environment only when nuclear weapons explode and nuclear reactors operate.

No doubt building reactors will create jobs, and resulting profits are deemed necessary for the corporations that are the proponents of nuclear power.

However, there remains the real danger of low-level radiation, the monster of waste disposal, and the possible horror that just one of the over a hundred aging nuclear power reactors in North America could be our first Chernobyl.

First of all, let us deal with the question of waste disposal.

The US has spent about $10 billion in their failed proposal to use the Yucca rock formation as the burial ground for their nuclear waste. 0ur beleaguered planet is littered with hundred of thousands of tonnes of unsafe nuclear waste materials.

When Chernobyl exploded 23 years ago, the city of Kiev eighty kilometers away was heavily dusted with radioactive debris. Dr. Alexy Yablokov, former president of the Centre for Russian Environmental Policy, estimated total death toll at 300,000. About ten years ago we were part of a group organized out of Brandon on a tour to Cuba. We were told by a doctor [a woman] at a children's hospital in Cuba, that Cuban health officials had taken in 30,000 children from the areas around Chernobyl for treatment due to radioactive exposure caused by the Chernobyl explosion. Cuba did this at their own expense.

According to a 2006 publication of the National Geographic Society stated that, as a result of the Chernobyl accident, there has been radioactive soil contamination of roughly an area of over 500 miles in diameter.

Why would we want to trap future generations with dangerous radioactive materials that mankind may never be able to undo or control?

After all, what is wrong with diligent onservation of our present energy resources, natural gas, hydro, wind, coal, water, fossil fuels, and the boundless energy of the sun?

Leo Kurtenbach,
Box 268, Cudworth, Sask., S0K 1B0
Phone 256-3638