Sunday, April 30, 2006 | 7:20 a.m.
Twenty years ago this past week the nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl erupted in a fireball that spewed radioactive particles across much of the Northern Hemisphere.
Thirty people died as a direct result of the explosion, 28 from acute radiation poisoning or thermal burns. Another 19 died soon afterward, and nine known fatalities from thyroid cancer are direct results of the accident.
In a 10-kilometer radius around the plant, coniferous trees and small mammals received lethal doses of radiation.
Twenty years later the consequences of that disaster are everywhere: in the destroyed communities around the plant, in the shattered lives, in a changed physical environment, and especially in the deformed children who abound throughout the immediate region and well beyond.
Only a craven government, insensitive to its people, would allow the conditions that led to this disaster. It could only happen in a place such as the Soviet Union, where people did not have rights. Not in my country, you say. Not here, in the USA, where the voice of the people is heard.
Don't kid yourself.
While we have had no disaster comparable to Chernobyl, the U.S. government has displayed an equal disregard for the health and safety of the American people. From Bikini Atoll to Southern Nevada, from Alaska to New Mexico, Americans were put at risk when officials knew better.
After one test in the Bikini Islands in the late 1940s, U.S. servicemen were sent in to scrub the radiation off abandoned ships used in the test. An old rancher outside of Baker, southeast of Ely, once told me that the day after an above-ground test in the 1950s, his sheep were covered in white dust and showing signs of sickness.
Two men in what he described as "spacesuits" showed up on his doorstep and insisted that he sign a piece of paper - a release - in exchange for a $5,000 check. The old man shook his head; he didn't feel he had a choice.
Ask the downwinders in southern Utah, the people who experienced the consequences of above-ground testing. Terry Tempest Williams, the noted Utah writer, calls her family "the clan of the one-breasted women," because so many have had mastectomies. They lived under the fallout; the wind blew it right on to them.
Americans have a profound distrust of nuclear power. The 1979 movie "The China Syndrome," in which a reporter discovers a cover-up of an accident at a nuclear power plant, may have been bad science, but it almost perfectly mirrored public discomfort with the nuclear industry.
The movie coincided with the scariest real event in this country, the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania. We actually evacuated the area around the plant, the kind of thing you only see in science fiction movies. No doubt, nuclear technology seemed bigger than the people who managed it and maybe even eternally beyond their control.
With such a history, it's no wonder the last new nuclear power plant in this country opened in the 1970s.
Now we face energy Armageddon. We are an oil basket case, unable to heed warning signs such as $3-a-gallon gasoline while we drive SUVs and trucks that drain gas like a thirsty man guzzling water under the hot desert sun. There is the possibility of shortages in electricity generation in the immediate future.
We will face a critical choice, whether to change behavior or to find new sources. We can only tighten the turbines so much, only wring so much power out of existing mechanisms. With the growth in demand for electricity, we are going to have to find new sources.
The most obvious and probably the easiest answer will be nuclear power. It is already being pushed at us. The question remains whether the public will accept what it perceives as the risk of nuclear power.
The noted columnist George Will once told me he thought the future would chastise us for not embracing nuclear power. I told him I thought the problem was the callous and dismissive treatment of the public by government and industry. No wonder the public fears nuclear power - look at its experience.
I don't know whether nuclear power is safe. I do know that I have been given plenty of reasons not to believe the Energy Department and the nuclear power industry. If they want to get me to sign on, they are going to have to earn my trust. And telling me that we have to do it and blowing off my questions won't get them there.
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