Column: Nuclear power: Not in our backyard

By Renee Thessing

Can nuclear energy ever be clean and safe?

My final answer: Absolutely not. If you want, you can stop reading now. This column will evolve into another boring “hippie” argument about our environment and health, basically two issues we tend to ignore in our day to day lives. If it’s unsafe now, science will eventually figure it out, right? As expected, life will go on.

Then again, if you’re from northern Illinois, the quality of your life may be interrupted by inexplicable bouts of cancer.

Illinois has more nuclear power reactors than any other state and all, except one, exist north of Champaign. The Clinton nuclear power plant is only about 40 miles west of Champaign. As nuclear plants continually fail, the presence of towers billowing steam should be a warning of the next Chernobyl, not a reminder of our green energy campaign.

The danger of nuclear power plants is in our backyard. Exelon, the company who owns five out of the six operating Illinois plants, revealed earlier this year that in 1998, a valve break at their Braidwood facility leaked three million gallons of tritium-contaminated water beneath the reactor. According to the Chicago Tribune, four tritium valve leaks occurred between 1996 and 2003. However, residents were informed of groundwater contamination only this year. Why did Exelon wait to reveal this information 10 years after the first episode?

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On Exelon’s outreach Web site, www.braidwoodtritium.info, the company minimizes the health risks of tritium, often comparing the spills to “natural” tritium exposure. The site includes a link to the Environmental Protection Agency’s facts about tritium. However, the link is not to the EPA Web site, but rather to Exelon’s abridged version of the EPA’s tritium information. Most shocking, the Exelon Web site omits the most significant sentence under “How does tritium affect people’s health? As with all ionizing radiation, exposure to tritium increases the risk of developing cancer.”

The information continues by explaining that tritium is one of the least dangerous by-products of nuclear power plants. This is true, to an extent. Unlike other radioactive isotopes with half-lives of millions of years, tritium only has a half-life of 12.5 years. Since tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen, once ingested, it behaves like water. The body rapidly replaces its water content, and therefore, exposure to tritium can seem less dangerous. However, Exelon’s secrecy has prevented us from knowing how long Illinois residents have been exposed to higher levels of tritium. We can estimate that exposure has been at least since 1998 – eight years before nearby well testing even began. Years of exposure allow the water-like tritium to be incorporated into the genetic makeup of cells and have the potential effects of cancer, genetic mutations, and damage to fetuses.

Exelon’s delay to inform the public has rightly raised suspicion in nearby residents and all Illinoisans minds. The state of Illinois and Braidwood community members have already filed law suits against the corporation.

In his most recent State of the Union, President Bush proposed the Advanced Energy Initiative, an investigation and funding for alternative energy sources, including “clean, safe nuclear energy.” However, this progressive source of alternative energy produces radioactive isotopes with half-lives over a million years. Therefore, nuclear energy will never be safe and guarantees a cancer producing environment for hundreds of generations.

If we’re not already irate about environment and health risks in the country of profit, more people should be irate with how much money we’re losing. Nuclear power plants actually produce a huge financial burden in clean up, health and decommissioning costs. Other sources of renewable energy are readily dismissed as too expensive, yet according to the Nuclear Energy Information System, since its inception, “nuclear power has cost this country over $492,000,000,000.”

Any way we evaluate the advantages of nuclear energy – monetary, environmental, or health – we can clearly see that this energy is not sustainable for the long term. Will it take a Chernobyl catastrophe in Illinois to begin shutting down our plants? Or are the Braidwood carcinogenic tritium leaks enough?

Renee Thessing is a junior in LAS. Her column will appear on Mondays. She can be reached at [email protected]