Some new developments concerning the St. Lucie nuclear reactor in Florida, which we covered in Sprol 6-23-2005.
According to an article by Matthew L. Wald published in the New York Times and excerpted below, Florida Power & Light shipped radioactive waste to regular landfills, municipal sewage treatment plants, and “some unknown locations.” According to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the company has concealed these shipments from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
As a game, ask yourself if you would have concealed this information.
If you knew it. If your job might depend on it.
You would of course know that it would take a few decades before it would have any effect on anyone. That it would never be traced back to you.
How would you live with the knowledge?
…a week after the cleanup was completed at a dump site, the company found contamination at a level 20 times what was proposed by the state, and thousands of times higher than what the Environmental Protection Agency allowed for agricultural land; the surrounding area is used for cattle and citrus. emphasis added
[Plaintiff's attorney] Nancy La Vista said she planned to argue that tests of the boys’ baby teeth showed abnormally high levels of radioactive strontium, which is produced when atoms are split and that when ingested binds to human bones. Older people have strontium in their bones that was created from atmospheric nuclear testing. But, Ms. La Vista said, “These kids were all born after Chernobyl, after Three Mile Island, and after atmospheric testing.”
How woyuld I live with the knowledge, and could I have done it?Most corrupt people become so incrementally, in very small steps. Maybe I could have dumped the stuff myself, if my job depended on it, and I had a family to house and feed, with children to educate, maybe I would have let a little bit of radioactive waste be dumped in the wrong place. Just a little, so that, say, no one would be exposed to anyhting more than the radiation from a radon-painted watch hand. And the next time, maybe I’d let a little bit more go out. Until, of course, I’ll poison a farm or a river and the US taxpayer will have to spend millions and millions of dollars to clean up my mess, and I probably made some people very , very sick. Maybe some of them died. I’ll have no choice. My children are in college, and that is very expensive, and I was only following orders, and, at the time, nobody told me how dangerous this stuff can be, since you can’t see or smell radioactivity, and I have learned to excuse myself to my own selfish excesses over the years that I could never consider myself at fault for this. Of course, almost any one of us could have done it, and lived with the truth conveniently sanitized.
Thank you for posting this, it’s a well thought out comment and expresses something I was hoping someone would post. Thanks for reading Sprol!
Certainly we need to control nuclear materials whether they are used for power, medicine, or other applications. However, the strontium in the baby teeth claim has been refuted by most scientists. Use of soil samples, air and water samples, and other more modern techniques give more accurate dose estimates. My understanding is that this incident involved less does than the difference between living in Miami versus Denver (Denver is higher in altitude, so there is more dose from cosmic rays). Of course, I will not be surprised when the lawyers start suing Denver as a nuclear polluter.
hi