Our children deserve better

This April it will be 26 years since a nuclear reactor in the former Soviet Union began to meltdown. It will be another 10,000 to 100,000 years before that meltdown concludes, before radioactive contamination in once-fertile agricultural soils diminishes enough to support human livelihood again.

Consider what Windham County would look like if a series of human errors were made at Vermont Yankee, similar to mistakes made at Chernobyl-4 on Friday evening, April 25, 1986? Like the Soviet reactor, Vermont Yankee has the capacity to transform an area of hundreds of square miles into an uninhabitable wasteland for at least a hundred generations. No technology is immune to human error, and Vermont Yankee — in particular — has resulted in over a dozen serious “preventable mishaps.”

Even if Yankee was closed down tomorrow, the job of maintaining a livable environment in Windham County, northern Massachusetts and southwestern new Hampshire will have just begun. Preventing radioactive leakage from Yankee is an inter-generational project that we stand at the very beginning of. We’ve already failed to restrict radioactive leakage at Vermont Yankee only a few decades into this millennia-long project.

One thing is certain: With an array of renewable energies such as biomass, wind, sun, methane, and hydro available, our children will wonder why their ancestors, who put a man on the moon could not have produced their electricity without handing down to them an inter-generational legacy of toxic waste. As a notable physicist once remarked, “nuclear power is great — and we already have the best atomic power plant possible, luckily it’s located 93 million miles away and is called the sun.”

Ben Falk

Moretown