– Nuclear Power, National Security And The Dirty Bomb (The Market Oracle, Nov 12, 2013):
Although severely damaged by the world public opinion fallout from the Fukushima disaster, the nuclear industry continues to claim nuclear power is the low carbon, oil saving energy of the future. Taking the lifetime of the civil nuclear power industry as starting in the late 1950s, however, it has already had a long period through the 1980s and 1990s when world reactor orders and completions were often zero per year. Public confidence is weak.
The recent so-called Nuclear Renaissance, based on recentering reactor sales to developing and emerging countries of the South, featured the hard sell of Chernobyl- and Fukushima-sized power reactors to countries that are often unstable and fragile. This was symbolized by Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt at making French reactor sales to Libya’s colonel Gaddafi in
2007, offloading as many as two 1970s-vintage reactors for reassembly in Libya, and recycling petrodollar billions.The global security risks of this strategy are hard to exaggerate, but since business is business they are almost totally ignored, except and only in specific cases like Iran.
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In reality, any big reactor is a giant dirty bomb. This is totally rejected by the world’s deciders.
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THE GLOBAL SECURITY THREAT
The bomb-equivalence of the world’s presently operating 436 civil reactor Doomsday Machines is therefore calculable – and extreme. It dwarfs the combined radiological inventory of all warheads held by all nuclear-armed powers, both the 5 declared-nuclear UN Security Council powers, and the world’s present 4 non-declared nuclear weapons states.…