World Environment Day- Build Sustainable & Environment Friendly Society

5th June, World Environment Day, lessons to be learned from Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters.

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed."- Gandhi

Nuclear power plants can catastrophically fail, causing vast human and environmental damage. The corporations that run the power plants, however, are protected from catastrophic economic failure by government limits on liability, which shifts the economic burden to the public. If the corporations that own nuclear power plants had to bear the burden of potential financial losses in the event of a catastrophic accident, they would not build the plants because they know the risks are unacceptable. It is government liability limits, such as the Price-Anderson Act in the US, that make nuclear power plants possible, leaving the taxpayers responsible for the overwhelming monetary costs of nuclear industry failures. No other private industry is given such liability protection.

Nuclear power is a highly complex, expensive and dangerous way to boil water. Radiation releases from nuclear accidents cannot be contained in space and will not stop at national borders. Hubris, complacency and high-level radiation are a deadly mix. Hubris on the part of the nuclear industry and its government regulators, along with complacency on the part of the public, have led to the creation of vast amounts of high-level radiation that must be guarded against release to the environment for tens of thousands of years, far longer than civilization has existed.

Nuclear energy, as well as nuclear weapons, and human beings cannot co-exist without the risk of future catastrophes. The survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long known that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist. The Fukushima accident, like that at Chernobyl before it, makes clear that human beings and nuclear power plants also cannot co-exist without courting future disasters.

Huge Thermal Power Plant at Sundarban, Bangladesh, is a joint collaboration between National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) of India and Power Development Board of Bangladesh will be going to cause an irreplaceable loss to Its Biodiversity, local fishing community, and World's largest Mangrove Forest which is the only survival place for critically endangered royal Bengal tiger and the Irrawaddy dolphin.

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) is planning to set up a nuclear plant on <a Haripur, West Bengal, A village full of enormous agricultural production and local indigenous people. A huge community is dependent on local prawn culture, salt-producing and fishing.

It is another onslaught of the evils bred and fostered by the recent trends of globalization to the common man. The Kudankulam nuclear plant, located near to the highly populated livelihood of village people and fishing communities. The discharge of hot water with radioactive pollutants into the sea is increasing the temperature of the seawater in the coastal areas and drive away or kill fishes. Contaminated fish will be no longer available for the market, eventually, it will bring out the misery of the fisher people in Tamilnadu.

The accidents at Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl are a wake-up call to phase out nuclear energy and replace it with energy conservation and more human- and environmentally-friendly forms of renewable energy.