When the Nuclear Age was launched, nuclear advocates predicted that the probability of a severe core meltdown and major release of radiation among the world’s reactors would be 1 in 10,000 reactor years. (NOTE: a “reactor-year” is one reactor operating for one year). We have not accumulated 10,000 years-worth of reactor operation, yet have already experienced the catastrophic nuclear disasters at Chornobyl in 1986, and the three meltdowns and explosions at Fukushima, Japan in 2011. Several other less severe meltdowns and radiation releases have occurred in Three Mile Island, PA in 1979, Fermi-1 in MI in 1966, and Windscale, England in 1956.

Official pronouncements and estimates of the costs of these nuclear disasters are always underestimates, couched in vast cover-ups, and “blessed” with official imprimaturs of the U.N World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose role it is to promote and expand the so-called “peaceful” use of nuclear power worldwide.

Governments and the nuclear industry have a great deal to lose if the real costs of these disasters became widely known. For years after both disasters, activists have defied their governmental cover-ups in an attempt to reveal the true scope of the destruction and cost – often at great risk to themselves and their families.

Three inescapable conclusions have emerged that cannot be covered up, no matter how much official wallpaper is used:

• A Chornobyl/Fukushima anywhere is a Chornobyl/Fukushima everywhere, due to the spread of fallout and continuing leaks and contamination from both;
• There are no more nuclear “accidents.” From now on, knowing what we already know about nuclear power and its dangerous potential, any further nuclear disasters and catastrophes must be deemed as intentional, and governments and nuclear industry executives must be held fully accountable for them before the International Court of Justice; and
• As noted safe-energy/anti-nuclear song-writer Kristin Lems wrote after the Chornobyl disaster in 1986: