Good Evening, Thank you all for your concern and time regarding this issue and thank you to Charles Strain for organizing this event as well as to Roberta Siegel, Jack Lawler and Brad Little for all the work on past events.
I am Gail Snyder and serve as President of the Board of Nuclear Energy Information Service a 39 year old non-profit organization based in Chicago. We are focused primarily on bringing an end to the use of nuclear energy locally here in Illinois as well as the nation and the world.
By now most of you have seen the footage of the explosion in Beirut Lebanon linked to the storage of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate on the edge of a harbor in a city of over one million people. Estimates are that over 130 have died and over 5,000 were wounded. 300,000 people are homeless as a result and the damages are estimated to be upwards of $15 billion dollars.
The pictures and videos of the devastation and impact to people as they went about their daily lives there are heart breaking.
Now I want you to think about what if they had been warned. What if someone told them there is something dangerous stored in your community that can do so much damage that if you live through it your community may not recover? Would people demand the danger be removed? Would they protest? Would they accept the risk and keep living there?
Four Hiroshima Day alums — Bradford Lyttle and friend, Roberta and Howard Siegel — show up anyway at the Henry Moore Sculpture, Univ. of Chicago, Aug. 6, 2020.
Our organization and others are sending out a warning that we have something dangerous in our communities and it is nuclear energy and the nuclear waste it produces. If it was a nuclear power plant that melted down in Beirut the damage would have been widespread and long lasting. There would be no rebuilding and returning to live there because the area would be a permanent exclusion zone like those created when the nuclear energy power plants melted down in Chernobyl in the Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan. Everything would be abandoned. There would be no returning to get your household items or your car, no community to return to. Radiation levels could be so high that rescue efforts might not be attempted. If you can imagine if the white part of that explosion you see on the video in Beirut was radioactive thousands of people would be exposed to radiation depending on which way the wind was blowing. The difference being that in a nuclear meltdown no huge explosion and shockwave would occur and no visible warning that radiation was coming toward you or was all around you be obvious to you. It is invisible and deadly.
The explosion in Beirut was small by comparison to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and miniscule by comparison to the modern nuclear weapons countries have today which if dropped on Beirut could easily kill 150,000 to 400,000 people instantly. By comparison almost 160,000 people have died in the U.S. from Covid-19 but that took several months.
The connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is clear. Nuclear reactors at nuclear energy facilities create the fuel for nuclear weapons. Recently countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have advanced their nuclear energy programs. We would argue those countries don’t need nuclear power for energy. The expansion of nuclear power brings with it the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. If we want to say “never again” in regards to Hiroshima and Nagasaki we must address the dangers of existing and expanding nuclear energy.
