[GPCA Updates] RELEASE Ga. Greens: Danger from Fukushima nuclear plant damage should be a warning to Georgians

[Green Party of California Updates]

(Distributed by the Green Party of the United States, http://www.gp.org)

Georgia Green Party http://www.georgiagreenparty.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Saturday, March 12th, 2011


Fukushima Radioactive Release Should Serve as Warning Greens Urge Obama to
Withdraw Loan Guarantees for Nukes

"We are horrified, but not at all surprised by this latest nuclear accident,"
said Denice Traina, a health-care worker residing in Augusta Georgia and
former co-chair of the Georgia Green Party.  "Fukushima has now joined
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island as beacons to the human folly of boiling water
with nuclear fission."

News agencies from around the world are reporting on a Saturday explosion at a
nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan which destroyed the containment building
housing a nuclear power reactor, triggering a radiation leak.  The disaster
was set off by an earthquake which hit 8.9 on the Richter scale and the
resultant tsunami.  The explosion and resulting fire were caught on video and
have been published to youtube.

In 2010, the Obama Administration announced tax-payer financed loan guarantees
for the construction of two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Burke
County, Georgia.

"Greens in Georgia and elsewhere urge the administration to reverse itself on
the insanity of using public assets to finance a new round of nuclear
construction," said Adam Shapiro, Co-Chair of the Georgia Green Party,
resident of Atlanta and a radio show host.  "Private capital has known for
years what a poor investment nuclear power is.  If not for these taxpayer
backed loan guarantees and the immunity from liability provided by the
ill-advised Congressional Price-Anderson Act, the nuclear industry would have
long ago succumbed to market forces."

Engineering firms and bond financiers still stand to make tremendous profits
from the industry, if public tax dollars can be found to underwrite the failed
technology.  Heralding a new generation of safe nuclear reactors, fission is
being sold as a 'carbon-free energy'. That can only be said if one ignores the
tremendous carbon footprint of the nuclear fuel cycle.  Greens urge
investments instead in solar, wind and geothermal technologies which would
harness the Earth's solar income, rather than tapping its fossile fuel savings.

"While Fukushima underscores the insanity of the Yucca proposal to store
nuclear wastes over a fault line, the 1986 explosion in the Ukraine shows us
you don't have to build a reactor on a fault line to incur these risks," said
Traina, whose kids and grandchild all live within thirty miles of Plant
Vogtle.  Studies have documented nearly a million radiation-related deaths
since the April 26th, 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which led to nuclear fallout
and raised background radiation levels throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

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http://www.georgiagreenparty.org/Issues/NuclearPower/Obama_Props_Up_Nukes_with_Taxpayer_backed_Loan_Guarantees_Is_That_Environmental_Racism