Reporting environmental news and views from North Carolina's capital city.
For a report on the N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network's Oct. 25 forum on North Carolina's energy future, see my story in this week's Independent.
posted by Sue Sturgis @ 5:02 PM
1 comments
A writer and editor living in Raleigh, N.C., I'm a former staff reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer and the Independent Weekly in Durham, N.C. Since the fall of 2005, I've been working with the Durham-based Institute for Southern Studies, and I contribute to the Institute's Facing South blog. To contact me, e-mail suesturgis at raleigheconews.com.
1 Comments:
Personally I think your current Indy article vastly overstates the case on the danger in living near a nuclear reactor.
Mostly it is because I don't put a whole lot of stock in the epidemiology studies on cancer rates of populations living near nuclear reactors. First off, there exist a lot of contradictory results in the literature about the health effects of living near reactors. This isn't suprising since the studies are difficult to do.
Second, if these studies were accurate than one should find a strong dependence between cancer rates and geography. The amount of background radiation you expose yourself to depends greatly on where you live. Where I live in New Mexico there is quite a bit more natural uranium/radium in the soil than where I grew up in Illinois or lived in Durham. Also the altitude I live at means I'm exposed to more cosmic radiation. This natural background is on the order of or greater than the radiation one is exposed to from a nearby nuclear reactor. Yet we don't see this link between cancer and geography.
It's a shame that mainstream environmental groups have come out against nuclear energy. It's fine to advocate alternative energies but unless you see a massive change in government energy policy we are going to be strongly dependent on coal, natural gas, or nuclear. I'd much rather live next to a nuclear power plant which stores its waste on site rather than a coal plant who stores its waste in the atmosphere.
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