Ask Fukushima or Chernobyl if nuclear is as clean, secure as Ohio senator claims | Opinion

Tom Hayes is a documentary filmmaker and associate professor of instruction at Ohio University.

Remember House Bill 6 and Larry Householder.

Ohio’s current nuclear power industry is so successful that it bribed Republicans in the Ohio legislature to the tune of $60 million to put Ohioans on the hook for a $2 billion bailout of the power industry’s bad investment in nuclear.

 Sen. Jerry Cirino opines in August that Ohioans need further bad investments in nuclear, for which we will likely wind up footing the bills. 

Ohio doesn’t need the dangerous waste

Beyond that, nuclear power produces “waste” containing one of the most toxic poisons produced by man. Its toxicity is second only to nerve gas. That poison “waste” stays lethal for tens of thousands of years. You don’t even have to eat it, just get near it, to be poisoned by it.

To this day, the United States has been unable to come up with a national repository for that deadly waste. Ohio only has temporary storage for the poison that’s already been produced in our state’s reactors. 

Ask people living near Three Mile Island, Fukushima or Chernobyl if nuclear reactors are, as Cirino put it, “clean, reliable and secure.” 

The clean energy pushback

Opinion: Ohio doesn’t have enough energy to power the future. That must change

Meanwhile, our president and some local communities are suppressing the development of clean wind and solar energy industries that could address our growing energy needs. Those energy sources also “create high-paying jobs in engineering, construction and operations.”

It’s easy to understand why the president is suppressing anything but fossil fuels. He’s getting a half billion-dollar luxury jet as a “gift” from a fossil fuel-producing country. 

It’s not so easy to understand the pushback from Ohio communities against wind and solar — clean power generation that doesn’t produce poison with a half-life of 10,000 years. 

Wind and solar may not be “attractive,” but they are no uglier than a 500-foot-tall cooling tower at a nuclear plant, or whopping bail-out charges on our electric bills.

Tom Hayes is a documentary filmmaker and associate professor of instruction at Ohio University. He was an activist in the No Nukes movement prior to the Three Mile Island meltdown at which point Americans, at least temporarily, wised up.