Nucular Threats

It its effort to make nuclear power as ugly as possible, Greenpeace skews the impact.

Official UN figures predicted up to 9,000 Chernobyl-related cancer deaths.

But Greenpeace says in a report released on Tuesday that recent studies estimate that the actual number of such deaths will be 93,000.

Stressing that there is a problem with diagnosis, it adds that other illnesses could take the toll to 200,000.

"Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases," Greenpeace campaigner Jan van de Putte told Reuters news agency.

"The only methodology that is accepted is for calculating fatal cancers."

So, in other words, we can't calculate the number directly, so we'll just include everyone that died from a disease that could be linked to radiation. Never mind that some of these people would have contracted their disease whether or not the meltdown occurred. Of course, no deception is unjust if it can be used to fight against the evil that is nuclear power.

It is certainly plausible that the UN is under-counting, though I fail to see what motivation they would have to do so intentionally.

Meanwhile, Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, writes a passionate op-ed to environmentalists to rethink their stance on nuclear power.

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots.
...
Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

You have to wonder what the full scope of harm environmentalists have done through their meddling. How much cleaner would the environment would have been? How much less CO2 would their have been? How much wealthier would we have been? I don't think that I am completely off-base by saying that environmentalists may be the most dangerous threat to the environment today.

I hope the current batch of activists heed his call, I disagree with their motives, but the ends are just.