Art Robinson: Nuclear power is "inexpensive, clean, and safe."

Art Robinson: Nuclear power is "inexpensive, clean, and safe."

We feel compelled to point out that Art Robinson, the Republican candidate who ran against Congressman Peter DeFazio in the in the 2010 election, is an enthusiastic advocate of nuclear power. He presents himself as an expert on nuclear energy and describes nuclear power as "inexpensive, clean, and safe."

But don't worry, in case an accident happens Art Robinson says nuclear radiation is good for you!

Robinson has indicated that he will again challenge Peter DeFazio in 2012.

January 25, 2012 - Update
Japan's Fukushima "inexpensive, clean, and safe" nuclear reactors are still emitting large amounts of radiation ... and it's not getting any better.

The amount of radioactive materials released from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has risen this month compared with December, Tepco said.

The amount so far has come to 70 million becquerels per hour, compared with 60 million becquerels in December ...

Japan’s science ministry says 8 per cent of the country’s surface area has been contaminated by radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

It says more than 30,000 square kilometres of the country has been blanketed by radioactive cesium.

June 26, 2011 - Update
The Asia Times reports that the Fukushima nuclear crisis is the biggest industrial disaster in history and is even worse that Chernobyl.

Yet, as we are now slowly coming to realize, Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl. In a revealing recent feature article published by al-Jazeera, Dahr Jamail conveys the comments of Arnold Gundersen, a senior former nuclear industry executive in the United States.

"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Gundersen asserts. "We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl ... The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up."

Molten nuclear fuel in three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant is likely to have burned through pressure vessels, not just the cores, Japan has said in a report in which it also acknowledges it was unprepared for an accident of the severity of Fukushima.

It is the first time Japanese authorities have admitted the possibility that the fuel suffered "melt-through" – a more serious scenario than a core meltdown.

Over the last several days, evidence has emerged indicating that the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was far more dire than previously recognized. The main evidence is extensive—rather than partial—melting of the nuclear fuel in three reactors ...

The worst case scenario is that the fuel rods fuse together, the temperatures get so hot that they melt together in a radioactive molten mass that bursts through the containment mechanism and is exposed to the outside. So they spew radioactivity in the ground, into the air, into the water. Some of the radioactivity could carry in the atmosphere to the West Coast of the United States.

UPDATE - Kevin Kamps, specialist in nuclear waste at the nuclear watchdog Beyond Nuclear, talks with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now about the status of the Japanese nuclear reactors and how a similar disaster could occur in the United States.