Jane Fonda: Nuclear power is no climate solution

From the Philadelphia Inquirer : “The actor Jane Fonda writes that while some see a planned restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant as a tool to fight climate change, the risk of an accident outweighs any potential benefits.”

Fonda states “The recent news about restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant 75 miles west of Philadelphia hit me hard. My heart sank as I thought back to The China Syndrome, a nuclear disaster movie I starred in with Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas in 1979. Why, I wondered, would anyone tempt fate by reactivating a facility that suffered the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history?

The China Syndrome was about a nuclear power reactor potentially melting down and unleashing a cloud of deadly radioactivity across the surrounding region. Two weeks after the movie hit theaters, real life imitated art with a vengeance. One of the two reactors at Three Mile Island suffered what investigators termed “a partial meltdown.” As industry officials and federal regulators tried to determine the extent of the damage and whether to evacuate people, a terrifying drama played out on TV screens across Pennsylvania and around the world.

The nuclear industry’s business model has long been: privatize the profits, socialize the costs.

Like two people trying to get through a narrow doorway at the same time, there isn’t room for both nuclear and renewables in our energy future. It’s an obvious choice, no?” Photo by Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Commons, edited