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Using nuclear power to curb global warming? Ramping up nuclear energy not helpful as a response to global warming. Chelyabinsk of the former Soviet Union has lessons to teach.

Article Excerpt
Aside from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the meltdown at Chernobyl is commonly regarded as the deadliest nuclear catastrophe in history. In fact that unhappy distinction belongs to another place in the former Soviet Union, a place called Chelyabinsk.

Tucked behind the Ural Mountains far from European invaders, the region of Chelyabinsk has provided armaments for Russian rulers since the time of the czars. After World War II, it became a center of Soviet nuclear weapons production. Between 1946 and 1967, Chelyabinsk experienced three interlocking disasters whose cumulative damage exceeds Chemobyl's and persists to this day.

The difference is that the Chelyabinsk disasters did not become global media events. On the contrary, both the KGB and the CIA kept them secret for decades.

Now the people and ecosystems of Chelyabinsk may suffer anew, thanks to the desire of George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin to boost their nations' respective nuclear industries. At the G8 summit this past July, Bush and Putin announced their joint desire to increase nuclear energy use and reactor exports, a move they asserted would increase global energy security. If the...

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