Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
The Economist recounts how Jimmy Carter's experience in Chalk River, Canada relates to Japan's current nuclear crisis.
Three weeks after Japan's earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant, spewing radiation as far as Iceland, clean-up crews have been working around the clock to bring the reactor under control and contain the leakage. Their life is a nightmare. "Crying is useless," wrote one worker in an e-mail to a colleague. "If we are in hell, all we can do is crawl up to heaven."
(…)
The fear and danger is beyond comprehension for most people, and in particular the political leaders who must order men in to danger. But interestingly, it is not unfamiliar to former American president Jimmy Carter. Nearly half a century ago, as a young naval officer, he led a 23-man team to dismantle a reactor that, like Fukushima, had partially melted down.
(..)
In 2008, when Mr Carter was 83, he was asked if he had been scared. The former president grew quiet and, speaking very deliberately, replied: "We were fairly well instructed then on what nuclear power was, but for about six months after that I had radioactivity in my urine. They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. It was in the early stages and they didn’t know." The account, from Arthur Milnes, a journalist and historian at Queen's University in Canada, appears in a book published last month, "Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: A Canadian Tribute" (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011). "I learned the dangers," said Mr Carter.
Read the full article.
Related reading
Read more about Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.
Read Arthur Milnes account of Jimmy Carter's Chalk River experience on CNN.com
Read Peter van Wyck's account of how Japan's Fukushima nuclear crisis is the latest example of how containing radioactive materials is simply not possible.
Van Wyck is the author of The Highway of the Atom.
No comments yet.