Millions of people who drink water will get cancer.
In fact, if you want to contemplate a very scary statistic, everyone who drinks water will die. Really.Water is deadly.
We saw what happened when there weren't enough life boats on the Titanic. Water caused the deaths of hundreds of people.
Speaking of ultimate water catastrophes, flash back to Noah's time. You think scalpers were getting good prices for the Jazz-Bulls, think what they could have wrangled for a couple of seats on the Ark.
So, water is a really bad thing, right? Of course not. However, as illustrated above, it could be falsely portrayed as such. The same holds true with nuclear power.
Nuclear energy is getting a bum rap. The reason is simple - people don't understand it.
Like water, there are dangers, but the good far outweighs the bad. Nuclear energy needs to be part of the modern world.
But we're only comfortable with what we understand, and the images we have of nuclear power are mostly negative - mushroom clouds, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island .
Some would like to do away with it and just keep using the older forms of energy.
Failing to utilize nuclear energy is an option but a foolish and shortsighted one. Using that logic we should abolish cars and go back to walking because of the thousands of deaths automobiles cause each year. They clearly result in many more serious injuries and deaths than those caused by nuclear power plants. But we'll continue to drive and travel by plane despite an occasional tragedy because we're entering the 21st century not the 18th.
Ignorance has resulted in much of the fear associated with anything nuclear. The U.S. government had no clue how harmful the effects would be when it conducted atomic bomb tests in the '50s at the Nevada Test Site. Now we know how deadly and debilitating the fallout from those tests were. The government compounded the matter by covering it up. But mistakes made 40 years ago would not be made today.
Deseret News writer Jerry Spangler addressed a number of issues in last week's three-part series on nuclear energy, including the long overdue need to properly educate people about it and everything related to it.
Knowledge coupled with a controlled environment changes the nuclear energy equation from one of fear to one of understanding and confidence.
Which brings us to nuclear waste. How dangerous is it? Well, if you sleep with a couple of spent fuel rods under your pillow, chances are you'll have some serious health problems.
But if stored properly, the risk from spent fuel rods should be virtually negligible, regardless of where they're located. That includes the proposed nuclear waste storage site at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Tooele County.
I'm not advocating shipping 40,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from the East to Tooele. But the proposal needs to be looked at in the proper context.
The two issues are safety and self-determination.
Utah should not be forced to take nuclear waste it's not responsible for. Those states that generate it should store it. If they're unwilling to do that, then they should get out of the nuclear power plant business.
The safety issue should stand on its own.
If it's not safe to store nuclear waste in Utah, it's not safe to store it in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey, Washington, Idaho or California either. Those plants should be shut down before people start glowing in the dark.
Nuclear storage proponents claim that in the 40-year history of the commercial power industry there has never been a fatality due to nuclear power operations. They also claim that in 40 years (involving 2,500 shipments) of transporting spent nuclear fuel in casks there have been no radiation-related injuries, fatalities or environmental damage.
Don't we want to believe them? Don't we want to believe that storing nuclear waste is safe? Wouldn't it be quite easy to find out if nuclear power backers aren't telling the truth? A mishap regarding anything nuclear tends to get in the news.
Let's keep nuclear waste out of Utah but for the right reason.