On Monday, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak pledged to meet the country's energy and development needs by building several nuclear power plants. But can Egypt be trusted to safely go nuclear?
This was a topic of discussion today on the BBC's World Have Your Say radio program, and yours truly was a guest caller. My position: from an environmental and human health perspective, nuclear energy isn't intrinsically horrible. If anything, it's got a bad rap because scientists have only recently started quantifying the death and destruction caused by pollution from coal- and gas-powered plants. But the downsides of nuclear energy -- the possibility of meltdowns, the problem of waste disposal -- are so serious that it should only be used in countries with powerful, responsible regulatory systems. That disqualifies Egypt.
One of the program's guests -- my apologies for being unable to identify him; the archived show and transcript aren't up yet -- described France, which gets three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear plants, as a model for Egypt. But this was either overly optimistic or disingenuous. France has excellent oversight; one measure of this is provided by anti-corruption nonprofit Transparency International, who give France a
Corruption Perception Indexscore of 6.9 to 7.8. Egypt, by contrast, scores 2.6-3.3, roughly comparable to Mongolia and Rwanda.
Nuclear power plants should not be built in these countries, and the United States should not be helping.
I'll put up the link as soon as it's available.
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Image: A boy in a children's cancer hospital in Minsk. From Magnum Photos' Chernobyl Legacy site. Pay it a visit.*
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