The Venezuela disaster was not the only one that did not make it into the news bulletins. Some other examples from the last quarter of 1982:
October
¾dam collapse in Liberia (200 dead); floods and dam collapse in Spain (89); November¾fire in a restaurant in Turkey (19); high tension cable snapped in Brazil (29); mine explosion in Poland (18);December
¾explosion in synthetic rubber plant in the South Urals, USSR (many, but exact number not revealed); collapse of apartment house in Egypt (20).(*)And then there was a particularly vicious disaster that claimed 1,100 lives last November (this one did make some media). It started in the Salang tunnel on the main highway connecting Afghanistan with the USSR when a fuel tanker of a Soviet military convoy collided with another truck, caught fire and exploded. What drove the death toll so high came from outside the tunnel: the Soviet command, rattled by continuing Afghan resistance, assumed it was another guerilla attack and ordered the tunnel sealed, knowingly letting 1,100 people, including their own men, be baked to death.
Which brings us back to Wicker, Kendall and Caldicott. What they have in common is not only that they help damage public health by fanning fear of a safer energy source; all three also recommend that our security rest on trust in slaves of an ideology who will coolly kill whenever expedient
¾not only their adversaries, but their own people.* Source: West European press, collected by Public-Affairs Division, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna.]
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Vol. 10, No. 6
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 10, No. 6 Date: November 23, 2004 04:35 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: Nuclear wastes: law and reality
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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