Originally Posted by
Deks
Long before Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant contaminated a large swath of the Pacific Ocean with radioactive material in 2011, for example, General Electric marketed the Mark 1 boiling water reactor used in the plant (as well as in sixteen American nuclear plants), a cheaper alternative to competing reactors because it used a smaller and less expensive containment structure. Yet the dangers associated with the Mark 1 reactor were well known. In the mid-1980s, Harold Denton, an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, warned that Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting if their fuel rods overheated and melted in an accident. A follow-up report from a study group convened by the commission found that “Mark 1 failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely.” Why hasn’t the commission required General Electric to improve the safety of its Mark 1 reactors? One factor may be General Electric’s formidable political and legal clout. In the presidential election year of 2012, for example, its executives and PACs contributed almost $4 million to political campaigns (putting it sixty-third out of 20,766 companies), and it spent almost $19 million lobbying (the fifth-highest lobbying tab of 4,372 companies). Moreover, 104 of its 144 lobbyists had previously held government posts.
Ovo je izvod iz knjige, nije wikipedia, autor je bio ministar rada u Klintonovoj vladi. Japanci nisu znali koje su im djubre uvalili, ali Amerikanci jesu.
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