Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One man perhaps more than any other made it impossible in the second half of the 20th century to defend Soviet communism. That man was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Douglas Burch at Time magazine writes:

Solzhenitsyn's unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the greatest heroes of the last century. His books are a must read for anyone who wishes to catch a glimpse of the hell to which atheistic totalitarianism leads. He is dead at the age of 89.

RLC

Please Move Aside

Quick: What's the most dangerous fuel to use to generate power? Coal, oil, nuclear?

How many people have died from accidents in American nuclear power plants? World nuclear power plants?

How many deaths occur in coal mining accidents each year in the U.S.? In China?

An article at FrontPage Mag provides some interesting perspective on these questions and others. For example, did you know that:

A coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor-and not into a self-contained storage site but directly into the atmosphere. By generating electricity whose production otherwise would have required the use of fossil fuels, the 104 nuclear plants now operating in the U.S. prevent the release of approximately 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year; that is the equivalent of removing 96 percent of all passenger cars from U.S. roads.

If Three Mile Island was a disaster, it was largely in terms of public relations: the meltdown had resulted in no injuries and precisely zero deaths - indeed, there was no sign of harm to any living thing in the plant's vicinity. The worst that occurred was that the two million residents in the surrounding were exposed to approximately one-sixth the amount of radiation that they would have absorbed from a single chest X-ray at their local hospital. Thanks to the plant's built-in safety features, the public was never in danger.

The worst nuclear power plant accident in history, the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine, resulted directly in the deaths of more than 30 people, and it exposed millions more to radiation that, by the highest estimates, could eventually result in several thousand cancer-related deaths. Moreover, it rendered some 20 square miles of land uninhabitable for an extended period.

But the Soviet reactor in Chernobyl was an outmoded relic: it bore no resemblance to the reactors that are used in the West. Most notably, it lacked containment shells to prevent radioactive materials from escaping in the event of an accident. The far superior Western reactors were equipped not only with such safeguards, but also with numerous built-in sensors designed to shut down the plant immediately in the event of trouble.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American nuclear plants have long been safer workplaces than most other manufacturing plants. The nuclear industry's safety record is far better than that of the competing coal industry, for instance. Each year in the United States, an average of 33 coal miners die in the line of work, yet there have been no calls to end coal mining on grounds that it is too dangerous.

In other nations, the numbers are much worse. During Chernobyl's heyday, thousands of men were killed in coal mining accidents in the Soviet Union. In China, some 5,000 coal miners perish in accidents each and every year. Since the dawn of the nuclear era, the world's 400-plus civilian nuclear plants have logged well over 10,000 aggregate years of activity, and Chernobyl remains the only accident ever to have harmed members of the public. In addition, the U.S. Navy has been powering ships with nuclear reactors for more than 50 years and has experienced no nuclear accidents.

Nor is there any discernible health risk associated with living close to a nuclear plant. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a person would have to live next door to such a plant for more than 2,000 years to get the amount of radiation exposure he gets from a single X-ray.

Coal today is used to produce about 49 percent of America's electricity, while natural gas and petroleum account for another 20 percent and 2 percent, respectively. A coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor-and not into a self-contained storage site but directly into the atmosphere. By generating electricity whose production otherwise would have required the use of fossil fuels, the 104 nuclear plants now operating in the U.S. prevent the release of approximately 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year; that is the equivalent of removing 96 percent of all passenger cars from U.S. roads.

If not for nuclear energy, America's dependence on foreign oil would be even greater than it currently is. During the 1973 oil embargo, nuclear technology produced only 5 percent of the U.S. electric supply, while oil accounted for 17 percent. Today those figures are 19 percent and 2 percent, respectively. If more nuclear plants are constructed, they could replace coal and natural gas as America's major source of electricity production.

So why aren't we building more nuclear power plants? For the same reason we're not drilling for more oil and building new refineries. The Democrats refuse to allow them. They need to be told politely to get out of the way.

RLC