In this week’s Earth Minute, GJEP Executive Director Anne Petermann discusses the rising global movement against nuclear power and protests taking place around the world to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster–April 26th, 2011.
To listen to the Earth Minute:
Earth Minute April 26, 2011
Today is the 25th Anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear melt-down.
With yet another nuclear disaster underway in Japan, people around the world are commemorating this devastating anniversary with protests against nuclear power.
In Strasbourg, France yesterday, 700 people staged a “die on” on the Pont de l’Europe, a bridge connecting it to the German town of Kehl to demand the closure of France’s oldest nuclear power plant at Fessenheim.
Across Germany, tens of thousands of protesters launched anti-nuclear demonstrations, and 20,000 plan to march to the nuclear plant at Biblis—which was temporarily shut down as part of a government moratorium following the Fukushima crisis in Japan. The protesters want it permanently shut.
Additonal protests are planned in Russia, Belarus, Japan, Turkey, and across the US—from Vermont to California. In Vermont, the state legislature voted to close the aging Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, but the plant’s owner plans to sue the state to keep it open. The Vermont Yankee plant has been plagued with radiation leaks and is the same design as the Fukushima plant.
Across the world people are uniting to say that it is time to end the nuclear power, before yet another catastrophe occurs.
For the Earth Minute and the Sojourner Truth Show this is Anne Petermann from Global Justice Ecology Project.
