To the Editor:

The news from Fukushima and the world nuclear power industry is bad and getting worse.

The implications for the reactor at Plymouth and downwinders on Martha’s Vineyard and the Cape are mixed.

But the news from the renewable energy industry is good and getting better, and can ultimately end our disastrous encounter with the not-so-peaceful atom. Sooner rather than later.

First the bad news: Some 2.5 years after the multiple explosions at Fukushima, thyroid cancer rates among nearby children have skyrocketed to more than forty times (40x) normal.

More than 48 percent of some 375,000 young people — nearly 200,000 kids — tested by the Fukushima Medical University near the smoldering reactors now suffer from pre-cancerous thyroid abnormalities, primarily nodules, and cysts. The rate is accelerating.

More than 120 childhood cancers have been indicated where just three would be expected, says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project.

The nuclear industry and its apologists continue to deny this public health tragedy. Some have actually asserted that “not one person” has been affected by Fukushima’s massive radiation releases, which for some isotopes exceed Hiroshima by a factor of nearly 30.

But the deadly epidemic at Fukushima is consistent with impacts suffered among children near the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island and the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, as well as findings at other commercial reactors.

A wide range of studies show that even without an accident, radioactive emissions harm people and other living things downwind.

This is bad news for the Cape and Islands. In a region with ever-changing wind patterns, Martha’s Vineyard is at risk from the reactor at Plymouth as well as also from decaying nukes in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, among others.

There’s no credible evacuation plan.

But there are things an active citizenry can do. Nukes like Plymouth, Indian Point, Oyster Creek are becoming more dangerous and less competitive every day. Designed in the 1950s, operating since the 60s or 70s (are you driving a car that old?), they’re being left in the economic dust.

One factor is fracking, which prices gas cheap but imposes terrible ecological and health costs.

The other is perhaps the greatest technological transformation in human history. With solar and wind in the lead, green power is gutting the centralized King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes, Gas) corporate energy industry.

In Germany, the transition to a completely Solartopian economy is accelerating. Energy prices have plunged. The world’s fourth-largest economy (Europe’s biggest) is booming on a self-sufficient green revolution that will guarantee a techno/economic edge.

Cape/Islanders can help make that happen here. Plymouth and the rest of America’s aging reactor fleet is sinking below break-even. A technology once hyped as “too cheap to meter” can no longer compete.

In response, the infamous Koch Brothers and other King CONG billionaires are pushing desperate anti-solar laws (at least one has surfaced at the Mass. legislature) to shield their obsolete, global-warmed, radioactive fossil/nuke investments. These can and must be defeated.

They also want taxpayer handouts to keep dying reactors online even though they are financially kaput. This scam is playing especially strong in Illinois, but it will come here too.

One of the world’s most profoundly anti-environmental industries now claims it can fight global warming. But nukes emit greenhouse gases in their fuel cycle, spew heat directly into our air and water, divert money from renewables and threaten us with lethal radiation.

Our choice has never been between fossil fuels and nuclear power. These inseparable industries must be jointly buried, asap.

Our real choice is between fossil/nukes and green energy, between lethal obsolescence and a renewable techno-revolution, between King CONG and a Solartopian future that promises jobs, prosperity….and survival.

It’s great that solar panels, wind farms, and bio-fuels and are sprouting up everywhere.

But we must also shut that Fukushima clone at Plymouth and all the other reactors that threaten the Cape, Vineyard, and Earth as a whole. Now.

Harvey Wasserman is the author of SOLARTOPIA!  OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH and edits www.nukefree.org.