John G. Fuller's iconic 1975 book "We Almost Lost Detroit" helped open many eyes to the dangers of nuclear powerNext Wednesday, Beyond Nuclear is joining with grassroots environmental allies in southeast Michigan to mark the 50th anniversary of the Oct. 5, 1966 partial meltdown of the infamous Fermi Unit 1 plutonium breeder reactor located on the shore of Lake Erie. In the form of our "Freeze Our Fukushimas" and "Got KI?" campaigns, the lessons that should have been learned from this close call with catastrophe, that endangered the Great Lakes, and countless numbers of people downwind and downstream, will be applied to resisting ongoing operations at Fermi 2 (a Fukushima Daiichi twin design), as well as seeking to block the proposed new Fermi 3 reactor.
Shockingly, Fermi 1 was originally under serious consideration, by both private corporations (such as Dow Chemical, which went on to found and manage the Rocky Flats, CO plutonium trigger factory), as well as the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, as a source for fissionable materials for nuclear weapons, and even fission products for radiological weaponry (a.k.a. dirty bombs). More