common dreams has this up.

I was reading about all the consequences of nuclear disaster in the ecology textbook yesterday…brought back a lot of that anxiety of the 60s and 70s…

The costs are enormous and not necessarily recoverable.  The book likened it to what happened in Hamburg during WWII– it was July, 1943, that Hamburg was just plastered with bombs.  There were fires that shot flames 1500 feet into the air.  People were incinerated by the heat.  They reported that bomb shelters were turned into infernos and rescue workers could not enter them for two weeks following the bombing.  The book likened this to nuclear disaster because of the chemical component that poisoned the land, rivers, killed the humans and wildlife in the area.  It was total devastation of life. And the soils would not recover from the chemical devastation that killed not only vegetation, but the beneficial soil bacteria that helped the rooted ones to survive.

I’ll have to write a more thorough report of how the book details the ripple effect of nuclear disaster–chilling.