On occasion of a ceremony on August 6 remembering the dropping of the first atomic bomb and its victims that happened August 6 sixty six years ago the Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan laid a wreath of yellow flowers at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. His piercing words express a hush of fear billions of people around the world feel who for decades had been lulled into a false sense of security by their leaders: “I deeply regret believing in the security myth of nuclear power." Among world leaders Naoto Kan’s honesty stands out but he could have known sooner.
Following a stream of British, French, Russian and other countries reactor failures and shaken up by the Three Mile Island reactor unit’s 2 meltdown in 1979, the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NRC, took some action. The public was concerned after a Chernobyl, or worse Fukushima, like tragedy of a large sacrifice landscape was narrowly avoided at Three Mile Island. In 1985 the NRC predicted that every 20 years with a 50/50 probability a maximum impact core melt down among the 100 US nuclear power plants, representing one quarter of the wolds reactors, would occur. Each core melt down would potentially be killing hundreds of thousands of people as part of long and short term consequences of radiation.
The question must be asked why the global nuclear threats are so persistent and the problem is not corrected. I suggest that false identities have become so entrenched that it is hard for any kind of language to function in the nuclear and uranium industry debate.
The concept that there is such a thing as a nuclear ‘energy’ industry is fantasy. It doesn’t help that even leading critics like Green Peace or the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives endorse this core assumption of nuclear propaganda. Nobody who really looks can find a shred of evidence to support that uranium mining and the nuclear fuel cycle industry have a justification without the nuclear weapons business. We all know that everything has a price except the tools for war. I appreciate the honesty of the US government in this regard which handles nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors under one roof, the US Department of Energy. Almost all of the ecological and health related criticisms in the wider public discussion present nuclear weapons, their currently exploding proliferation and their threat to peace and survival as risks, as negative side effect of nuclear energy. Again, nobody has evidence to substantiate this causality. There is ample forensic, historic, military, nuclear physics and industry analysis showing that its the other way around. Nuclear energy and its massively subsidized astronomic cost have a commercial meaning only as a factor of and contributor to atom bombs, DU weapons etc. The Global Zero movement, outstanding nuclear researchers and physicists like Robert Jungk and Jens Scheer have been adamant that ignoring the dominance of nuclear arms in the equation of uranium mining, nuclear fuel cycles and atom bombs is a stifling impediment in the dismantling of either one. It feels good to leave the intellectual insane asylum behind where they all believe in the reality of ‘nuclear energy’. In fact the nuclear fuel cycles take up such massive quantities of energy and resources that nobody was ever able to show that nuclear power generation actually has a positive energy balance.
Dr. Tatsuhiko Kodama from the Radio Isotope Centre of the University Tokyo spoke as expert witness in the Japanese parliament in July 2011. He explained that the degree of contamination in the affected region so far is about 20 times as significant as the radiation and contamination caused by the Hiroshima bombing. By August the emergency workers in Fukushima started observing highly radioactive steam surfacing from the floors of three of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors and the surrounding areas. These are China Syndrome indications that the containment floors have given way allowing the liquid nightmare ponds now to inch towards groundwater; quite possibly resulting in steam explosions soon to catapult and aerosolize tens of tons of plutonium and uranium or more into the atmosphere and the winds. Bad news for us in the Northern Hemisphere and especially the West and Northwest of North America. Sounds like nuclear reactors are weapons of mass destruction on a constant hair trigger setting after all. Truth is, operational risks of reactors are at levels of warfare activities and not comparable to any kind of civilian undertakings. In the US, Canada and world wide about half of nuclear ‘power’ plants operate well past their originally specified design life, only speeding up the pace of disasters to come. It takes professional liars to present this differently. Now is a time of a renewed nuclear arms race and a global weapons proliferation to many new members in the nuclear club and perhaps even non state actors.
Ever since the Manhattan Project on very basic industrial terms the nuclear industry has remained a cult of not just the impossible but of irresponsibility on a truly grandiose scale. Vital water and steam pipes as well as other metal components are subject to unpredictable radiation embrittlement. Basketball size chunks may fall out, blow off from incredibly high quality components after ten seconds or ten years of use, nobody knows. It is one important reason why equipment failure different to other industrial systems in nuclear equipment is not an accident but everyday occurrence and possibility.
The nuclear politics are no less crazy than the metallurgy. As a standard nuclear cover up procedure in 2008 the Harper government fired the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission president Linda Keen because late in 2007 she had shut down the Chalk River reactor, Ontario. This was her duty as the plant had been operating for some time in violation of safety requirements. Its back up power generation among other safety items was not in place; very similar shortcomings that proved fatal in the Fukushima setup. Linda Keen was let go, the reactor fired up only to shut down again in May 2009. This was because inspections at that point had revealed a heavy-water leak and corrosion at the base of the reactor vessel. Chalk River has a history of trouble and radiation leaks into the environment that goes back decades. As Robert Jungk in his “The Nuclear State” points out, the scientific and ethical corruption as well as treason to humanity doesn’t stay contained within the nuclear operations complex. Nuclear industry with its risks requires and breeds a nuclear security state with an inherent desire to attack freedom of expression and other democratic rights. The industrial, ecological and economic characteristics of large scale nuclear technology haven proven to be so non sensical that we can expect now a fair amount of cynicism regarding its use as a transformational tool towards totalitarian goals by many governments. If a population can be forced to buy in to one abstract falsehood it helps to force another on them like the neoliberal religion.
The very concept of radioactivity and splitting the atom originated with questioning, non conformist minds who discovered deep below basic Newtonian appearances of things uncertainties and fluidity in the reality of physics. A role played Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Robert Oppenheimer and others. And here comes Stephen Harper who just about every time he talks refers to uncertainty and himself as the one who controls it but in real life maximizes risk and ruinous debt in the nuclear vanity. The irony is of course that fear of nuclear winter as certain consequence of a large scale deployment was one reason that kept us alive during the cold war. But now there is a new breed of medieval culture warriors who could appreciate to learn from the nuclear winter theme the reality of man made climate changes.
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