A lot of the Yukon uranium mining claims are in the Peel watershed, thousands of them. In his letter to the Yukon News from June 24 "Uranium Moratorium Now" Lewis Riffkind laid out what some of the unavoidable consequences of uranium ming are, radioactive tailings from where dust travels and ground water is contaminated. Because of that British Columbia has a uranium mining moratorium in place. The danger of uranium mining alone warrants the protection of the Peel watershed, at least 50 % of it. The ecological reasons have been explained but its also the responsible thing to do to preserve peace, to prevent a waste of public money for useless and harmful nuclear installations. I am going to discuss a concern that the nuclear industry, of which uranium mining is part of, has managed to play down very well. In fact so well that even critics usually buy into it. Its all about the idea that the purpose of the nuclear industry is to produce energy. Its a carefully crafted fiction that we need to leave behind in order to touch reality. Its an industry that is almost entirely funded by taxes. The profiteers in the business have a few front operations like medical isotopes or power plants that deliver electricity into the grid.
Now that the Chalk River hell hole is finished because its so scary, medical isotopes seem not so very important and irreplaceable any longer. The US Department of Energy has wind power listed as about 50 % more expensive than coal which makes it cheaper than nuclear power. Nuclear energy never had and never will have a market, there is no real business accounting, many costs are hidden in military and other expense accounts. Some of the data are hard to come by but independent researchers suspect that the energy balance is negative. That would mean that nuclear energy facilities use more energy in fossil fuel, hydro power and other energy forms than what is ever put out in the life time of the nuclear power plants of a given country’s program. Aside to diminishing oil and gas and money reserves huge quantities of metals as well natural space, ecology and brain power are tied up in the hubris. Another commodity that the nuclear industry eats up is democracy, for reasons like impossible security and truth management problems. So why is it there? The answer is bombs. French nuclear power is an often cited and often misunderstood example. France needed its own uranium enrichment program for weapons because it bailed out of NATO in 1958. There too the energy business is the perfect front for the bomb business. People everywhere wouldnt stand for such overkill in the bomb business and knowingly being taxed so much for universal holocaust proliferation. It just makes sense, nothing seems ever too expensive in order to have bigger and better guns than somebody else. You see, its not just radioactive contamination that leaks out, the cause is so purely corrupt and so entirely false that proportional to the industry size of a country, corruption tends to spill over into other spheres of life. Imagine the potential for criminal activities in the current Yukon Party government if it was overseeing a uranium producing mining sector in the Yukon.
Nuclear weapons are not an ugly sideline of the 'industry', they are its origin, its core and its foundation. Lets be clear about this, there is no peaceful use of the atom, other than perhaps some really small scale research and medical installations. How could there be in a market economy when nuclear power generation costs are outclassed by every other large scale form of power generation and are not even long term competitive to solar panels? The misunderstanding of weapons-grade materials as possible but not desirable extension of power generating plants is the big lie of the nuclear industry. It is the other way around, the reactors with their fuel cycles are a necessary part of manufacturing weapons-grade materials. For example the Iranian nuclear industry is completely within the general framework of the nuclear industry which has no credible separation between peaceful and military uses. Of course its hard to call the bluff when its the leading industrial nations own bluff. The mechanisms that are described in Robert Jungk's "Nuclear State" (1979) have undermined democracy and have recruited the media to produce a lot of professional journalism. One of the scholars and independent experts who early on pointed out that the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty by way of promoting nuclear 'energy' in reality facilitates the proliferation of nuclear weapons was the late nuclear physicist Jens Scheer.
He expressed this decades before the Pakistani physicist A Q Khan took crucial bomb making expertise from a Dutch power plant to Pakistan. It was the fertile foundation for that countrys weapons program and a globe spanning weapons proliferation program that was necessary to pay for Pakistans nuclear missiles. Because this fundamental distortion has been lapped by the public it is difficult to penetrate the diverse outflow of truth manufacturing by the nuclear mafia comprised of government, military and industry bodies. We can see this now in a lack of opposition against the unfolding expansion by the nuclear 'energy' industry which is riding the wave of global warming concerns and lobbying hard for a come back. Radiation and nuclear winter from a nuclear conflict, or an inevitable big accident made possible by the nuclear 'industry', potentially represents the ultimate ecological disaster and it can come a lot sooner than the equally avoidable greenhouse gas catastrophe. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons deserves support from green politics and all responsible human beings alike. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates that the phase of relative stability regarding the danger of nuclear war in a long post WW2 era will come to an end. Within 10 or less years the nuclear club of currently about 7 or 8 members will grow to roughly 30 powers with an arsenal of nuclear weapons. To say we dont want a nuclear holocaust but we can have uranium mining and exploration in the Peel watershed is like saying we are against slavery but we deliver the shackles and the coffin ships; or in todays terms support investment into so called Free Trade Zones with concentration camp inspired sweat shops. This is what is going on in the border area between South and North Korea where North Koreans are kept as forced labour by Western corporations. North Korea's pariah status as rogue nuclear power with its measly five bombs or so is good for the free trade business even though they don't have quite enough of a nuclear arsenal to have a credible deterrence by Western standards. Constant threats and invasions against countries outside the Western sphere of neocolonial powers and institutions send the apocalyptic message to the world: "Get nuclear bombs and get enough of them, then you will be respected. But please, buy CANDU reactors as entry ticket into the weapons grade enrichment cycle. The Canadian tax payers are financing for free as in Chretien's CANDU sale to China". A few days ago the Ontario government put an end to government funding for future reactors because they make no economic sense. The answer of the CANDU reactor people was interesting: ‘OK, OK despite solid nuclear propaganda from the CBC and other media we’ve been found out having wasted the wealth of nations while still brazenly marketing garbage to the Canadian people. But we still need Canadians to keep buying the CANDU junk in order to stay in business to cheat even more countries out of billions and billions.’ Nuclear free trade, financial fantasy and ideological obsession, this is the stuff the global crisis is made of.
Moral and intellectual cohesion was understood in the abolition of slavery and we need to be as good as our ancestors who stood up for humanism on those fronts, when it comes to the ultimate abuse instrument of our time, thousands of nuclear weapons ready to murder and starve billions. Voices of citizens that fit hardly anybody's idea of managing their right or left agendas are too easily ignored just as were those weird peace activists in the twilight years before WW1. Do we want to push insanity with no doubt high quality uranium ore from the Yukon? Bruce Cockburn said it best in one of his songs: "Politician, you are a real big liar, burning us in Neutron Fire".
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