DeAnander:
[...]
I watch the unfolding disaster in Japan with a kind of dull horror, unable really to grasp the losses involved if the situation deteriorates further. Even the losses incurred thus far are staggering. Almost 200K people evacuated. To be evacuated — kicked out of your home on short notice, taking only what you can carry or cram into the car. Not knowing if — like Chernobyl residents — you will ever be allowed back. Leaving behind so much of the material substrate of your life, your memories — your *home*.
And since everyone is lying — the engineers, the government [why is it everyone involved with nuclear power seems to end up lying like the deluded wife of a violent alcoholic, always promising that he's really reformed this time and he'll be safe in future?] — not knowing how much radiation you and your family have already been exposed to?
How comforting is it to hear that your government will be passing out potassium iodide pills to reduce your risk of thyroid cancer?
And this is the future that the international fraternity of nuke engineers want replicated on a mass scale with a crash building programme — fast-tracked for even *more* secrecy and cover-up and slipshod engineering and cut corners? This is “our only hope” for surviving climate change and peak oil? Doesn’t look like hope to me, looks like desperation: as in the desperate, increasingly bizarre and violent risks taken by an addict in full-on withdrawal.
I wrote passionately several years ago at European Tribune that I felt Big Centralised Nuclear Power was the perfectly wrong solution to peak oil and climate change — that it
* was not even climate-neutral,
* was insanely costly (has any nuke plant ever turned a profit or failed to hit up the taxpayer for enormous cleanup costs after its short useful lifetime?),
* had a short resource future (uranium supplies are also limited, folks),
* encouraged the dangerous resurgence of the Security State, and
* represented the first or second prize in technomanagerial arrogance and hubristic risk-taking with public (indeed, biospheric) health.
I wrote that nuclear plants were not and *could not be* case-hardened enough to withstand the unusual rigours that a destabilised climate would subject them to — that declining snowpack would threaten the river levels needed to cool inland plants, that storms of unprecedented force would threaten the high-tech grids and support systems on which these fragile monsters utterly depend, even that diesel fuel for their backup generators might become difficult to obtain reliably in future. They are not a technology for hard times. They are a luxury toy for a civilisation rolling in wealth, with real estate to burn (literally), with an adolescent appetite for spectacular risk-taking and machismo. They are, in terms of human survival and resilience, a super-expensive frivolity, a Neronic ego-monument as crazy as the last moai or an obscenely overcompensated CEO’s third private jet.
How many of them have to fold up under even moderately severe climate/weather/geo events before we get it? This is Oz technology — terribly clever and impressive, but still just the work of a little cowering primate behind a curtain, pulling levers and praying that the damn thing keeps working ‘cos he has no idea how to fix the mess if it doesn’t.
[There is a terrible irony about our condition. Industrial civilisation has promoted the explosion of human populations (while also promoting an expanded scale of death and suffering along the way); and meanwhile industrial civilisation -- poisonous to the core in all its crude, violent, anti-biotic processes -- is busily undermining the ability of the biosphere to feed us, the hectarage of land we can inhabit, the friendliness and suitability of the planet for our own and other life forms. Each time we poison another few hundred square miles for several tens of thousands of years to come, we are like a family in a small and crowded house chopping yet another square foot or two out of the floor so there is less and less room to stand in. Japan is a small country with a high population density -- can they afford to write off thousands of acres of inhabitable space? Is that a fair price to pay for "cheap" electricity? If told that this would be the price, would the voters and consumers have said "Yes, fine, sign us up?" Are the people now being evacuated from their homes saying to themselves, "Well, it's all right really, I had a decade or two of cheap reliable power and my wide screen TV was really fun to watch, so losing everything and having to start over as a refugee is a fair deal." ???]
Words fail me. Birthright? Mess of pottage? Staten Island, beads? The price exacted for what industrialism “gives” us has been deferred (for some, only for some) but it is coming due with a vengeance. Was it worth it?
Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe they’ll cool F-1 down with sea water — their last best hope — and all those innocent people will be allowed to return to their homes, facing nothing worse than enormous, ever-escalating costs to replace the power they were obtaining from the old plant. Maybe “only” a few hundred cleanup workers will be irradiated enough to die untimely and unpleasant deaths from cancer. Maybe we will squeak by again, dodging the bullet, skating along until the next near-meltdown and the next coverup and the next evacuation [or failure to evacuate -- having seen what a bloody hash the US govt made of the NOLA storm and flood, do we like the idea of the same gang handling a Chernobyl-class event in the States?]. I hope so, I sincerely hope so. But I wish that “just squeaking by” wasn’t enough to lull everyone back into a happy childlike trust in the benevolent and wise nuclear authorities (and their endless welfare scam).
OK, I’m ranting. But honestly, how many fables and parables and contes have we generated over the centuries about genies out of bottles and false promises of absolute power — and we still don’t get the moral? When we accept the Genie’s offer — the GEnie in this case — we set ourselves on a path that seldom ends well.
I think I need to take a deep breath, get offline, and do something life-affirming
PS why “first or second prize”? because I’m still not sure whether GMO releases will prove to be even more stupidly undermining of civilisational longevity than nuclear power. the jury is out. so far, both technologies have only one guaranteed result: they leave our descendants an impoverished, diminished and shrunken world in which to realise their happiness and their possibilities. we should call them not High Technology, but Selfish Technology. to steal the future from our posterity has to be one of the meanest thefts of all.
13 March 2011, 11:18 pm
{{{{{{{justdrew}}}}}}} 
aww thanks 
