After the 2011 Japanese tsunami destroyed the Fukushima nuclear reactors, I wrote no more essays against nuclear power. Events had spoken louder than words!
This failure did not chasten the nuclear lobby and its supporters. Their most extreme propagandists perversely and disgracefully proclaimed that now they knew nuclear power was safe. (For instance, at least a couple of journalists, including a blogging science teacher, in The Mail, and Monbiot in The Guardian.) This was only days after the disaster, when it was not possible to know the truth.
If only arrogance could keep nuclear power stations safe, humanity would
have no worries about them.
Of course, that was the purpose of the arrogance, to stifle legitimate worries
of the populace about nuclear power. The Guardian Comment is Free was full of
it.
A similar unteachable attitude of the British government and its officials was exposed, when The Guardian obtained emails that the energy department was anxious to play down the Fukushima disaster, to prevent adverse public opinion challenging its immovable intentions to build more nuclear power stations in Britain. That is to say in England and Wales, because Scotland won’t have them.
Angela Merkel was going to go back on phasing out nuclear power in Germany, until the Fukushima crisis made her change her mind. She has an educated interest in science, lacking in the British cabinet and legislature. Perish the thought that a British elective dictatorship could ever be induced to be guided by the evidence of events! The Titanic is unsinkable!
For my own part, before the Japanese tsunami, I already had made my views known, presciently, as it turned out. Yet I would never be an expert and there were plenty of others, much better informed, who I could only trail along after, as a secondary or tertiary source.
Moreover, the evidence remained unclear for the extent of, and potential for greater harm from, Japans nuclear tragedy, in the wake of the tsunami misery. For instance, in 2015, Japanese television reported that the extent of radioactivity, escaping into the atmosphere, had been under-estimated. And that says nothing about leaks and flushings of radioactive contamination into land and sea.
However, I have picked up a few salient points, from both supporters and opponents of nuclear power, as well as general reading, which are perhaps worth recording here.
The first atomic pile or nuclear reactor was built to understand how a chain reaction worked, in order for the Manhattan project to know how to build an atomic bomb.
As far as nuclear energy was concerned, from first to last, civilian needs were subordinated to military objectives. Indeed, the former has typically covered for the latter. Nuclear power has been the spin-off and accessory to nuclear weapons.
This was certainly the case in Britain, where the mess from the fifties nuclear weapons scramble still has to be cleared-up, in Sellafield, if it can be. It is suspected to be the case in Iran, secretly and illegally helped by Pakistan. Enenews alleged that the US presidency secretly and illegally armed Japan with nuclear weapons under cover of its nuclear power program.
I read on Comment is Free that even a scientist, who designed the atomic pile, for military research into destructive potential, knew this was not the optimum nuclear reaction for peaceful civilian energy purposes.
India has large deposits of thorium and has researched this nuclear reaction option. It was alleged (on CiF) that this was stalled by the Clinton administration offering favorable terms with its own uranium fission reactors.
Whether thorium power, or other not too offensive nuclear options, are feasible remains unproven. I know by my own specialty of election science, the self-interested wilfully ignorant human determination to corrupt and degrade even the obvious. So, for all I know, there may be a niche for a fairly civilised form of nuclear power. Or there may not. But private fortunes should not be begging governments to hi-jack public funds for its research.
If a peace-friendly nuclear power could be developed, with minimal levels of toxic waste, at least, it would undermine the fraudulent excuse of governments claiming to want (uranium fission) nuclear power just for peaceful purposes.
In any event, nuclear power has been the most outrageous example of private profits at social costs. It is so dangerous as to be uninsurable. The public pays for the contingency of being lethally irradiated and made more or less terminally ill. The public pays, from here to eternity, for the nuclear waste disposal problem, which remains unsolved.
If “the world is full of half baked solutions,” as a letter writer to The Guardian said, talking about Internet banking, this “solution” isn’t even half baked.
The hubris of scientists promoted their own prestige in a nuclear utopia of unlimited energy. Even the equable Arthur C Clarke was caught up in it. (Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected essays 1934-1998.) Such was the craze for “atomics” in the 1950s, made possible by suppressing the inconvenient truth that this unlimited energy brought with it the potential for unlimited sickness.
Governments were signing up their peoples to a devils bargain, without their consent.
Harold Macmillan suppressed news of the Windscale reactor catching fire. Only the foresight of a chimney filter, derided as “Cockcroft’s Folly,” prevented a disastrous escape of fall-out. As it was, contaminated milk was disposed-of and cattle slaughtered.
Energy Minister, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn parroted the phrase that nuclear
power would be “too cheap to meter.”
When I mentioned this, my veteran left-wing friend, Dorothy Cowlin recalled
that she had found it hard to forgive him for that.
Investigations, into the atomic bombings of Japan, revealing that they resulted in the whole range of cancers, were kept secret. (Stated in a 70th anniversary tv program, on the bombing of Hiroshima.)
Alice Stewart discovered that x-rays of unborn children induced fatal
cancers. This unwelcome news did not make Stewart a household name, as it
should have done.
When an overseas colleague enlisted her aid, in researching the health of
nuclear power station workers, the American government stepped in to suppress
the exercise. (Gayle Greene: Alice Stewart, the woman who knew too much.)
When the Swedish parliament voted her the alternative nobel prize, the British embassy didn't even give her a car-lift from the air-port. She might as well have been a non-person, as far as the Establishment was concerned.
Despite the deficiencies of this after-word, as well as the previous essays, I hope I have said enough to justify the conclusion that nuclear power has been a stalking horse for nuclear proliferation, endangering the health and happiness of life on earth, thru subordinating civilian needs to military objectives. Nuclear power has not been possible on a commercial basis, independent of public funds insuring its disasters and catastrofes waiting to happen, and disposing of its chronic waste.
Nuclear power has been dishonesty personified. Its public relations, employing friends in high places, suppressing evidence on radiation sickness, and dumping its hyper-pollution on future generations to solve or suffer.
When extravagant promises of "atoms for peace" (perhaps the biggest threat to life on earth) were no longer remotely credible, the tyrants excuse of necessity (against climate change) is made.
No mature government by democratic consensus would inflict this bitterly opposed burden on the coming generations.
Today (21-09-2015) George Osborne announced the start of a nuclear deal with the Chinese government (as well as the French state-owned EDF). He claims that nuclear power is low carbon emitting, which, no matter how many times it is repeated, is still false.
As before mentioned, this fraud is exposed by a Total Energy Audit,
specified by PR Rowland, of the whole production process from uranium mining to
waste disposal, including all the facilitatory expenses.
British government is a typical Stalinist enslaver to white-elephant prestige
projects, above all, the tarnished glamor of atomics. This unamiable mind-set
has been characterised as "nuclear fascism."
The biggest health benefit and energy economy would be thru really good insulation standards in buildings. A big coalition called the Energy Bill Revolution promotes this for every home. The Tories singularly neglect it, all the better to exploit their energy serfs, in a nuclear feudalism of centrally controlled power.
But disable the center and the whole is made helpless. That is why the US
military developed the internet for decentralised communications.
Whereas decentralised energy, where everyone can get by in healthy insulated
homes with their own renewable energy generators and storage, is the future
that beckons to free democrats.
In the 1950s, a comprehensive expert energy report, to Pres Eisenhower, predicted correctly that nuclear power would never make more than a minor contribution, and that the future benefit to mankind lay with an aggressive research into solar power.
More than half a century later, David Attenborough spoke for a new Apollo project. The Kennedy presidency marshalled the nations resources to put a man on the moon within the decade. Likewise, an international fund could enable a doable project to collect and store enough solar energy for the worlds needs. Just a tiny proportion of all the radiation from the sun, that daily reaches the earth, would leave no need for fossil fuels and their climate-destabilising pollution.
He might have added, removing the risk of nuclear power contamination, rendering the planet more or less uninhabitable.