1) "Atoms for peace;" atoms for war.
2) Ten-level Hells.
3) Nuclear Winter.
"...and the only serious error is the - then universal - overoptimism about the future role of atomic energy." Arthur C Clarke.
From my atomic house "too cheap to meter,"
I left the wife the atomic house robot to greet her.
I cruise to work in my (avoided) atomic car
to stock-pile weapons for the atomic war.
Plutonium Plutocracy prepares atomic blitz.
On evenings, atomic space-ships show at the Ritz,
where crews slow crooks and aliens with atomic blasters,
and the basement's stocked with first aid plasters
for a designated nuclear fall-out shelter.
So, the space pirates hit our flying saucer.
I hire-purchase a flying cup (life-boat)
with ever-lasting atomic batteries, on remote.
While the firm homes in on my atomic beacon,
I'll read a little on-board science fiction
to lighten the ever-lasting night.
Hargh! Hargh! Hargh! Who-ever heard such flights:
Lemmings Energies, into atoms for war,
gets its weapons-grade uranium from your
Lemmings Fission Energies into "atoms for peace"
which is taken an interest-in only by the police.
Criminal negligence and damages demands
radiate from the radio-active waste-lands,
the health hazards of carcinogenic leaks,
the endless maintenance and security breaks;
the fall-out with government as middle
managers of the corporation fiddle.
If only fission shares had half-lifes of its products.
If only reality, with reason, did not corrupt.
The children of children blame investment trusts
for their Lemmings' shares that leave them bust.
Workers' kids of kids blame the Lemmings' union
for dead-end jobs they kept plugging on.
Fusion energy begins; new battery stores.
With new generations of micro-generators,
locals declare Energy Independence Day.
How dare they!? In every ingenious way!
Note (8 October 2006):
There's a section on renewable energies, large and small scale, on my web
page: A default government pushes more nuclear power pollution. The
compilation was haphazard, and energy-producing inventions keep being
announced. This is despite governments having wasted generations' of wealth
on nuclear weapons' over-kill and nuclear power waste. Yet the still
pro-fission energy G8 governments' "worrisome lack of determination", to
invest in alternative energies research against climate change, was
high-lighted by Lord Rees, the astronomer royal.
TEN-LEVEL HELLS.
“Unless the government tacitly guarantees that taxpayers’ money will somehow cover the many contingencies and risks, private finance will not build new nuclear plant. The Government will be too preoccupied, devoting all its political will to the slowest, most expensive, narrowest, most inflexible and riskiest option. The most damaging cost of nuclear power is its opportunity cost.“
Walt Patterson.
Three-Mile Island was a level 5 emergency.
Had we heard of it, likewise the Windscale blow-out.
The milk was poured away, the cattle slaughtered.
Humans, too, would be discreetly geiger-counted
but no doubt out-right slaughter was frowned upon.
In a sturdy British determination to turn over
a new leaf, Windscale was re-named Sellafield.
A leak was fined as criminal negligence
for up to eight months in 2005.
Sellafield notched-up a level 3 emergency.
Chernobyl was a level 7 emergency
that threatened a thermo-nuclear reaction
with millions of casualties and a continental
river system poisoned for thousands of years.
Fission is the only energy supply
that comes with ten levels of Hell.
Even Dante's Inferno only had seven.
The atomic salvationists fear for "when
the lights go out." At least the old hell-fire
sermons tried to keep folk out of Hell,
not in it, as the only way to keep warm.
Neither reason nor ridicule will move them:
The false prophets, of the fission utopia,
the fissiophiles made fall-out into a Reign of Terror.
The cancer rates and costs of Chernobyl were worse
than its return to the Stone Age, some pretend
fission averts. British plants already flake out.
Yet the fault-prone over-budget Finnish reactor
like some gargantuan beast tries to bury
its waste, as if it will be safe for ever.
The crust of "Gaia" gets its radioactive fix:
States become pushers of a fission addiction.
Like Finland, Britain has abundant natural forces.
The Carbon Trust proposed eight tidal barrages.
Even nuclear France built tidal plant in the sixties.
Britain, with the best tidal resources, currents
and waves, built nothing: No low impact lagoons.
Wind and sun complement as power sources.
Solar power will lighten the carbon foot-print.
But big government's small minds starved ingenuity.
Gordon Brown says nuclear power is "clean" -
not counting the carbon-intensive uranium
mining, extraction and infrastructure,
the laying concrete for plants and waste storage;
"secure" - if Britain's eight hundred nuclear police,
being merged with a larger force, and screwed down
to existing stations, stay lucky; and "affordable" -
not quite the hubris of "too cheap to meter."
The propaganda of atomic energy
has found its level at a perpetual motion machine
fraud: the unlimited energy from fission
an unlimited liability of radioactivity.
Fission energy hasnt turned an honest penny
in half a century, given a Total Energy
Audit of all the hidden costs and health
and safety and security imperatives.
Small Is Beautiful. Big Is Subsidised.
Even big government will prefer fusion energy.
Fission consumes also energy in housing
and sustaining personnel. Then, the plants' running
and maintenance and decommissioning costs
and that sword of Damocles, the waste disposal.
And centralists depend on the national grid
which wastes a third of energy it transmits.
"Clean, secure and affordable" -
for three hundred thousand years?
Unless Gordon Brown is God, he knows not.
The God delusion is not the delusion of God's
being but the delusion of being God.
Power not only corrupts, it deludes:
The laws of Nature would be suspended.
This loss of touch, termed "villa sickness," afflicts
the powerling in the presidential palace.
If "Goddo" says fission energy is clean,
secure and affordable, Goddo has spoken.
British Energy was sold between states.
Drawing from a well of public money,
France alone, besides little Lithuania,
is mainly nuclear. Parasite politics sells-out
Britain’s future to build more Ten-level Hells.
A French nuclear spokesman wrestles with English.
Is it beyond a state firm to send some-one fluent?
Someone like their director of publicity,
one Andrew Brown - and he brother to the PM
as well! Not to mention those friends of Gordon,
present and past chairs of atomic agencies
included – the so-called "nuclear cronies,"
the Tories still waved thru, after a Green show
to vote blue for. "Blair's heir" Cameron promised
to put a wind-mill on the sand-castle
of 10 Downing Street, which shows his priorities.
Cameron "the chamelion," Labour called him,
goes pro-nuclear again, once Labour ditched the plan
for renewable energy, after the poll - that farce.
A state of "jobbing lawyers'" "dodgy dossiers"
brings back nuclear power "with a vengeance"
or sends scores of thousands to their deaths
in foreign wars and disturbs the peace.
Old dogs of politicians rehearse
the old cold-war ploy of nuclear power,
with their heads in the air over super-carriers
and under the sea with submarines.
Their arsenals and dumps terrorise the future
with time bombs of radioactive devastation.
The global self-promoters plot and fancy
the people too poor to rule the new order.
If anyone ever thought that democracy
should give way to "merit" or technocracy,
fission energy shows that a rule by genius
can become a genius for idiocy -
in the classic Greek sense of the word.
The campaign-finance scandals announce
the age of Pay-master politics.
Such science, as owes its success to honesty,
is both a democratic and scientific method:
STV-PR needs be for all official elections.
Science requires first chamber political laws
checked in economic practise by the nation's
division of labor, elected in the second
chamber, for Equality of Lobbying.
Notes.
Nobel prize sharers the International Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore both thought fission energy did little against climate change while creating dangers it couldnt solve.
The World Conservation Union meeting in Bali, as part of the UN climate convention, announced that solar power is the best technology for lowering the carbon footprint.
Acknowledgments:
The quote from Walt Patterson appeared in Earth Matters. (Autumn 2008.
Friends Of The Earth magazine.)
The Mail reported on the government's "Nuclear croneyism".
The Independent On Sunday, 2008, revealed the ramshackle state of Britain's
nuclear power stations.
"Lovelock is wrong on nuclear energy" (because he neglected the Total Energy
Audit.) PR Rowland MSc, PhD, CChem, FRSC. Life Letters, The Guardian.
Robert Kyriakides, The Energy Age. (On the fact that nuclear power is
not carbon-neutral, and on the huge medical and financial costs of Chernobyl,
and on the ten emergency alerts of nuclear plants.)
"Small Is Beautiful. Big Is Subsidised." is a recent book title.
NUCLEAR WINTER
Remember your humanity and forget the rest.
Bertrand Russell.
The Bar Maid is off-hand with the Royals.
And canteen staff scarcely curtsey to them
on their tours. Is that a fact? That's a fact!
The PM broadcast to the nation today.
No-body here turned on the radio.
Did any out there? Here's his first draft:
As before in our history, a regional conflict
has led to world war. Far away nations
have detonated thermo-nuclear weapons.
We grew nuclear plants like poison mushrooms,
and are enveloped in a nuclear winter.
But we have averted global warming. -
Cross out: in a nuclear winter. -
In future, we must secure a world government
of free peoples.- Cross out: of free peoples. -
At home, martial law... (blah, blah, blah...fill that in).
Be of good courage and stay in your homes
(and rot). Stop! Don't put down: and rot. Stupid!
The PM has spoken! Before he escaped,
in the heat of the four minute warning,
some-one forgot to change back the points,
so a train load of holiday-makers
blundered into the secret tunnel.
The troops obeyed orders. It's said, things go
missing in the village, 'cos some-one got in -
but that's an excuse for pilfering.
Last night, shots rang out, in the quarry.
I'd had a good day at the office,
shuffled a few papers, laid the secretary,
the usual thing - you've no idea
of the complexities of modern government -
when this memo popped up, on supplies:
three months, to let fall-out subside,
without a thought for the crops not growing.
Mind you, that didnt count the vintage drinks.
At least, we have the chance to die happy.
The plonk was laid down after the Wall fell.
And brokers, since broke, moved in their data dumps.
(Never mind bomb surges frazzle the science servers.)
One hundred and twenty feet down, Whitehall
and the City now think they are "the People."
Cabinet debates how soon to send out
forage parties. Patrols in fall-out suits
could requisition unspoiled stores but
they'd be vulnerable to contamination
from hostile and frightened mobs
acutely distressed with radiation sickness.
Local war lords, who take over depots,
must have their militias taken out
before they hide unauthorised rations.
Bonfires, against the unrelenting cold, spread
unchecked, with their attendant scavengers.
Smoking chemicals re-act a global Bhopal.
The regions declare independence.
Note:
The astronomer, Carl Sagan and associate wrote a poeticly-titled book, which
should have been called Nuclear Winter, researching this probable out-come of
even a regional nuclear conflict, which would most likely escalate,
anyway.
Richard Lung.
27 December 2008.