Saturday, Japan is shutting down the last nuclear power generating station. Unlike the US, their licensing process includes an annual review in which public opinion is taken into account. Here, in America, we license our nuclear facilities for twenty years, often rubber stamping their permits with callous disregard for public opinion. When TMI (Three Mile Island) blew, our bucolic world in rural Pennsylvania was dosed with rad waste and the cover up continues today. Officials still claim that there was no reason to worry although massive quantities of radioactive material had been spewing from the plant for over two weeks before the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) was notified of a problem at the site. Allowing corporate interests to police themselves has not worked in Japan, nor has it worked here in the US. We just have a better handle on how to squelch public opinion. The last nuclear protest that I participated in was "overseen" by at least three dozen police from several jurisdictions. There were also intimidating and threatening gestures and actions from a handful of local residents who screamed insults and slogans that made my skin crawl. hearing of an entire nation banning together to practice true enlightened action in the face of evil and unconscionable danger makes this world citizen proud.
There is little that can be said about the ways we have chosen to do business in our neck of the woods. When the public began to understand that nuke waste is dangerous for tens of thousands of years and requires armed guards around the depots where it is stored, basically forever, the phrase "nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter." began to be bandied about. I'm not sure about you, but we still have a meter on our house. When increases in cancer were understood to be the result of being dosed with fallout, it was immediately compared to the radiation you would receive from sun tanning (which was thought to be "healthy" back then) or (for those with a desire to enter the "jet set") the amounts of radiation you would receive from taking a trans-Atlantic flight. If public opinion hovered just above fifty percent against, the next straw was added to the back of the public. Many who live in the townships that do have nuke facilities pay no property tax. Who wouldn't like that? The fact that no one will ever want to buy your house if it is in the shadow of a hazardous waste production facility, even knowing that they would pay no taxes on the property for life, makes no difference to those who have been convinced of both the need for and the safety of this insane way of making electricity.
I have readers in Japan, for them I say Bless You! Their public opinion has pushed the hand of government further toward sanity in one brief year than hundreds of thousands of protesters have done in the US in my fifty year lifetime! Even when what we warned about came true, the nuclear disarmament crowd was marginalized and the nuclear power opposition was painted as unpatriotic Communists (when that was the worst word in our political dictionary) or Socialists today. Caring about everyone as much as we care about ourselves is antithetical to capitalistic values I guess. I thought that we were a country of freedom but that our freedoms ended where they imposed on the noses of our neighbors. Not so in the case of generating electricity. We allow our freedom to flip a switch to impact hundreds of generations who have not yet been born. They will inherit the waste that has been created today with no means of paying back the bitter cost of stupidity with which we saddle them with our waste. Even as a child, I understood the odd disconnect between those who advocated for nuclear energy production and the facts. for all the touting of nuclear energy as "carbon-neutral" that claim is bogus. I have written of this before, so if you understand, jump ahead a paragraph or two. The litany of carbon-fueled activities and processes that are required to produce electricity through nukes is almost unfathomable. whether the Japanese understand it or not, they have taken a bigger step toward sustainability than they could possibly imagine.
First of all, massive amounts of fuel (carbon-based) need to be spent securing title to land that is "appropriate" for siting a facility that will be dangerous, works best near an inexhaustible source of water and requires sturdy bedrock to support the massive weight of a reactor core and the attendant containment facilities. Ideally, it would be near points of use, to keep transmission line costs down, then the construction requires hundreds of thousands of tons of limestone to be baked in kilns (also using carbon based fuel) for the cement that holds concrete together. Conventional fuels (read, carbon releasing) are pumped in to the facility in the form of backhoes, bulldozers, trucks, rock crushing and screening operations and you also need to keep the lights on in the design and drafting facilities. flying your representatives around to secure permits and lobby for leniency amongst the regulating agencies expends more jet fuel, etc. Riding herd on public opinion has a very real cost as well. Going to several dozen public hearings, putting out ad campaigns and negotiating settlements to placate local and regional opposition can require many resources and also hinge upon cheap carbon-based energy.
Then, there is the cost of fuel for the process. Naturally occurring "ore" is getting less and less available and what we have is at ever lower concentrations. Massive mining operations are required to get the raw material for fueling up a nuclear generating station. Once mined, again using carbon based energy, the ore must be crushed, refined, concentrated and transported from facility to facility to accomplish each of these critical steps. The next part requires even more energy and is called enrichment. This is what we are so mad at Iran for doing today. Massive centrifuges must be made to spin for years to extract enriched fuel for the process. These centrifuges are best energized by electricity, produced mostly from fossil fuel in our country. Finally the fuel needs to be pelletized and transported to the reactor.
When I was a child, I envisioned the entire process as similar to winding up a rubber band powered balsa wood airplane. The only difference is that the order of magnitude is much, much greater. The propeller is so much harder to spin that we scar the land as we spin it. We hemorrhage massive amounts of fuel in winding up the mechanism. We scar communities and create massive monolithic concrete structures that must eventually be disposed of as hazardous waste. Even during the period of "free flight" there are risks and costs that make the whole process seem more like a bad acid trip than I can express in mere words. I have always understood the threat from these facilities as equal to, if not greater than, the threat of nuclear weapons. Like the person driving while texting, you never know when their destructive power will be unleashed. At least with weaponry, you have to decide when and where to unleash the deadly power, accidents can happen any time, any place. Add to this the long-term consequence of producing extremely long-lived waste and you can see the whole house of cards come crumbling down.
What we were never told is that the entire charade began because we needed some of that waste to refine again, rendering even more of the landscape inhospitable for hundreds of generations, to get weapons grade material. Instead of just enjoying the "free flight" during the years of electricity generation, the whole game was to make the ultimate weapon. The gods and goddesses are smiling on the land of the rising sun. Today, tomorrow and for centuries to come we must continue to celebrate Japan's good sense and compassion. Not only for their people, but for the people of the entire planet! At their peak, the (I believe) 54 nuclear generating stations (I have also heard the number fifty) provided 1/3 of Japan's demand for electricity. In spite of this fact, the people of Japan decided to stop throwing money and their future down the rat hole of this dangerous and short-sighted form of electricity generation. The rest of the world needs to follow their lead and develop alternative and less destructive means of meeting our needs. Conservation, efficiency improvements and alternative methods of production are readily available to us all and we need to begin spinning the wheel in the directions we want to go, not backward to a time of decadent ignorance and the immorality of subsidizing dangerous and deadly industries that leave our children with unrivaled debt.
We all need to celebrate the wisdom with which Japan is pursuing sustainability. We also need to keep pressure on our own leaders to eliminate this relic of cold war thinking. No one is better off under a system that puts our nation and the rest of the planet under threat of catastrophe. Radiation from Japan is already here. Even though the government is trying to downplay the facts, we need to understand that the massive bolus of radiation that continues to leave Japan is not "less dangerous" because we are finding isotopes with short half lives. In some ways, that is indicating that the problems are far worse than we can imagine. Short half life materials, detectable over a year later indicate even greater and more concentrated plumes entering the atmosphere than we had calculated. spread the word, we have finally come full circle in the nuclear age. I personally find it somewhat ironic that the first place on earth to be decimated by nuclear attack has gone through a process that led them to fully embrace the devilish technology and then commit to ending the nuclear nightmare once and for all in just two or three short generations. This is the blink of an eye in the time span of radioactive waste and needs to be celebrated by every man woman and child on the planet!
There is little that can be said about the ways we have chosen to do business in our neck of the woods. When the public began to understand that nuke waste is dangerous for tens of thousands of years and requires armed guards around the depots where it is stored, basically forever, the phrase "nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter." began to be bandied about. I'm not sure about you, but we still have a meter on our house. When increases in cancer were understood to be the result of being dosed with fallout, it was immediately compared to the radiation you would receive from sun tanning (which was thought to be "healthy" back then) or (for those with a desire to enter the "jet set") the amounts of radiation you would receive from taking a trans-Atlantic flight. If public opinion hovered just above fifty percent against, the next straw was added to the back of the public. Many who live in the townships that do have nuke facilities pay no property tax. Who wouldn't like that? The fact that no one will ever want to buy your house if it is in the shadow of a hazardous waste production facility, even knowing that they would pay no taxes on the property for life, makes no difference to those who have been convinced of both the need for and the safety of this insane way of making electricity.
I have readers in Japan, for them I say Bless You! Their public opinion has pushed the hand of government further toward sanity in one brief year than hundreds of thousands of protesters have done in the US in my fifty year lifetime! Even when what we warned about came true, the nuclear disarmament crowd was marginalized and the nuclear power opposition was painted as unpatriotic Communists (when that was the worst word in our political dictionary) or Socialists today. Caring about everyone as much as we care about ourselves is antithetical to capitalistic values I guess. I thought that we were a country of freedom but that our freedoms ended where they imposed on the noses of our neighbors. Not so in the case of generating electricity. We allow our freedom to flip a switch to impact hundreds of generations who have not yet been born. They will inherit the waste that has been created today with no means of paying back the bitter cost of stupidity with which we saddle them with our waste. Even as a child, I understood the odd disconnect between those who advocated for nuclear energy production and the facts. for all the touting of nuclear energy as "carbon-neutral" that claim is bogus. I have written of this before, so if you understand, jump ahead a paragraph or two. The litany of carbon-fueled activities and processes that are required to produce electricity through nukes is almost unfathomable. whether the Japanese understand it or not, they have taken a bigger step toward sustainability than they could possibly imagine.
First of all, massive amounts of fuel (carbon-based) need to be spent securing title to land that is "appropriate" for siting a facility that will be dangerous, works best near an inexhaustible source of water and requires sturdy bedrock to support the massive weight of a reactor core and the attendant containment facilities. Ideally, it would be near points of use, to keep transmission line costs down, then the construction requires hundreds of thousands of tons of limestone to be baked in kilns (also using carbon based fuel) for the cement that holds concrete together. Conventional fuels (read, carbon releasing) are pumped in to the facility in the form of backhoes, bulldozers, trucks, rock crushing and screening operations and you also need to keep the lights on in the design and drafting facilities. flying your representatives around to secure permits and lobby for leniency amongst the regulating agencies expends more jet fuel, etc. Riding herd on public opinion has a very real cost as well. Going to several dozen public hearings, putting out ad campaigns and negotiating settlements to placate local and regional opposition can require many resources and also hinge upon cheap carbon-based energy.
Then, there is the cost of fuel for the process. Naturally occurring "ore" is getting less and less available and what we have is at ever lower concentrations. Massive mining operations are required to get the raw material for fueling up a nuclear generating station. Once mined, again using carbon based energy, the ore must be crushed, refined, concentrated and transported from facility to facility to accomplish each of these critical steps. The next part requires even more energy and is called enrichment. This is what we are so mad at Iran for doing today. Massive centrifuges must be made to spin for years to extract enriched fuel for the process. These centrifuges are best energized by electricity, produced mostly from fossil fuel in our country. Finally the fuel needs to be pelletized and transported to the reactor.
When I was a child, I envisioned the entire process as similar to winding up a rubber band powered balsa wood airplane. The only difference is that the order of magnitude is much, much greater. The propeller is so much harder to spin that we scar the land as we spin it. We hemorrhage massive amounts of fuel in winding up the mechanism. We scar communities and create massive monolithic concrete structures that must eventually be disposed of as hazardous waste. Even during the period of "free flight" there are risks and costs that make the whole process seem more like a bad acid trip than I can express in mere words. I have always understood the threat from these facilities as equal to, if not greater than, the threat of nuclear weapons. Like the person driving while texting, you never know when their destructive power will be unleashed. At least with weaponry, you have to decide when and where to unleash the deadly power, accidents can happen any time, any place. Add to this the long-term consequence of producing extremely long-lived waste and you can see the whole house of cards come crumbling down.
What we were never told is that the entire charade began because we needed some of that waste to refine again, rendering even more of the landscape inhospitable for hundreds of generations, to get weapons grade material. Instead of just enjoying the "free flight" during the years of electricity generation, the whole game was to make the ultimate weapon. The gods and goddesses are smiling on the land of the rising sun. Today, tomorrow and for centuries to come we must continue to celebrate Japan's good sense and compassion. Not only for their people, but for the people of the entire planet! At their peak, the (I believe) 54 nuclear generating stations (I have also heard the number fifty) provided 1/3 of Japan's demand for electricity. In spite of this fact, the people of Japan decided to stop throwing money and their future down the rat hole of this dangerous and short-sighted form of electricity generation. The rest of the world needs to follow their lead and develop alternative and less destructive means of meeting our needs. Conservation, efficiency improvements and alternative methods of production are readily available to us all and we need to begin spinning the wheel in the directions we want to go, not backward to a time of decadent ignorance and the immorality of subsidizing dangerous and deadly industries that leave our children with unrivaled debt.
We all need to celebrate the wisdom with which Japan is pursuing sustainability. We also need to keep pressure on our own leaders to eliminate this relic of cold war thinking. No one is better off under a system that puts our nation and the rest of the planet under threat of catastrophe. Radiation from Japan is already here. Even though the government is trying to downplay the facts, we need to understand that the massive bolus of radiation that continues to leave Japan is not "less dangerous" because we are finding isotopes with short half lives. In some ways, that is indicating that the problems are far worse than we can imagine. Short half life materials, detectable over a year later indicate even greater and more concentrated plumes entering the atmosphere than we had calculated. spread the word, we have finally come full circle in the nuclear age. I personally find it somewhat ironic that the first place on earth to be decimated by nuclear attack has gone through a process that led them to fully embrace the devilish technology and then commit to ending the nuclear nightmare once and for all in just two or three short generations. This is the blink of an eye in the time span of radioactive waste and needs to be celebrated by every man woman and child on the planet!
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