Uranium Country

I attended an amazing lecture last night on Canada's role in the global nuclear industry. Jim Harding, the author of Canada’s Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System, was in Hamilton to speak on the subject of The Nuclear Church of Canada.

There's no other way to describe it. There's no rational reason to back nuclear power so proponents have to point to faith. It has been repackaged and repackaged over the years but it's still the same creature: a white elephant. First it was for peaceful abundant energy in the 1950s. Then it was the energy solution in response to the oil shocks of the 1970s. Now it's the climate change solution. Yet nuclear for so many reasons has never caught on.

Nuclear energy certainly isn't safe since it poisons the earth (both mining and spent fuel including depleted uranium munitions) and leads to nuclear weapons proliferation. Nuclear energy and weapons are one and the same as I've repeated countless times here. Nor is it economically viable without massive subsidies and full life cycle costs show that nuclear energy is not the carbon saviour it's portrayed to be.

What Canadians don't recognize, or assume technology will fix, is that uranium mining destroys ecosystems and kills all beings. This is at the level of the individual or community. Port Hope, Ontario a place I'd never heard of, has some of the most dangerous air, due to free isotopes, in Ontario. It houses a uranium refinery. The best part is, the Government of Canada knows it's leading to higher cancer rates and other deformities yet Health Canada has never conducted a rigorous health study. Ever.

They can't. Much like the Alberta tar sands, industrial civilization is in denial that all our "progress" has only benefits--such as they are. The government and corporations are complicit in this pure violence.

The best part of the evening was when I stood up and called this behaviour (mining, refining, building, dumping, ignoring, censorship, denial) what it is: insanity. A nuclear clergyman behind me blurted out in response: "You have to live". This man of the cloth was so screwed up that he didn't know what living actually is. Cancer is not living. Breathing in isotopes is not living. Poisoning ecosystems is not living. Very little that civilized humans do has anything to do with life.

We must reject this false religion and its scores of acolytes. We must erase the churches in our minds that ignore the truth that we are rubbishing the entire planet one plot at a time. And then become part of the community of life again. It's always been the only way.