Two Weeks, Young Man

Outrageously, the ruling five nuclear powers today gave Iran two weeks to come clean about its nuclear program. Do as I say, not as I do. These countries (US, Russia, China, UK, France) have thousands of nuclear warheads at their disposal and no one, repeat no one, can demand one scrap of information about their nuclear programs. Why do we allow this hypocrisy to continue?

Yet no one asks these questions. Not the media, not politicians, not pundits, not religious leaders, not CEOs, nobody with power. Can you hear all the sheep braying along with the chorus line. To war!

I shouldn't even be wasting these key strokes. What can you do with an insane system?

For once, Iran has the moral high ground and I think they hold all the cards. The powerful always fall. We just have to make sure that there are no other powers rising from the ashes after they come tumbling down.

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.

The Energy of the Future?

On his recent trip to the Middle East, French President Sarkozy exclaimed: "In 40 years from now there will be no oil left and in 100 years no more gas, nuclear power will replace those energy sources . . . It is the energy of the future."

Nuclear is certainly the fuel of the future. For one thing, the waste produced in reactors is going to be around for tens of thousands of years. That's a hell of a lot of future. Do you think that humans are really going to keep an eye on this most hideous of wastes during those long years? Or, as we usually do, are we going to forget about it and then have it come back to bite us in the ass? Only an idiot wouldn't bet on the latter.

While it's nice to hear a president speaking so candidly about the end of oil, the dream of nuclear is a nightmare for more than the waste reason outlined above. First of all, we must be pretty thick to pin all our hopes on a fuel that, much like oil, will peak and decline as well. There is only so much uranium on the earth. Once it's gone it's gone.

So essentially we are just buying a few years before we are forced to live like every other being on this earth: simply. The only true infinite (and even then . . .) source of energy is the sun which grows crops (and therefore animals like us) which provide everything humans need (food, fuel, paper, meat, clothing--sorry no computers or plastic).

If only we could learn this and change course now instead of going through the pain of climate change and then the threat of nuclear waste to end up where we should have been going in the first place. But humans are pretty stupid and shortsighted so what do you expect?

Fight Climate Change--Go Nuclear!

Yes, we've all heard it before. Embrace nuclear technology and you'll fight dangerous climate change. Sure there's no emissions from nuclear plants unless you count all the oil used to build a billion dollar power plant. But we won't count that, will we? Bigger is better! Long live modernism!

But here's a new spin on the old refrain based on another handy use of nuclear technology. Now this is something that George W. Bush could really get behind.