Fuku Radioactive Scaremongers!

Acknowledgement: Special thanks to The Rev for his blessings upon this post, and vital fact-checking and sub-editing to reduce the risk of me sounding completely insane.

Dear Nuclear Holocaust(ers)
This post is a general vent re: post-Fukushima and the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disasters. The reactor complex took two massive natural hits, both of which were well beyond it's designed integrity limitations_ (a quake of richter scale 9 vs a design tolerance of 6.9, and a tsunami 15m high vs a 'safe' height of less than 10m). The resultant outcome was a reactor accident rated at level 5 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (Three Mile Island was also a fatality free level 5, while Chernobyl, with it's awful radiation emissions and multiple fatalities, has been classified the highest possible: level 7).  So, with that in mind, let's panic like sissies, or snort derisively at nuclear power, because, hey, you're a fucking physicist or some shit, right?

[Pictured: in no way a nuclear explosion, nuke plants are not bombs.]

The Fukushima plant did not melt down.  Not like Chernobyl. There were no direct deaths during the emergency from radiation or burns.  And that's despite all those hydrogen pressure explosions you saw on the news. Yes, some radiation from the plant did rise, and some of the braver damage control crews were exposed to up to 25% of a medically recommended dose, but it wasn't radioactive armageddon like the media threatened.

Is there anything more disappointing to an idealist than lying down on a quiet

wet road devoid of cops, security and industrial vehicles trying to pass?  Hope

there's a sliced lunch in your student backpack, sweetheart, because walking

home tube-chained to Derek there, just because the 'fascist pigs' couldn't be

fucked bolt-cutting you free, is going to be a drag.

Much of the plant is rendered to safe levels and the remaining irreparable chambers are shut down now. This means the three nuclear chambers unaffected by the earthquake, tsunami, and repair contingencies are now getting power back to thousands of citizens adversely affected by the meanest shake n' splash recorded against inhabited land for fuck-knows-how-long. The scaremongers and reactionaries, amateur ecologists and ambitious politicals all claim Fukushima to be just another (albeit only the third in the last 40 years) incident proving the lethality of nuke power.  Even though the 'nuclear' bit did not kill anyone!

I see it different. Fukushima, despite it's age (43 years), and the sheer magnitude of the Natural force arrayed against it, did a lot fucking better than it was designed to do and the people in charge, although could have done a little better in some places, on the whole saved many thousands of fucking lives by doing the job they were trained to do under hardships and adverse conditions.

But all you protestors go nuts, okay?  Coz, y'know, you're the experts.  If you had your way all nuke plants would be torn down right now and replaced with solar-electric, solar-thermal and wind-power crap.  Good luck finding enough constant sunshine, wind and available land to power an entire city with that plan, Earth Child.  Let's see how long you can run your podcasts, blogs and Youtube riots with bio-fuel generators or geo-thermal induction. The bottom line fuckers is that Solar is still too expensive and easily damaged, thermal is not fast enough and wind-power is too resource hungry on infrastructure and budget to be a viable sole source of electricity.

Listen, it's very easy to poo-poo stuff that we take for granted while running enough tech and appliances in a single home to power an entire African village.

In other words, THINK ABOUT WHY WE HAVE IT!  Nuclear power is the by far the most efficient form of power generation at our disposal to date.  It's cleaner and safer than it has ever has been.  It doesn't cause anywhere near the pollution or direct dangers of coal or similar fossil fuels (an average of 590 coal miners die on the job each year in North America alone - 34 died at Chernobyl, the most catastrophic meltdown in history – mind you Chernobyl went down because of management decisions guiding and controlling the bottom line like how often the fuckers had safety checks. So the technology did not fail the system of humans supporting it failed.).

Look at the Long Game

Best of all, nuke fission is our gateway technology to developing viable nuclear fusion (100% waste free power).  We can do it already, but it costs fucktons in resources and coinage to generate the heat and magnetic containment fields required to fuse hydrogen and helium isotopes and produce a net gain of energy. 

"Yeah, sure, Sex Detective, feed us some Trekkie sci-fi bullshit to justify

nasty nuke power."

Fuck you, eco-savage.  The first proto-type is already under construction in France, and an even better version is planned for construction in 15 years.  None of which would be possible without the advances already made through nuclear power.

Look, I'm all for sustainable, renewable, affordable and workable power solutions, but the most vocal protestors against what we have to do to power our civilisation right now sometimes have a political and financial agenda, and not a practical one.  They are deeply passionate about cleaning up the Earth, but they're even more horny about gaining acclaim and credit.  I have yet to meet a Direct Action type of Greenie or conservationist who wasn't operating under the personal assumption that she/he were absolutely right.  TIP: be wary about anyone who believes they are absolutely, 100% right.  Sane people are designed to doubt, it's a built in check and balance system that stops you from doing really stupid things.

See, this sort of stuff (pictured above) is what I call 'non-stupid' eco-protesting.  There's plenty of placards, props, chanting, maybe a sausage sizzle and even a face painter for the kids.  The messages are direct, if a little alarmist.  I mean, seriously, nobody at all would love a 'nukeburnt' country no matter how pro-nuclear they might be, surely.

Toxic waste is always the secondary scare argument against nuke power - it's glowy, greeny goo that mutates fish and wantonly poisons kindergartens or something.  But try looking at where toxic waste comes from in general, idiots.  Here's a toxic waste source the militant econauts usually skip over - the production and then eventual disposal of solar panel cells, just like the ones on your suburban roof.  That shit will kill anything, but it doesn't stop the biggest producers of solar panels from dumping their shit in ground water sites (well done, China). The average recycling paper mill dumps more poisons, bleaches and toxins into our river systems and land fills per month than any nuclear power plant would in a year.

Then here we get a giant, inflatable elephant, which is all kinds of awesome as well as being a definitively misguided, metaphorical cliche.  White elephants describe an unnecessarily expensive or spectacularly unuseful thing - a waste or liability that outweighs its promises.  That would be great if that sentiment was focused on some of the more ridiculous dreams in the clean energy circles (eg: perpetual cold fusion), but to brand nuclear energy as such a pale beast is palpably unfair.  Places that rely on nuke-kettles for electricity tend to have cheaper power bills, cleaner air and stronger energy grids than coal burning equivalents.  Their workers are safer, their supply is more reliable, and once set up, a nuke plant can, pound for pound, output many times the juice of fossil fuel, solar, hydro, geothermal, wind or any other type of generator.

Then we get the extreme, or 'Direct Action', protests.

They're always fucking chaining themselves to shit: gates, bulldozers, trees, other protestors, you name it.  Here we see prostrate eco-warriors cuffed to each other within a metal tube.  This makes it all the harder for some poor cop to bolt-cutter the cuffs coz he'll have to somehow cut through the tube first.  Well done, martyrs, you've really struck a blow for the planet, but that still doesn't explain why the hippie on the left is wearing a badger on his face.

These are just the sort of exhibitionists that pray (and provoke) to get clubbed or tazed or dragged away by tax-paid law enforcement.  Antagonists in these highly charged confrontations - where irresistable forces and immovable objects meet in a clash of wills - always claim 'peaceful protest' while unpeacefully resisting removal.  Not too many Gandhis in the eco-war movement.  Bruises, abrasions and court appearances are a badge of office to these people.  They will compete with each other to push the envelope.  They will break into restricted areas, harrass shipping, sabotage equipment, blockade transport routes, and basically carry on like an ADHD platoon at a tantrum convention.

Of course, there are also those who have embraced the Japanese disasters as a boon, a chance to revive and reinvigorate old causes.  See, the 21st Century has been most unkind to the anti-nuke movement because environmental protection is no longer a fringe, radical point of contention.  Thanks to the likes of Al Gore, Kyoto and the Internet, everyone has at least some basic and common understanding that fucking up the biosphere is a bad idea.  The number of individual eco-causes has multiplied exponentially - green energy programs, sustainable communities, Earth Hour, car pooling, waste recycling, carbon taxes, lead-free fuel, desalination plants, energy saving everything, the list is endless.  Nuke power is just one of many concerns nowadays.

Or, and I'm just spitballing here, or you could all turn off the juice at work and

home just 1 minute earlier every weekday of the year and save 5 or so hours,

but nooo, that's way less cool, right?

So, to all those who protest, bitch, whine and cry about scary energy sciences that you don't understand, I say keep up the good, righteous and ignorant work, morons.  We, as a progressive species, should have expanded, and hence refined and polished, safe nuclear energy decades ago, but you zealots treated it like some kind of evil sorcery and kept us back.  I mean, for fuck's sake, most of us still rely on coal!?!  COAL!  Lumps of fossilised flora to boil water for steam turbines that spin and generate the electricity to power your hybrid cars.  This concept and basic application hasn't changed for over a two hundred years, people.  Coal is dirty to burn and dangerous to mine (look at tassie and new zealands mining disasters).  It fucks up our atmosphere on a scale our planet hasn't seen since everything was volcanoes, and is used in its dirtiest forms (namely coarse, Brown coal) by the biggest users (yes, I'm looking at you again, China). The ultimate thruth is that we are running out of coal resources and we are increasingly needing to take risks to get more of it. Another point is it takes coal to power the refineries that are processing our other fossil fuels like crude oil so we are using one fuel to create another and we are actually running out of both. Even our crude oil deposits are getting scarce so rapidly that shale oil is finally being looked at as a viable resource to exploit even though two years ago it was considered ridiculous to think about. Nuclear energy is a hell of a lot more cleaner. We mine less materials (especially if Thorium is used and not Uranium as this element is plentiful everywhere.) We produce less waste and gain more electical output.

Green energy is everyone's goal, not just an elite cadre of eco-snobs who think the world is a giant corporate conspiracy.  Grow up and face a few facts, not least of which is that efficient, carbon-neutral, low toxic power sources require a lot of money to develop.  Who's going to fund it?  You?  No.  Me?  Fuck no.  It will be big business and government programs.  The same corporate and government programs that gave us commercially hybrid cars, bio-fuels and solar panel subsidies.