“Without civilian nuclear energy there is no military use of this technology— and without military use there is no civilian nuclear energy”
-French President Emmanuel Macron
-by Harvey Wasserman
There is no separation between nuclear power and nuclear war.
The “Peaceful Atom” is a radioactive myth.
The world’s fleet of atomic reactors is the happy-faced infrastructure of Dr. Strangelove’s global radioactive weapons industry.
In the United States, 94 commercial nukes comprise the core foundation of the world’s biggest Bomb machine. They are, above all, military machines.
With the massive multi-billion-dollar government-sponsored expansion of the Piketon-Portsmouth Enrichment facility in southern Ohio, the prime function of every US reactor is to be an essential provider of waste management, fuel and expertise for radioactive weapons of mass destruction.
The public face remains a “too cheap to meter” lie that “Our Friend the Atom” is providing us endless inexpensive energy.
In fact, virtually all operating reactors churn out electricity at far higher cost than solar, wind, hydro, battery storage, efficiency and other green energy sources. At massive old reactor sites like Diablo Canyon, California, their inflexible base-load supply of hyper-expensive nuke juice clogs the grid and blocks off far cheaper, far more flexible renewable supplies.
As for climate, nukes operate at ~570 degrees Fahrenheit, pouring massive quantities of waste heat into the atmosphere and nearby rivers, lakes and oceans. They spew radioactive carbon 14 into the bio-sphere while emitting countless tons more greenhouse gasses through the mining, milling, enrichment and ultimate attempted disposal of fuel.
But at the tail end of the fuel cycle, uranium, plutonium, hyper-radioactive cladding and other components now find their way into the war-heads and depleted uranium shells of global mass destruction.
The reactors themselves are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction.
The devastating explosions at Chernobyl and Fukushima underscore the potential of atomic reactors to spew own their own apocalyptic quantities of deadly radiation throughout the planet.
But the Ukrainian war zone presence of six Zaporizhzhia nukes also makes it all too clear that even a single errant shell fired by a warring nation or a tiny terror group could send a lethal cloud over all of Europe and, via the jet stream, throughout the planet.
Even less dramatic catastrophes at Three Mile Island, Fermi One, Santa Susana, Windscale-Sellafield, Kyshtym, Mutsu, Kashiwazaki and more have yielded massive health, ecological and financial fallout.
Each sitting nuke and its fuel pool thus plays the role of a pre-deployed weapon of apocalyptic mass suicide.
None are insured. Nor are they reliably inspected by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency or other so-called regulatory bodies throughout the world.
So one must ask: if they can’t economically compete, can’t be insured, operate un-inspected, worsen climate chaos, are sitting ducks for nuclear attack, and more….why are they still running?
The answer is clear: they are the infrastructure for our nation’s Bomb-making machine, playing the same role for dozens of other countries around the world.
So next time someone tells you to support nuclear power, ask them:
“Exactly which reactors can you prove to be safe?”
“Which ones’ future are you ready to personally guarantee?”
“And why do you support the continued production of nuclear weapons of apocalyptic mass destruction?”
—————————
Harvey Wasserman wrote SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, & THE PEOPLE’S SPIRAL OF US HISTORY.