Nukes or No Nukes

I have this girl friend, Jessie Collins.  I learned of her "on paper" before I met her.  I was a T.U. Law School Student and (OK, I'm a nerd) was reading Atomic Safety Licensing Board Hearing decisions in the library there.  One was about Sequoyah Fuels nuclear facility, about 50 miles from my home town.  In that decision, hairdresser Jessie DeerInWater had challenged the NRC on relicensing the facility, citing a history of  safety violations.

While still at TU, I helped Gary Allison with the CASE challenge to Black Fox I & II, two Nuclear Power reactors planned for Inola Oklahoma.  It was natural that I'd fall in with Native Americans for a Clean Environment when I graduated and started practicing law in Tahlequah.

In January 1986, a bad accident at Sequoyah Fuels sparked public outcry against the facility, and my law office was among those working for citizen groups to oppose the facility.  About 36,000 pounds of uranyl nitrate went airborn  when a uranium hexaflouride cask ruptured, creating a radioactive footprint around the plant for miles.  Travellers driving I-40 were in a traffic jam from the smog, and got doses of the stuff.  Residents nearby got it too, and the cancer rates soared thereafter.  Eventually, many neighbors sold out to move to safer havens, leaving lifelong friendships and kin behind.

So last week Jessie called me and said that the Unitarian Congregation of Tahlequah would be having a forum on nukes or no nukes this  Sunday.  I'm going to make up my mind.

In some respects, things have changed over the years.  More mouths to be fed on Earth than ever before have stretched the demand for energy.  And we know what fossil fuels are doing---   trapped as greenhouse gases, they are warming Earth's atmosphere.  This melts the polar ice caps, sending polar gusts in new patterns that spark severe weather.  This causes habitat changes for Indigenous communities far north.  It changes the world of the polar bear.  And we know that to change the course of the global climate, we must turn down the thermostat before we hit the wall because the indicators lag and the response time of  effecting change is a longer horizon of time than human brains have historically needed in past generations-- many folks may not be genetically predisposed to think so far into the realm of systemic consequences.

So then, is nuclear power the answer because it is far less a contributor to greenhouse gases?  Or can we find a way not to exchange the devil we know for a devil we don't know?

Amory Lovins in Soft Energy Paths written about 1978 seems to be fairly well born-out in his views that a nuclear energy future institutionalizes facism.  Even if benevolent nations (and one could argue that the United States of America is such an example) can somehow find solutions to policing against terrorism, there will always be ill-intentioned nations remembering that nuclear power is but a step away from using atomic weapons.

It seems that in the past we had simpler choices.  But perhaps, I was seeing it all with simpler mind and was less inclined to appreciate the ambiguities and subtleties.  When younger, I might have said that nations have had cold wars for time immemorial, without seeing any injustice in, for example, the U.S. lording it over Iran about developing nuclear power for its people's energy needs.   Back then though, I was a student at OU where hundreds of middle eastern students studied nuclear engineering without so much as a blink of concern by the U.S.

After fall of the Pahlavi dynasty and rise of the fundamentalist Khomeni religious revival in Iran, and especially when U.S. hostages were seized in the U.S. Embassy during the Carter years, the U.S. seemed to shift toward a conservative foreign policy which did not  treat other countries as equals, and the cold breath of isolationism and fascism began to blow.  We fought secret little wars in places like Nicaragua, El Salvador, and in the Middle East.  The French gave Syria nuclear capability.   Middle Eastern politics began to triangulate against an ever-Christianizing West.   Until today, nuclear power is just seen as a subset of  capability of atomic destruction for ideological hegemony.

So yes, I could accept the risk assessments of nuclear power, even after my own friends have died of cancer from it.  How many others lived because their ventilators breathed from the power?  How many others didn't freeze in winter?  And, looking into the future.... how many others might live because we'ved curbed greenhouse gasses?

I'd propose that we vote it a different way:  Let's cut back on energy consumption with robust conservation.  Let's apply policies that reward small families and small energy footprints.  Let's avoid the nuclear proliferation by our individual actions.

I'd propose it, except that it doesn't address the basic problem which Lovins pointed out.  Nuclear power only works in a secure world with secure neighbor-countries.  It only works in peacetime.  For warring societies, it is far too easy to take a bite of the apple, and produce weapons of mass destruction.  Few weapons are as formidable as nukes for destroying entire populations of people, and sickening others to die slowly from the long-term contamination.  There is a genie in the bottle.  It would be so easy to uncork the lid.

So, I am left wondering whether it is better to make personal sacrifices and live in a fascist police state for nuclear power... or whether it is better to not go there.  President Obama this week unveiled taxpayer subsidies to take us on the road to a nuclear future.  At least in the last fifteen years, that was a road which had been closed and was growing over with saplings while the Bush Administration held back nuclear competition to favor the petroleum industry. (It is odd that we find blessings in the most unlikely places.)

Or is it best to insist, for everyone and not just myself, that we bank our future on solar PV technologies that consumers are too mind-boggled to learn, and on wind generators that have their own noise and avian flyway harms, and on small localized or home power units which are diversified into a patchwork quilt of solutions.

The best answer I see is to take nukes out of the hands of governments altogether.  It prevents them from being terrorist targets and we eliminate that vulnerability.  Then we need to do the hard learning that is needed to shift to soft energy, diversified energy, local energy, neighborhood energy.  Instead of big huge grids, we need a million micro-grids.  And we need to apply the same standard across the board from nation to nation so that no one country is judged by external merits-- No Nukes everywhere.

I encourage your comments.