That was as close to it as he wanted to be.

            We are told that nuclear power is being used to generate electricity. That is not correct. Nuclear power is being used to boil water, and the resulting steam is being used to generate electricity in variants of the same way it has always been generated. What the enormously expensive nuclear plants do is generate heat in the most dangerous way imaginable, with waste products that are, so far, unmanageable. Conversion of the energy of nuclear fission or fusion directly into usable power would be a new and different kind of process. Perhaps it can be done; maybe people are working on it; but the present system is not it. The present system is a fancy steam engine.

We are told that nuclear plants are pollution-free. On July 9, 2002 Senator Trent Lott, then Senate Minority Leader, said, "Nuclear power is a clean, efficient source. We need to deal with nuclear waste." By "clean" the Senator evidently meant that nuclear plants do not give off air-polluting smoke. Indeed, it is impossible for them to give off air-polluting carbon-based smoke, as they do not burn any carbon-based combustible substance. But clean they are not. They pollute in three ways:

            1. Normal emissions. There are emissions from these places and all the other kinds of nuclear manufacturing and storage places. A study states that "...nuclear power accounts for a very small fraction of the radiation experienced by the U. S. population - less than 1.6% of total artificial radiation, and less than 0.3% of all radiation. One source estimates that ... nuclear power plants cause ... roughly ... between 8.3 and 30.2 annual statistical cancer deaths nationally, plus a comparable number of survivable cancers. However, individuals in contact with various segments of the nuclear fuel cycle may have much higher exposure with correspondingly higher effects: the same source notes that nuclear workers bear 99.9% of the risk of fatal cancer from normal nuclear operations."

When the plants have worn-out, broken or defective parts, their more abundant emissions, if "not very dangerous" before, may become quite dangerous. (If they were dangerous before, how much more dangerous?)

            In 2003 a big hole was found in the reactor head of the Davis-Beese plant in Toledo--a plant, already well-known for bad safety, belonging to FirstEnergy Corporation, a company that the Government blamed for the infamous blackout of August 2003. Leakage of tritium from Reactor No. 1 of California's San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was discovered during demolition, long after the reactor had been retired; similar leakage has occurred in at least nine other plants. Numerous plants in the United States and elsewhere are old, worn out, suffering corrosion problems, emission problems, and still permitted to run.

2. Accidents. Inevitably, accidents happen. When a nuclear plant has a catastrophic accident, people die immediately and a lot of people die slowly over years. Many unborn descendents will remain unborn, or be deformed at birth, or have fatal cancers at rates greatly above the rates elsewhere.  

Chernobyl is famous for its catastrophic breakdown on April 27, 1986; the eventual toll is still unknown, unknowable. Famous as well is the cover-up of the disaster for more than two weeks by the Soviet army and Government, a cover-up that included failure to inform neighboring countries and failure to evacuate and otherwise protect inhabitants of the region. Even several years later, it is believed, relevant information, such as the amount of radiation actually released, had not been divulged. (Time Magazine, May 18, 1986 and Nov. 13, 1989)

The March 23, 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania was just barely prevented from getting as completely out of hand as Chernobyl. The data on damage it may have caused to present and future human beings and animals are not yet cleared up. Files were placed behind a stone wall. Quite high State employees were fired, apparently for reporting embarrassing information about the disaster, etc.[1]

In a symposium held in Harrisburg, Pa. on March 26, 2009 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Three Mile Island disaster, Arnie Gunderson, a former nuclear industry executive turned whistle-blower, stated, "I think the numbers on the NRC's [Nuclear Regulatory Commission's] website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000." Data presented in the symposium by nuclear engineers supported Gunderson's statement.

Besides the few catastrophes or near catastrophes, there are many accidents at "nuclear plants" that do not produce many fatalities, but nevertheless suggest that--industry and Government protestations notwithstanding--the safety of these complicated artifacts is not what one might wish; that, indeed, they are disasters waiting to happen.

The world's largest "nuclear power plant" in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, Japan, was damaged in a 6.8 magnitude earthquake on July 16, 2007. Water containing radioactive material leaked into the Sea of Japan; drums containing nuclear waste fell over, many losing their lids, 800 liters of turbine oil leaked from a reactor, and small amounts of radioactive materials were emitted into the atmosphere. Industry spokesmen (who had, on the day of the earthquake, stated that no leaks occurred) claimed that "the emissions, although inadvertent, had been within legal limits."

"Japan has a history of cover-ups and accidents at nuclear power plants..." For example, on December 8, 1995, three tons of liquid sodium coolant spilled from a pipe at the Monju reactor at Tsuruga, 200 miles west of Tokyo, Japan. At a news conference on January 13, 1996, "...officials acknowledged that a video of the accident had been heavily edited before it was given to news media to make the leak appear less serious." (Reuters, Jan. 14, 1996)

And so forth.

3. Waste. These reactors produce tons upon tons of radioactive and otherwise poisonous waste. No satisfactory way to dispose of it has yet been discovered. Typically, the radioactivity in it will last, not a short while, but thousands of years. As Senator Lott said, we certainly need to deal with the waste. Waste from all nuclear installations, including the power plants--radioactive trash of all kinds--is part of an impending disaster. Nobody knows what to do with it, really. Nobody knows how to make it safe. Everywhere it has ever been put, it is causing trouble. The barrels will not last as long as the half-life of the stuff in them; the stuff will leak out, is leaking out.

Barrels of it have been thrown in the deep ocean.[2] Some of the people in charge would like to throw more of them there. Who knows what those substances are doing or will soon do to life on the abyssal plain, to the entire food chain for that matter? For the waste will outlast the barrels by thousands of years.

They bury it in the ground. It gets into the water table. It gets into the water people drink, as it is alleged to have done in Pensacola and Gulf Breeze, Florida.

From 1952 to 1970 the people in charge of the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory dumped 16 billion gallons of waste into wells that feed directly to the water table. It wasn't even in barrels, didn't have to leak out, already out.[3]

Transport of nuclear waste, as well as other nuclear materials, seems to be handled rather well nowadays. It is different from other types of toxic waste, which are often shipped to and unceremoniously unloaded in countries whose people, it is felt, are not as valuable as Americans and whose governments are willing for a price to let their land be a dump for hazardous, perhaps mortally dangerous garbage. On the contrary, nuclear waste is often shipped for recycling from other countries to the United States, the United Kingdom, France, or Russia. It is shipped all over the United States on the highways and by rail. The containers used are accident-proof; successfully so until now; the difficulty is at the destination..

Most nuclear waste is kept where it was generated or "temporarily" stored somewhere else, waiting for somebody to figure out what to do with it. This is a considerable problem. In Scientific American, June, 1996, Chris G. Whipple wrote: "In the half century of the nuclear age, the U.S. has accumulated some 30,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods from power reactors and another 380,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste, a by-product of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.  None of these materials have found anything more than interim accommodation, despite decades of study and expenditures in the billions of dollars on research, development and storage." That statement was written in 1996. In 2009, only the numbers have changed.

"Currently, only temporary storage areas exist for the disposal of radioactive waste.  The U.S. government is working to devise a plan for the safe storage and permanent disposal of nuclear wastes." That statement was written in Environmental News Online in 1999. Ten years later it is still true.

In a September 5, 2001 public hearing of the U.S. Department of Energy, Governor Guinn of Nevada, furious about the U. S. Government's desire to make Yucca Mountain a depository for enormous quantities of nuclear waste, declared the scientific evidence was not complete, yet the DOE had called this meeting to gather public comment on that evidence "prematurely" and over "our reasonable and faithful objections." The Governor remarked that United States Government agencies denied "until just a few years ago" the illness and death their atomic folly caused to thousands of Nevada and Utah citizens. Nevada, it seems, did not want "the most deadly substance on earth" to be buried in the Yucca Mountain site, which would happen, said the Governor, "if the DOE has its way."

In 2003, President Bush signed a joint resolution into law, officially designating Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository site. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified 293 technical issues DOE must solve before submitting the license application. The State of Nevada filed major lawsuits against the plan.

On April 6, 2009 the New York Times published an article with dateline March 31, 2009 entitled: "Yucca Mountain Plan for Nuclear Waste Dies."

The people who invented the nuclear power plant for generation of electricity didn't plan for it to be mortally dangerous. They thought it was a pretty good idea and would solve many problems. Unfortunately, it has solved few problems and created new, threatening ones. The response of official people to these problems is not encouraging.

Scientists that prepare reports that mention unusual levels of fatalities, cancers, birth defects, fetal death, anomalous births of farm animals, and so forth, find themselves marginalized, maybe out of a job, their reputations damaged, no funding for their research. Government people and the people in the "nuclear power" business like reports that explain that the danger is minimal or that it does not exist.

For many years U. S. government people and business people (and some science people; for example Dr. Teller) suppressed information contained in their own reports of studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[4]

They also lied about the harm from exposure to radiation suffered by American servicemen sent into Nagasaki in September, 1945.[5]

They said, continued to say, insisted, that the exposure of 45,000 servicemen ordered to the 1946 "Operation Crossroads" atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands was within "allowable limits", and steadfastly refused for many years to admit that the multiple grave ailments many of these men suffered came from that exposure. The servicemen were a few miles from the explosions, were splashed with water from them, could see the bones in their hands when they covered their eyes, were irradiated. Were moved up to where the blasts had occurred. The government's people refused them treatment, but it's a dead issue now, because most of the people affected are dead.[6]

More than 700 nuclear bombs have been tested by the United States since World War II.[7] At least 317 of these were atmospheric tests, 208 of which were in the continental United States.[8] Government people and their hired help insisted that the fallout from these artifacts did not harm the people that it is alleged to have harmed, cause the leukemia, the cancers that it seems to have caused, produce the birth defects and fetal deaths that it is reputed to have produced, create in livestock the anomalous births and strange maladies that it is claimed to have created. Recently they have relented a little on this issue.

In the 1950s, U. S. Army people ordered thousands of their soldiers ever closer to atmospheric nuclear explosions. At first they were placed seven miles from ground zero, then four, then two miles from ground zero. They were ordered to move toward the blast center several hours, two hours, one hour, even immediately after detonation--just to see what would happen to them.[9] Army and Government people refused to admit radiation was the cause of many of these soldiers' multiple grave ailments--radiation that army people had sent the soldiers to absorb!

Their faithful servants were denied both help and comfort.

"People." Not "the Government," not "the Army," not "the Atomic Energy Commission," not "Business." People do this, make these decisions, make these statements, write these letters; people, male and female human beings, mostly male, not some abstract metonymy like "the Government," "the Army," "the VA," "the AEC," "business," etc. They do it because they are told to, or because to do otherwise would be job-threatening, or because it's their duty. Like Eichman. Call them eichmen (occasionally eichwomen). Or because they believe in a "greater good."

Maybe some of them believe what they say.

What's to be done? A few suggestions for people who cause things to be done in the U. S., Russia, Britain, India, China, Japan, Pakistan, Israel, France, Brazil, :Korea, and so on:

Admit the danger.

Stop using fissionable material in large quantities for anything whatever. This is not a frivolous suggestion. Besides the emissions of radiation and besides the danger of meltdowns, nuclear waste is making more and more pieces of the earth irreversibly unsuitable for living creatures. Having proved yourselves unable to solve this problem, you should stop these dangerous activities.

Develop practical fusion technology and find out how to use it to make electricity without hazardous waste--with or without a steam engine.

Develop practical alternate methods that do not use nuclear fission or fusion.

Don't make new kinds of nuclear weapons.

Don't make old kinds of nuclear weapons.

Don't claim that Uranium 238 doesn't do any harm, and stop calling it "depleted uranium" when it's used to make shells, bullets and armor, or made into commercial products. It is uranium. When uranium dust (an inevitable product of the military use of U-238) gets into the human body it makes the body sick. To say that Uranium 238 emits very low levels of gamma radiation is correct; to say this makes it innocuous is disinformation. It is poisonous--a question of biochemistry, not nuclear physics. And as for radiation, once inside the body, the alpha and beta radiation (which, it is quite true, will not pass through paper) have no shield, for they are right there with the cells. There are numerous sources for this information, by both science professionals and journalists; for example, the presentation by Doug Rokke, PhD at the UN-UNESCO International Conference, Athens, May 24-25, 2001, and Dr. Helen Caldicott's article on "Medical Consequences of Depleted Uranium.")

Take proper care of the people your folly has made sick, and compensate the survivors of the dead; do not say that what made them sick was something else, and that you aren't responsible for their problems. And don't put people into this kind of danger. For more than sixty years you have sent your soldiers into places full of radiation and poisonous materials; most recently, because you use uranium to make bullets, shells, and armor that vaporize into poisonous dust, full of U-238.

Don't use cheerful slang for the things made to kill people, things that contaminate earth, sky, and sea. "Nuke," "Boomer," "Star wars," "Bunker-buster," and so on.

Be trustworthy. If you would become trustworthy, after a while you could be trusted and respected without suspension of disbelief. Wouldn't you like that?

[1] Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon with Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Waters, , Killing our Own--the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, Chapters 13 and 14 (Published in 1998 as a Delta Book by Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017. (The entire book can be downloaded in various formats.)

[2] Ibid.., page 162

[3] Ibid.. Page 139

[4] Ibid.. Chapters 4, 5

[5] Ibid., Chapter 1

[6] Ibid., Chapter 2

[7] Ibid.. p. 7 (Introduction by Dr. Benjamin Spock)

[8] Gallery of U. S. Nuclear Tests: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/index.html , last updated 6 August, 2001

[9] Ibid., Chapter 3

      On the sea we travel as on deserts, wishing only to cross to the destination. On the sea we fish and fight battles. On the sea, then, we are hunters and gatherers, sometimes warriors: the most primitive stage of social evolution. We carry our industrial-age artifacts there to do our stone-age work, tools too advanced for such primitive enterprise. Our fishing fleets take fish that are too small with nets that are too fine, for mature fish have become scarce. Much-hunted whales are endangered. Life forms are disappearing. The seas are ever more polluted with our leavings.

      In a few places near the shore we farm kelp, farm shellfish, raise fish. In a few places we drill for oil and collect manganese nodules. Scientists have unraveled mysteries of the seabed and comprehend something of ocean layers, currents and ecologies. And politicians and entrepreneurs have begun to think of potential riches.

      The World-Ocean covers seventy-one percent of the earth's surface; but ocean is not only surface; it is volume, layer upon layer. All this tremendous three-dimensional space awaits mankind's civilizing hand. What wonders, what agriculture, husbandry, minerals, sources of power, will be found or created there? In this frontier things yet undreamed of will be done. Whales, dolphins and myriad other creatures await domestication. We will discover or create food plants. Imagine a field, ready for harvest, whose volume is one thousand or ten thousand or one hundred thousand cubic kilometers. We will come to understand and use the minerals of the depths. Great volumes will be set aside as nature reserves. No doubt some people will make the sea their home.

      At present, these vast areas and enormous volumes remain effectively outside our world. International law has it that, beyond territorial limits ("the Area" in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), the seas are the common heritage of all mankind; but mankind is hard put to it to claim such a heritage, for no sovereign body yet speaks for mankind with an authoritative voice. The International Seabed Authority, struggling to establish a practical jurisdiction, must seek the acquiescence of powerful states for the regulations it is able to promulgate. The U.N.'s sovereignty over the sea is weak, indeed does not exist, for the U.N. is not a government. Civilization has not come to the World-Ocean because the nations cannot agree on the way it is to arrive there. In these days, the sea is not developed, but despoiled. There is so far no coherent plan to make it an integral part of our world, no plan to civilize it. For that matter, so far as most of the world can see, there appears to be no plan to finish civilizing the land. There exists a hope or a wish, while the rulers use the marvels of science for the most evil and barbarous of practices.

      The problem of the undeveloped World-Ocean is one with the problem of the land. The world is the world.

      We need coherent world order. Mankind is trapped in a shifting, warring anarchy of independent states. There is one mankind; but this oneness has not yet crystallized in a sovereign institution that can effectively unite and govern mankind's diverse elements. That is why the oceans, and the land too, remain uncivilized. Without such sovereignty, "the common heritage of all mankind" is only a string of words, and the potential of the World-Ocean remains unknown and unrealizable. Without a peaceful, integrated world our race, on land and sea, will surely continue its present decline, its murderous wars.

      Every war is fratricidal!

      The existence of independent sovereign units gives rise to conflict. Several thousand years of tragic experience has proved that a single nation or group of nations cannot impose lasting peace, much less peace with justice; nor can persuasion, exhortation, or the simple need for it cause it to appear.

      Nothing can occur unless the conditions for its occurrence exist. A pot of water will not boil without heat, however long one waits. A pile of bricks will not become a house without a builder and a plan. And a house built on sand will not withstand the storm, whatever the real estate agent may claim. The world will have peace only when the conditions for peace are established.

      The minimum condition for world peace is this: that all the nations unite in ceding key elements of their sovereignty to a central sovereign Institution. This is what the most powerful nations have thus far refused to do, what the founding members of the United Nations Organization rejected. Peace has not come, not because the human race is incapable of it, but because the leaders of the nations have been unwilling to do what is required for it to exist.

      There have been two relatively serious moves toward peace, each after a ruinous war. The League of Nations would probably have failed even without the fatal decision of the United States, whose legislature rejected what its President had promoted and in large measure created. The United Nations Organization, with all its imperfections, has sometimes prevailed; has created numerous functioning world institutions and ameliorated or solved a number of vexing problems. Much greater than the League, it is admirable as a move toward what is needed; but the U.N. is doomed to failure in its present form, a central institution without sovereignty. It has not established world peace because it cannot.

      The United Nations Organization is like a one-armed pianist. It may perform brilliantly, but its repertoire is very limited.

      The sense that the world is one, that all mankind is a single, complex, diverse and beautiful thing, has grown ever more prominent. Protests against "globalization" arise, not out of a rejection of the fundamental oneness of the human race, but rather out of a terrible disappointment, on realizing that the people who arrogate to themselves the control of the world belong to the same bands that made fortunes on the slave trade and stole whole countries and their resources, not caring about the injustice and the misery their actions created. The protests turn out to be protests against the violation of the oneness of mankind, against the ongoing attempts to divide mankind into ruling and subject nations, races, and classes, against the contemptuous and murderous arrogance of those who claim the right to rule.

      If the horrors and disasters of two World Wars have brought us only to this place, we cannot realistically expect the world's present leaders to create the conditions for peace, although it is within their power to do it. It appears that more suffering is required.

      Events will finally force the nations to accomplish it. Some at least of the people who are alive today--or if not they, then their children or grandchildren--will see the beginning of the longed-for universal peace, the inevitable next step in human evolution. When it comes, the resources and wealth of the earth will no longer be sucked up for war and the satisfaction of greed at the expense of most of humanity. When it comes, the undiscovered material and spiritual resources of the earth will gradually reveal themselves. The whole planet will be our home.  The civilizing of the World-Ocean will take place.

      It is a terrible pity that we do not have this already and that suffering will, for now, only increase.

            "Own" is misleading. We need a different verb for it.

            Your own home: the American dream. It's yours. You got the mortgage, paid money down and X dollars a month for thirty years, it's paid up. Your house.

            As long as you pay the ever-rising property tax.

            You sort of own it.

            If you get poor, get old (practically the same thing), lose your job, if inflation creeps up on you, the County will sell your tax, which means the County will sell your home. Some places you have a year to pay it off after the tax sale, some places not. When you get behind in your taxes, you are evicted.

            There are people, there are companies, that make money buying taxes, getting properties at tax sales for peanuts. It's a business, perfectly legal. Business is business.

            Think about condominiums. You buy a condo in Florida in a nice building near the beach. What do you own? You have certainly bought something, quite a lot of money changed hands.

            The common areas, the hallways and so forth, belong to the association, which owns the building and grounds except for the apartments. You are a member of the association. Your share, if it is a large building full of people, is less than one percent. And of course there are costs: management, maintenance and repairs, painting, things the association (a democratic institution) decides must be done to the bushes, the play area, the pool.

            What you have bought is the right to use your apartment as long as you keep up the payments--keep up the payments!--and don't offend the neighbors.

            House, farm, apartment, what you buy is the conditional right to use a property so long as you can keep paying for it one way and another, and the right to pass this right to your heirs. If you have enough money and don't get old and forgetful and alone, probably you can keep using it. This is property ownership. It sounds a lot like rent.

            There are some things an American can pretty much own outright. Your car, once the payments are made, is yours; your right to drive it is conditional, but the car is yours. Owner's license, driver's license: if you don't have one or the other, you can't drive the car. Insurance. Inspection.

            Always there's the question of money.  

Your car is yours. If you can't drive it you can find a place to keep it for free, if you don't mind backwoods, mountains, deserts, and the like. If you're recently homeless, maybe you're living in your car, which you truly own if it is paid up. Maybe the whole family: husband, wife and children. It's good to have a place of your own. The authorities look down on this, though. You'll be able to keep the car, but your children may be confiscated.     

            Your clothes are yours, including shoes, watch, earmuffs and so forth. 

            We've always known that we can't take it with us; nowadays a lot of us can't have it while we're here, either. A lot of folks are fired. A lot of people are living on the streets.

            The USA is a rich country. A lot of poor countries are really poor. You can't imagine.

            Who owns the world, anyway?