I couldn’t go to Japan without visiting Hiroshima. Some people could. But I couldn’t. It was the same when I visited Poland. Cracow was beautiful, but I went to Auschwitz. I just had to know. Know by feeling. By being there. On the bullet train approaching Hiroshima my stomach was turning over and over. The morning we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, I wanted the sky to be a perfectly clear blue. It was. I wanted to see a marker in the sky, five hundred metres above the ground, where it exploded. A small ring of circling doves seemed to be marking the spot. The A-Bomb Dome, a burnt-out shell of an exhibition hall, still stands at the point almost directly below the blast. It’s a kind of thought-leader, focusing your mind as you enter the Peace Park. You see, it stood, while everyone within it, and for hundreds of metres around, fried in the 3,000 degree heat and shock wave. There are still people who say, “Well, yes, but…” Actually, we know all the arguments, the positions, the whys and wherefores. And the nearby museum presents a fairly balanced view of it all. Personally, I’ve never been able to stomach anything nuclear. I campaigned against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific during the mid-90s. I marched against the UK government’s persistent testing in the 80s. Today marks the anniversary of a British nuclear test at an underground site in Nevada in 1983. As far as I am concerned, nuclear is no answer to anything we face as human beings. I’ll leave this in the words of Kraftwerk in their 2005 rework of Radioactivity: “Sellafield 2 will produce 7.5 tonnes of plutonium every year. 1.5 kg of plutonium makes a nuclear bomb. Sellafield 2 will release the same amount of radioactivity into the environment as Chernobyl every five and a half years. One of these radioactive substances, Krypton 85, will cause death and skin cancer.” And now, as this government posits a French farce future with nuclear at the centre of our energy policy, I am appalled again. We have a problem. And I, for one, won’t be blinded by science.
Mark Griffiths www.idealconsulting.co.uk
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A dangerous debate to enter, I know, particularly as I am a floating voter on this debate. But I thought just occurred to me.
ReplyDeleteNuclear energy is essential to us. We all rely upon it. Without it there would be no-one and nothing. And its quite clear that nuclear energy will destroy everything too.
I am speaking of course about the Sun. That nuclear furnace which caused our world to be, and which will consume it too.
What strikes me is that no ones speaks bad of the Sun - nuclear polluter, future world destroyer that it is.
Is it because is so far away, and its end game so far in the future, that we can all feel its "not in our back yard"?
And if this is the case, where else could we burn without qualms? The Moon ?
I think it's an essential debate to enter. We have no choice but to be dependent on the Sun. It is not man-made. The way we have harnessed nuclear energy is man-made. We chose to do it and continue to choose, while denying other nations the right to. Choosing the nuclear route for energy (because relations with our Russian gas suppliers are so rocky), when so many other routes have remained under-explored and under-funded, is a failure of our humanity. That is also what I mean when I say 'What a waste!' We can never forget the Sun. I was only reading about the current unexpected lack of sunspots yesterday. Apparently, it's entering a cooling phase. The Sun is 'always there and not there'. It is 'everything and nothing'. All religions are certainly a personalisation of this power over us we can feel but never touch. And I've just come back from a place where, until recently, the Emperor was considered a direct relative of the Sun itself. And that, of course, is what led to Hiroshima.
ReplyDeleteI agree that other routes seem underfunded.
ReplyDeleteFrom my desk I watch daily as millions of tons of water move from right to left, and then left to right - twice a day. The tides of course.
It takes considerable energy to try and prevent them causing damage. But there must be ample opportunity to harness this movement as a source of energy. I am not taking of wave power (which strikes me as vaguely silly) but tide power.
I read of new large tidal plants for the Mersey and Severn. But as island nations the UK and Ireland should surely be blessed with lots of other opportunities. It would me building dykes across rivers and bays - and ther'd be lots of objections to that I am sure. But its one idea.
Energy has a cost -- and maybe that's the real message. Our fleeting dalliance with an era of cheap energy is over. What are we prepared to pay (in money, social and enviromental impact)? What are we prepared to sacrifice in lifestyle, mobility and security for us an our children?
I guess that's why I am a floating voter. I am not sure where this debate is being held.