What a waste

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