Godzillas Back, This Time He Says He’ll Save Us.

Godzillas Back, This Time He Says He’ll Save Us.SG Gate.com by Peter Coyote Now that Global Warming has penetrated enough frontal lobes to be sufficiently recognized as a threat, the people who have done the most to contribute to it are offering nuclear power as the way to defeat it, describing it as a “carbon-free energy source.” The first problem is that they are lying, knowingly. The construction of a nuclear power plant,the concrete required,itself a major contributor to global warming, the fabrication, the machinery to build it — all release vast amounts of carbon. The discharge of hot water from such plants, heats river to 90 degrees, destroying the life in them. But these are the small quibbles.Let’s set all political and social considerations aside for a moment and examine a single, irrefutable fact: radiation radically alters, damages, or kills any cell with which it comes into contact. Radioactivity per se, even natural radiation, threatens everything with replicating cells — from sperm to sperm whales, and crosses all plant and animal kingdoms with impunity. The implication of this is, that in order to protect the health and well-being of the biosphere, radioactivity must be perfectly sequestered for a minimum of 250,000 years. (After which time it is only half as radioactive as it was.)……………………………The second problem is, “the garbage.” As radioactive materials degenerate, they produce other, less usuable but only marginally less radioactive substances. We have no method for safely containing and sequestering this radioactive waste. Consequently, we have developed a taboo against talking about it or even considering the question, pushing the existence of mounting tons of lethal garbage onto the back-burner of consciousness. It is so lethally dangerous for so interminably long a period that finding any solution for the waste has stymied scientists and industry for the sixty-odd years since it was first fashioned into a bomb. As it is, tons of this deadly poison are leaking into rivers in Hanford, Washington and at the TVA in Tennessee, and just off San Francisco where it was dumped overboard in steel drums which are currently rotting and rusting away near the Farallones Islands, irradiating the fish so important to our “healthy life-style diet.”…………………………..Just so that everyone can consume as much power as they want. Might it not be easier to turn off the lights and turn down the heat a bit, drive less, and use a bit less of everything? Mightn’t that allow us to continue to be happily imperfect a little longer? To remain human?

City Brights: Peter Coyote : Godzillas Back, This Time He Says He’ll Save Us.