Nuclear Waste Disposal Quotes

Even with our immense wealth and technology, we continue to abuse the planet and each other for the sake of easy packaging and a cheap, disposable lifestyle. Unchecked population continues to outstrip the availability of housing, water, food, education, and jobs, while we squabble over politics, religion, gender, race, and nationality. Factor in the unrelenting advance of climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth extinction, the nuclear waste time bomb, ground water depletion, the social cancer of wealth inequality, dystopian surveillance, and the unstoppable US deficit growth and that’s a really bad news day for most of the planet during any age.

Nuclear power is a permanent disaster. Producing its uranium fuel is an environmental disaster - now tucked and folded over the horizon in mostly-poor countries where miners are paid $5 a day and unprotected against radiation. Building reactors is a financial disaster, always shifted to government subsidies. Waste disposal is both an environmental and economic disaster. When the fateful time comes to decommission the Doomsday Machines, after the easy 10-year life extensions run out, this is another economic disaster. But when a reactor becomes what it really is - the most massive Dirty Bomb you or Bin Laden (radhi Allah anhu) can imagine - the nuclear disaster will be hard to yank out of the media, quicktime, and carry on like nothing ever happened.

Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril--you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony

Take nuclear power as an example. Regardless of all arguments for and against the use of nuclear power, which are usually dominated by emotions rather than nourished by rational thought, it is a fact that not even a single civilian nuclear power plant would have been built if the correct calculations had been done. The alleged cheapness of nuclear energy was only cheap as long as the cost of disposal of highly contaminated waste was left out of the calculations. Since nuclear power was politically desirable, they knew they could palm it off on the general public,

environmental racism. For the purposes here, I define environmental racism using Chavis’s definition: Environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental policymaking. It is racial discrimination in the enforcement of regulations and laws. It is racial discrimination in the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste disposal and the siting of polluting industries. It is racial discrimination in the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of positions and pollutants in communities of color. And, it is racial discrimination in the history of excluding people of color from the mainstream environmental groups, decision making boards, commissions, and regulatory bodies. (Chavis 1999, 4) Environmental racism can be divided into three categories: procedural, geographic, and social equity/inequity. Procedural equity/inequity refers to policies and procedures, regulations, laws, and enforcement. Geographic equity/inequity includes siting and sanctioning of polluting industries. Social equity/inequity covers the racial, ethnic, and cultural aspects of targeted communities. Separately, these issues can be examined to tell the stories of communities that have been sickened by polluting industries, but when analyzed together, they tell a more nuanced story of the institutionalized behavior that is known as environmental racism.

Nuclear waste is unlike other wastes. It is not only the danger…but the timescale. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years. Uranium-235, the fuel used to power the reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years. To dispose of nuclear waste is to think in geological time. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions