31 March 2011

The necessity of Big Nuke - Monbiot again

George Monbiot in the Guardian sounding off again about the necessity of nuclear power.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/mar/31/double-standards-nuclear

My response this time:

So, you're making bets with human lives for the next ten thousand years, at least. Less than one hundred years of 100 centuries have passed, and we've already seen the Bomb in action, jerry-built first generation plants, nuclear waste in the US and the USSR gone AWOL, "accidents" like Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Ten thousand years. The final solution to waste management hasn't been solved. The history of (literate) human civilization only covers five thousand years. One or two epochs of chaos and barbarianism and we'll see Nuclear Fission generating a Final Solution for humanity - that's all of us, now and ever after. 
Big Oil, and Big Coal don't threaten civilization as such. And over a perspective of ten thousand years!!
You, George, are gearing up for a really plush job as a shill for Big Nuke.
Your cred has been washed away with the toxic spill water in Fukushima they can't find storage for. And the toxicity shredding your cred will accumulate (it accumulates, remember?) over the next, oh, ten years or so, at the very least, according to Big Nuke fans. That's what they're saying about the situation as it is NOW. But this "accident" looks to non-Nuke fans very much like the beginning of a catastrophe, not the end.
Two developments will solve our energy problems in the next couple of decades. 
One is certain - renewable fuels and improved efficiency. 
The other still sounds hypothetical and speculative to most people, but I can assure you it isn't. It's a successful mobilization of the massed working classes and peasants of dozens of countries around the world to put an end to capitalism and its dictatorship (when did the bourgeoisie ever permit the diversity of a competitive alternative non-capitalist workers state to show its paces?)
After that Big Nuke (and yourself as Little Nuke) will be as relevant as the people who used to think the sun circled the earth.

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