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Our Nuclear Menace – Just as Darwin Would Have Predicted

1-Andrew-McKillop
Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire

Fukushima. It is perhaps the most under-reported cataclysmic event in human history. Maybe things would have been different had it happened in either Russia, Iran or North Korea.

By now, we can write off the mainstream media and our political creatures with regards to this catastrophe. For reasons associated with the nuclear lobby and its corporate machine, their tongues are tied on the issue.

More silence, a few new theories and a couple of less than convincing assurances like, “It’s all under control, the humming birds and the badgers have returned to the exclusion zone and there’s a lot of very affordable property now, lost of economic opportunity in Fukushima”, (if you had any doubt of how spineless and redundant our leadership would be in the event of a true humanitarian crisis, this should be your ‘eureka’ moment).  The best they could manage is release a new Godzilla film production – and that’s about as close as you’ll get to an admission from the global elite’s media machine.

THE CHINA SYNDROME: How far and to what extent the damage done by Fukushima will never be disclosed by governments chained to the bed post by the nuclear power lobby.

In alternative media, there is even a paralysis beginning to set in – a general malaise afflicting even those left with integrity enough to comment or honestly report on the crisis.

Already, the situation in Japan is so degraded that it’s almost past the point of blame game. It’s not so much that the establishment is holding a gun to our heads, as it is man-kind holding a shotgun to its own head.

A Major Glitch in ‘Evolution’ Theory

When it comes to devising new and creative ways to snuff out his own species, you really have to hand it to mankind.  Not surprisingly, Darwinian nihilists must be quietly chuckling in the corner.

Incredibly, many politicians, economists and even hard-core environmental priests, still love nuclear power. It’s a strange kind of love, or a Strangelove to be precise.

When an elite talking shop magazine like The Economist talks, it’s important to listen, not least of to know exactly what mainstream establishment talking points will be latched onto by ‘atomised’, lobotomised politicians and perpetually confused tenured academics. In an amazing example of newspeak pseudo-science, The Economist in its May 3rd edition claimed that the 3,000 square kilometre total exclusion zone around the exploded Chernobyl reactor provides  “an example of (natural) selection responding to human action that was most definitely unintentional: the explosion and fire at a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, 28 years ago”. The Economist uses a study by a group of scientists headed by professor Timothy Mousseau of the US asking why birds and other animals living around Chernobyl have a better survival rate than animals and birds around Fukushima, to argue that animals “seem to have evolved to deal with the threat, just as Darwin would have predicted”.

Hold on. Did Darwin ever talk about nuclear reactors – more precisely exploded or melted down reactors? Concerning his evolution theory, major evolution in just 28 years would be pushing it, but The Economist would like us to believe that we are living in a Nuclear Age, so miracles can happen.

This is exactly to point where paid-for junk science becomes weaponised, and poses a direct threat to you and me.

The scientists headed by Mousseau found that antioxydants in the blood and feathers of birds, near Chernobyl, were significantly higher than in birds around Fukushima. These antioxydants, The Economist tells us, “mop up radiation”. Interesting theory. I wonder who sponsored that study?

To be sure The Economist did not state the conclusion it wants us to draw – exploded nuclear power plants are no threat, with time. Don’t panic, take your antioxydants, learn to love the happy atom, and embrace the new normal!

From Nuclear Orthodoxy to the Enlightenment

We cannot be surprised that the Nuclear Lobby, after wheeling on the great ‘Climate Threat’ to help sell its dangerous high-cost products, is now resorting to a junk version of Darwinism to sell the same products. Tainted strongly by Lysenkoism – not Darwinism, the new Darwinist Theory of Nuclear Power is that a bit of radiation does you good because your tail feathers will be high in antioxydants after 28 years – or you will die. Yes, you do have a choice!

The Economist reveals its true pro-nuclear colours with recent articles under gloating titles like “Anti-nuclear Protest in Japan is Fizzling Out”. It gives outright support to Shinzo Abe’s attempts to restart Japan’s nuclear reactor fleet with titles like “Nuclear Power in Japan: Start ’em Up”.

But objective reporting on nuclear power sometimes nudges its way, even into The Economist’s tainted fare, with rare articles where it tells us the world’s NPP fleet is still using “nasty old technology”.

Exactly that.

In reality, the “Nuclear Renaissance”, as the Nuclear Lobby calls it, is doing very badly. For starters, the economics of nuclear power are terrible. Further increases in the cost of nuclear power are certain, simply due to attempts by the industry to replace “nasty old technology” with Darwin-style, “evolved and perfected technology”.

The advanced European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) is a good example, in technological terms – and a somber example in economic terms.

The EPR, in its various versions – each one more difficult to build – can definitely be called safer and slightly more efficient than “nasty old tech”, Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) reactors. But the EPR series is dramatically more expensive, with admitted costs at least $8,000 per kilowatt, and possibly more. Despite industry rent boy economists constantly dancing around the issue, this fact is heavily documented and already widely published. This fact cannot be “uninvented”.

In contrast to the industry’s Nuclear Renaissance,  the “Nuclear Enlightenment” of the last 30 or 40 years, is real evolution. Without a doubt, Fukushima has almost forced enlightenment on this issue. As a result, junk Science claims about the innocuous or Friendly Atom, which dated from the dinosaur age of nuclear power in the 1950s and 1960s, have been dealt a long series of hard knocks.

The claim by the Nuclear Lobby that atomic energy is somehow “climate friendly” has been confronted by the total dependence on fossil fuels for uranium mining, transport, fuel fabrication, nuclear waste transport and disposal, as well as the building and servicing of NPPs. This all adds up as CO2 emissions – if you are to go by the climatist measure of what is green, and what is not. Overall, NPPs are better than coal-fired plants and about equal or slightly greater than gas-fired power plants, for emissions. They are in no way a Silver Bullet for cutting Al Gore’s deadly CO2 emissions, and it is a straight lie to even peddle this claim.

The nuclear enlightenment has also challenged the Nuclear Lobby’s assumption that the world energy system and its need for electricity is always growing. Here’s a fact: in some EU28 countries, electricity demand has been stagnant since the 1990s – long before the 2008 crisis. Since then, demand has decreased in most major EU28 countries – including Germany and UK. Long term power demand growth in the US is now forecast by the EIA at no more than 1% a year, if that.

Only the emerging and developing countries show “belle epoque” power demand growth trends – and even here the rates have seriously declined since 2010. To be sure, China and India are still the “last best hope” for the Nuclear Lobby, but the costs of nuclear power are eating into and pushing down nuclear program goals in both countries.

The Dark Enlightenment

The nuclear enlightenment has shredded the claims that nuclear power is “clean cheap and safe”. The most nuclear-intensive country in the world for power production, France, from 2013, has set a yearly rise of power prices of 10% for at least the next 3 years, probably continued after 2017, in an attempt to start paying the economic damage from its nuclear binge.  France’s official CPI is about 1.5% annual, meaning that power prices will rise at 7 times the official inflation rate.

As many as 25 of its 60-strong reactor fleet, simply due to age, will have to start being decommissioned through 2025-2040. The cost estimates for this are unsure, but the French General Accounting Office (Cour des Comptes) in Jan 2012 estimated about 3.8 billion euros for each NPP – and the French government is now trying to amass a decommissioning and dismantling fund. Inevitably this will mean further decline of power-intensive industries and fuel poverty.

The Fukushima disaster of 2011 in Japan has had a wide number of estimates for its total costs through the next 15 – 20 years, running to a consensus average around $150 – $175 billion, and that cost will surely increase as every year of inaction passes by.

Total accumulated costs from the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, to date, for the governments of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are placed in the region of at least $350 billion by sources including the UN Economic Commission for Europe (ECE).

The fantasy claim that nuclear power is “cheap” cannot resist these real world facts.

The enlightenment also draws on other strands, in society – nuclear power has a deservedly bad public image for safety and risk, in other words operating safety may be good, but risk is extreme. The damage it can do the economy is also now better known. Previously, the economy was thought of as being resilient to whatever humans could throw at it, but the 2008 crisis, laughably called the “Lehman Bros moment”,  underlines the fragility of national economies and the entire global system. In other words and today, we can no longer afford the luxury of building NPPs or suffering nuclear disasters.

What has also changed is that many of today’s scientists and technology specialists agree that nature is fickle, unstable, chaos-oriented making the Fukushima disaster by tsunami, triggered by tectonic plate movement and volcanism, an example of previously-unrecognized threats to NPPs. To date, no US reactor has been directly hit by whirlwinds and cyclones with wind speeds able to attain 350 kms per hour – much faster than the take-off and landing speed of a jetliner.

Unfortunately, due to media distortion – called “popularization”, but in fact pure and simple dumbing-down – nature is being treated as a form of irrational god, pagan-style. Threats to NPPs from natural phenomena can therefore be brushed off by the Nuclear Lobby as “populist exaggeration” – while the nuclear industry scurries to add extreme-cost new safety features to “nasty old tech” reactors.

Revenge of Gaia

The Nuclear Lobby can be squarely accused of bringing Hell down on itself. Ambassador Richard H. Jones, the deputy director of the International Energy Agency, for some while before the Fukushima disaster of March 2011, when addressing major conferences, would systematically hand out free copies of books authored by “the co-inventor of Gaia”, Britain’s greenist priest, James Lovelock – who has made a name for himself in recent years as a shameless shill for the nuclear power industry.

Before 2011, Lovelock’s nuclear pitch and extreme exaggeration of global warming theory were major money-spinners for himself. The “Gaia theory”, which he also peddles, was in fact not invented by Lovelock and his co-author Lynn Margulis of their “theory of the Blue Goddess”, but derived from pagan scriptures and recycled for a 21st century middle class audience without attribution from the works of several European philosophers, including Nietsche and Heidegger. This theory is rightly called neo-pagan and New Age, but nuclear power has no real place in even Lovelock’s world subject to the whims of irrational gods punishing mankind on a frequent basis. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Lobby can retreat to its laager of basic physics and engineering technology, but the damage is done.

Preaching climate change – the “mitigation” of climate change by NPPs is a loud claim of the Nuclear Lobby – also does not help. New Age philosophies encourage people to no longer trust nature, and the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming openly peddles the belief that human intervention can flip nature into a ‘Revenge of Gaia’. Put another way, because there are more than 67% of the world’s total NPP fleet situated at less than 80 kms from the nearest sea or ocean, what would massive increases of world sea levels –  as preached by Lovelock and others – do to them? Nothing good.

As it is, in the real world, chaos theory applies to many phenomenae – including evolution. The popularized, of course dumbed down version of Chaos Theory, can only make people very frightened of any new technology or change of existing technology. Yet the Nuclear Lobby touts the invention of fail-safe, total security, new technology reactors!

Playing with pagan philosophies, dumbing them down, and peddling them to the consumer masses – alongside high tech nuclear power – can only create fear. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory with its stark claim that any and all “climate change” is human-caused, and that we deserve it, at least if we do not like NPPs, love electric bicycles and adore Richard Branson’s lines of Green Bizniss, is a potent double-edged sword for the nuclear shills. It cuts both ways.

The fundamental problem with nuclear is this: when it goes wrong, there is no “fix it” measure, and almost no change of mitigation, other that migrating away from ground zero. Lovelock does not like talking about this elephant in the room at all, and it’s not great for book sales (trust me on that).

Industry Lobby: ‘Trust us – you know we’re lying’

The Nuclear Lobby – fighting a losing battle and probably its last – has played on themes that ultimately trace to distrust both in people and nature. By repeatedly distorting, and often lying, the Lobby has reinforced distrust of other human beings and intensified the fear-based desire of going through life avoiding all risk, just keeping the status quo alive, defending supposed stability and the Natural Order of Society. Peddling the fear of disaster – for the climate and the economy – the Lobby has made people more fearful of nuclear risk, accident, and radioactive contamination of the environment, the food chain and the atmosphere. Not less fearful.

Remember, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, when speaking on a 1965 television broadcast about the moments following the historic ‘Trinity’ nuclear test, “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

As it was then, it still is today – nuclear “philosophy” is a god of chaos...


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For the nuclear industry and its paid policy defense forces, it’s a three pronged strategy of misinformation, disinformation and information omission. One direct result of this is that “people simply do not want to know”. They shun any news or data concerning nuclear power – good or bad. Nuclear power is perceived by more and more persons as a somber, yet “undefinable” threat, weighing on their daily lives and their future. Nuclear fear has also washed over to rising fears that the beauty and harmony of nature have been permanently contaminated. After all – they tell us, those birds have more antioxydants in their tail feathers when they live around Chernobyl.

Nuclear Chaos is the exact opposite of the Newtonian worldview with its clockwork universe, and is perceived as a dark shroud smothering out ability to know, predict and anticipate how life operates on planet Earth. Maybe that’s why elites love it so much. Previous belief that we knew everything and can predict anything – even evolution – is inverted and clouded, even turned upside down, by the threat of Nuclear Chaos. That genie is already out of the bottle, and it cannot be put back in.

More technically, the previous and heavily implied teleological concept of evolution – both of animal life, human society, technology, the economy, science and nature – is threatened by New Age fears and nightmare dreaming, that nuclear power now symbolizes. Science theory that Nature is a truly random chance conglomerate of events and things that can easily tip into chaos feeds and intensifies the distrust of nuclear power. Other features of the perceived nuclear threat – you can’t see radioactive pollution, it is invisible but it does harm – have been intensified by the Nuclear Lobby, by distortion and lying.

If you don’t understand the underlying power and control mindset of nuclear Dr. No types, then it’s difficult to make sense of their chaos. What is seldom, if ever mentioned to the general public is why we are stuck with the backwards and highly risky uranium reactor technology in the first place. The A-bomb came before ‘civilian’ nuclear power, not the other way around, and so it is the bomb which drives the agenda – it always has, and it always will. It’s what those reactors produce in weapons grade plutonium for bombs and missiles, along with other new waste byproducts like depleted uranium, which drives the agenda. If you have control over these military assets then you gain a seat at the UN’s top table, and that club rules the globe.

The nuclear power industry and its promoters have shot themselves through the feet for decades, but this is now moving up to shooting the industry, and humanity as a whole – in its head. Some may contend that for reasons as simple and as complicated as quantum science, chaos theory, the environment movement, a long-running economic crisis, and street riots and rebellion – we no longer have a deeply rooted paradigm of the world being inherently stable. Nuclear Chaos trumps all of these combined.

It does not fit into that unstable world – or a perceived stable world.

It is a reality all its own.

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Author Andrew McKillop is a markets analyst and former energy economist and advisor to the European Commission, and author of the book, Doomsday Machine.

READ MORE NUCLEAR NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Nuclear Files

 

 

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Get Your Copy of New Dawn Magazine #203 - Mar-Apr Issue