Melting-down the myth of “safe” nuclear energy

It’s almost 2 o’clock Sunday morning as I sit down to write this. Due to a quirk of the calendar, in a few minutes it will be 3 a.m.

As of this moment, there are only “meltdown fears” looming in Japan. I hope it doesn’t get any worse, but by all accounts, it isn’t getting any better, either. Nuclear power plants are exploding and radioactive gas is being released into the atmosphere.

It’s like page 50 of a Tom Clancy novel, and the first 45 pages have been spent outlining the technical specifications of the plants and the history of nuclear energy.

The next 30 pages are going to be nail-biters.

My first thought, and I had it yesterday but went to the movies instead of writing about it, was that that’s going to be the end of all that beltway bafflegab about throwing any more tax dollars at building nuke plants over here. Hopefully for at least a generation, ala Three Mile Island, or until something better, safer, is found sooner and we won’t be tempted to give nuclear another look in 20 years.

This isn’t a partisan issue. Weak-kneed Democrats starting at the very top of the food-chain, namely the president, have gone on the record as being pro-nuclear energy. I couldn’t believe it, the first time I heard him tick-off nuclear as one of the sources of energy that we were going to continue to pursue. I knew I had to vote for him anyhow, but his position on this issue really worried me.

Because I’m not a learned man. I’m mostly wrong about stuff, especially the closer to home you get. All the little decisions I’ve made in my life, when taken together, haven’t amounted to much. But Big Picture stuff? Common sense stuff? I’m always the first one out of a burning building.

And it really worried me that a guy I thought was as smart as Barack Obama considered nuclear power as a viable option. Because even take away the high risk of a nuclear accident—in places like Japan and California, which are riddled with nuke plants built atop high-risk earthquake zones—for me, it always came down to the spent rods that are produced in creating “safe” nuclear energy.

These spent rods are deadly on a Doctor Doom Scale of 8, with 10 being a sudden, extinction-level event. The plants make this radioactive byproduct, which stays radioactive for something just this side of forever, and we have nothing to do with it that isn’t going to come back to haunt us.

We bury them in the ground, we bury them at sea, someday I wager we’ll be shooting them out into space, too. Because once we create this deadly shit, we don’t have a good strategy for dealing with it, and it’s only going to accumulate and become a bigger and bigger problem over time.

Nuclear power was never a reasonable answer to our energy woes because of those spent rods. Say another meteor hits the planet in 100 years, and humanity is wiped off the earth. The planet has to start from scratch again, and it’s millions of years before some version of home-sapiens reappears.

Except at their ancient archeological digs, they won’t be unearthing the treasures of King Tut, they’ll be unleashing a radioactive plague left by their far-off antecedents.

That’s what nuclear power is. It’s inherently unsafe on its face. Crazy, plainly unsafe.

And this is the best-case scenario. The worst-case is currently being played out in Japan.

My second thought was, Oh God—Japan again? If any country should have known the devil they were dancing with, wouldn’t it be Japan? If any country had exhibited a fear of nuclear energy and earned a pass, it would be Japan. In addition to being the only nation that has had nuclear bombs dropped on them in anger, their country is a jigsaw puzzle of tectonic fault lines.

It’s a worst-case scenario, waiting to happen. I hope to Christ this isn’t it.

Either way, I pray it’s going to be this generation’s Three Mile Island, which stalled the construction of new nuclear power plants for decades. I hope this incident, however good or bad it eventually becomes, has an even stronger effect on this generation’s Captains of Industry.

It’s time to stop throwing public and private money at an unsafe, unsustainable power source like nuclear energy and fund instead the young science geeks who will make that quantum leap that will remove us from the collective teat of petroleum, coal and nuclear energy.

History shows again and again, if the financial titans can find a way to make a buck off the new paradigm, they will kick the old way of doing things to the curb faster than you can say “8-track tape.”

We can’t let the unfolding tragedy in Japan go into the books without a long-term upside, the way the horror of what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki have effectively kept the nuclear genie in the bottle for more than 50 years.

This is our moment of clarity. Unless the next great scientific revelation is a way to eliminate the dangers caused by spent rods, we need to “stick a pin” in nuclear energy and turn our attention—and our tax dollars—to something brand new. Until we abandon the old, invalidated theory that “safe” nuclear energy exists and can be harnessed, we won’t be motivated to pose the question that will ultimately lead to that as-yet-undiscovered answer.

Warp engines and repulsor technology are just waiting to be discovered, we just have to want it bad enough.

How about it? Do you want it bad enough yet?

I do.