Don't announce accidental releases of radioactive materials. [27] Humans are not able to perceive radiation with our five senses. Thus there is no way for the public to be aware of radiation poisoning, except if informed or numerous people get and use radiation counters. By the same token, the damage is silent and cumulative. For example, the fact that the incubation period for cancer is anywhere from one (in the case of childhood cancer) to 50 or more years after the initial insult makes it easier to obscure the role of radiation and other environmental initiators of cancer.
Thirty years went by and the nuclear people are ready. They have mobilized some strange bedfellows. Many environmentalists, including such luminaries as James Lovelock, Stewart Brand, Jared Diamond, and George Monbiot, have moved or been moved from anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear. The terms "alternative" and "sustainable" are being used to describe nuclear power.[28] [29] The rationale given by environmentalists is that global warming is an impending civilization-ending cataclysm so that we have no other choice; nukes are required as a temporary stop-gap measure.
Leftists and socialists have more or less joined in, embarrassingly buying the IPCC theories without a critical glance.[30] [31] If anything, they feel that IPCC is stodgy and "go slow" about their own conclusions. They use that same "appeal to authority" fallacy; in this case, the variant known as appeal to (elite) consensus. Look what happened when "we" went by the word of that rustic slave-holder, Aristotle, that the Sun goes around the Earth. It took Europeans 2000 years to get over that one.
Without saying so or perhaps even being aware, they assume the science of global warming and its interpretation by and reportage by IPCC is non-ideological, is objective. This is quite a leap of faith and the opposite of the critical approach recommended by socialist theory.[32]
With regard to nuclear power they may be against it in a perfunctory sense, for example, giving a few spots on their websites and publications to anti-nuclear views, without integrating the nuclear question into their general approach.33] It is the ghettoization of the anti-nuclear advocates and their point of view.[34] They miss something important and with political ramifications: Nuclear weapons and nuclear power and political power can never be separated.
This latter reality has foreign policy implications for all nations. There is a worldwide push to sell and build nuclear power plants right now, a state-backed money-maker for a few insiders. At the same time, there has been in recent months an Obama-backed public relations campaign for nuclear disarmament. It sounds good but is meaningless because nuclear power and various nuclear and other weapons programs and radiation wars will continue, even if large thermonuclear weapons are eliminated.
The ramifications are there for leaders of all countries, who are aware of the danger of getting into America's gunsights, given the U.S.' consistently bellicose behavior, even if American liberals are not. They see that North Korea (DPRK) and Iran have countered America with local military parity. For their countries' survival they must get good weapons and a nuclear start; with power plants, a toe in the door. These arms races and related nuclear power races are lucrative for the few.
Capitalism, Ecology, and CO2
There are also socially destructive implications for a capitalist approach to CO2 abatement, for example, the capitalist-bureaucrat "cap and trade" "industry". This is open to all sorts of manipulation. A case in point: nuclear people would like to see a carbon tax for the explicit purpose of making nuclear power more economically competitive. In general, this "industry" has all the charm, elegance and utility of a traveling carnival. There is no evidence that it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions or produce anything useful. Such an institution can be counted upon to prolong its own existence and this in itself may encourage it to be slow in greenhouse gas abatement.
CO2 sequestration technological fixes are being promoted as part of this green capitalism. At the same time, not enough attention has been given to the Earth's carbon/CO2 cycle. The mass media discuss CO2 abatement strictly in terms of hydrocarbon use. The total cycle and the CO2 sink are rarely mentioned.
Much more CO2 is in the ocean and on land than in the air. The CO2 sink consists of the ocean, especially the ocean south of the Indian subcontinent, and the land. Through photosynthesis, the CO2 is utilized, turned into carbohydrate, e.g. cellulose, glucose. There are also inorganic processes that incorporate CO2 into minerals. On land the forests are most important.
The CO2 sink has degraded and is less able to incorporate CO2 than formerly.
In the ocean due to factors such as these: radioactive contamination reducing living populations, prior warming and acidification of the ocean rendering CO2 less soluble, and an ozone hole over the south ocean; the latter thought to be due to CFC gases.[35] [36] [37]
These CFCs are required coolants for a key part of the nuclear fuel cycle.
The rain forests are a huge sink, but are being clear-cut and burned at the rate of tens of thousands of square miles per year. Fewer people are aware of the northern (boreal) forest and its problems. Indigenous lands in what is more often referred to as the Canadian Province of Alberta are undergoing the largest engineering project in history [38] [39] A huge forest has been and is being stripped off our Mother Earth, and below the trees, gouging out the dirt itself in huge chunks visible from outer space, to get to the oil. It has been termed a gigantic slow motion oil spill. The extraction itself is energy intensive and CO2 emitting. A further irony -- there are plans to power this extraction using nuclear energy, to reduce the CO2 footprint![40]
It is a double whammy on the carbon/CO2 sink. Burning forests with their stored carbohydrate releases CO2. Simultaneously, there is less live plant life to incorporate CO2 through photosynthesis, at least temporarily.
