Nuclear... um... Terror?

Are we allowed to type the "T" word when the culprit is a corporate / capitalist entity? 

How about when a government colludes with the terrorists in order to hoist nuclear Swords Of Damocles up over our heads?  

If we're forced to play Russian Roulette, does that count as terrorizing?

I guess the real world terror of radiation poisoning and cancer doesn't count as the highly-branded "Terror (TM)" terror.  If you can't bomb some foreigners in the bargain why waste the ink?

We have to call it something else.

Massive stupidity comes to mind.  Criminal greed.  

And what of the non-stop lies we get from the Mainstream Media and their allegedly unpaid "experts" who paint smiley faces on the exploding nuke plants?  So many "experts" on nuclear issues come out of the woodwork and so fast. 

These self-styled expert-like people have no idea what's actually going on inside the reactors. The Japanese don't even know!  Yet they assure us repeatedly how it can't possibly be that harmful -- and even if it is, so are lots of other things -- so, "Naaa!"

I keep recalling Einstein's famous quote, because I keep coming across these situations that warrant it.  First there was the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico by British Petroleum and their friends (in the White House).  Now it's the U.S. Department of Energy shamelessly prostituting for the nuke sugar daddies even as Japan is poised to go up in a radioactive cloud.

Oh yes, it could still happen.  It is -- four days later -- not "under control" at multiple reactors.  Yet the head of the DOE stood up and shilled for Big Nuke   -- again -- even as investors around the world have acquired half a clue, and are running from Godzilla as fast as their brokers will permit.   Meanwhile solar, wind and natural gas shares are surging ahead (Marketwatch) .

The nation's top Energy Clown Stephen Chu said Tuesday, """whenever there is a reactor near a (potential) earthquake site, we look to what's the maximum size of that particular earthquake that geologists (say) can ever happen, and we design considerably above that." (CNN)

So, even as multiple Japanese reactors built by General Electric with the same design used on 23 plants operating in the US today literally explode on live TV, we are told that nothing like that could happen here.   Go back to sleep.   Geologists said we're just fine.   Right?  

It should be noted that these 23 excruciatingly badly designed nuke plants are Stephen Chu's responsibility as head of the Department of Energy, while parroting nuclear industry propaganda is technically not Mr. Chu's responsibility.   It's not supposed to be, anyway. 

The reactor at Diablo Canyon in Southern California   was built to withstand a 7.5 magnitude earthquake (Reuters).   Anything larger, then all bets are off.   The quake that hit Japan last week was a 9.0 or roughly 50 times greater movement than a 7.5 on the Richter scale.  

Not to disappoint his campaign donors, their president Obama responded Tuesday:

"Nuclear plants are designed to withstand certain levels of earthquakes, but having said that, nothing's completely failsafe, nothing is completely foolproof, and so each time these kinds of events happen, I think it's very important for us to examine how we can further improve the safety and performance of these plants."
--Barack Obama, March 15, 2011 (CBS)

No, Mr. Obama.   The correct end of the sentence is: ""it's very important for us to shut down these unsafe and unhealthy relics of the past and usher in a new age of clean, safe technologies."

Things have gone from bad to worse, to worserer at the Japanese sites.   One of the problems is that the plants seem to have been designed expressly to hide the spent fuel pools from the public, and they are located directly above the reactors themselves and under the roofs that have since exploded from the hydrogen gas build ups.  

The spent fuel rods are arguably far worse of a hazard than the reactors themselves!   If they go dry, these hot waste products ignite on their own and spew cesium-137 into the atmosphere.

Robert Alvarez, a senior policy adviser to the Energy Department's secretary from 1993 to 1999, writes:

 1  |  2