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We Have Sustainable Energy — The Problem Is The Oligarchy

February 18, 2015 By Ethan Indigo Smith 5 Comments

You can’t tell someone who knows everything, anything.

Inextricably linked to war and and disaster, the nuclear experimentation industry exemplifies every problem society has stubbornly manifest, only exaggerated and magnified beyond the pale. It causes social and environmental problems of the most hazardous and horrendous proportions, and the fact that we allow it appears to be the result of humanity’s collective mental problems. Our darker inner nature is destroying Mother Nature.

The environmental destruction of nuclear experimentation is exactly like the environmental destruction caused by global burning of petroleum products, only exponentially so.

Filed Under: Environment, Health & Lifestyle Tagged With: antinuclear, Climate change, energy, Hanford, mining, New Mexico, nuclear, nuclear bomb, nuclear energy, oligarchy, peace, renewable energy, solar, solar power, sustainable energy, War, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, wind power, WIPP

Blind Faith: The Nuclear History of Port Hope, Ontario

January 15, 2015 By Dennis Riches 2 Comments

Radiation is invisible, and it has always been imbued with a diverse range of magical powers in science fiction. Ironically, in a very real sense, radiation does make people invisible. Once groups of people have become victims of a radiological contamination, they are, in addition to being poisoned (or being traumatized by the possibility that they have been poisoned), marginalized and forgotten. Their traditions and communities are fragmented, and they are shamed into concealing their trauma. When contamination occurs, there is a strong impulse even among many victims to not admit that they have been harmed, for they know the fate that awaits them if they do.

Thus it is that hibakusha (the Japanese word for radiation victims) become invisible. When a new group of people become victims, such as in Fukushima in 2011, they feel that they have experienced a unique new kind of horror. For them, for their generation, it is new, but for those who know the historical record, it is a familiar replay of an old story. The people of Fukushima should know by now that they are bit players who have been handed down a tattered script from the past.

A case in point is “Blind Faith,” the superb 1981 book by journalist Penny Sanger, about the small irradiated Canadian town of Port Hope on the shores of Lake Ontario. In the 1970s, it faced (and more often failed to face) the toxic legacy of processing first radium, then uranium for nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.

Filed Under: Environment, Foreign Affairs, Health & Lifestyle Tagged With: Blind Faith: The Nuclear Industry In One Small Town, Blind River, Cameco, Canada, Canada Revenue Agency, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, cancer, Chernobyl, Cold War, Congo, Czechoslovakia, Darlington Nuclear Plant, Eldorado Mining and Refining, energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Farley Mowat, FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fukushima, Fukushima Daiichi, Great Bear Lake, health, hibakusha, history, Lake Ontario, Lung cancer, Manhattan Project, Marie Curie, mining, nuclear bomb, nuclear energy, nuclear power, Ontario, Penny Sanger, Pickering Nuclear Plant, Port Hope, Port Radium mine, radiation, radium, radium mining, Robert Jacobs, taxes, United States Department of Energy, uranium, uranium mining, Workmen’s Compensation Board, World War II, yellowcake uranium

Henry Miller’s “Air Conditioned Nightmare:” Battle Cry Against The Coming Nuclear Order

December 18, 2014 By Dennis Riches 2 Comments

When Henry Miller (1891-1980) returned from France to America in 1939, he was quick to identify air conditioning as both a metaphor and a real cause of a lamentable degradation of life. His first writing upon his return, published as “The Air Conditioned Nightmare” in 1945, was based on his road trip across America in 1939.

Looking at this book from the 21st century, it is surprising to read his tirades against Americans’ submission to technology. We have come to think of the 1930s as an economically depressed time when industry regressed and people were forced back to agrarian self-reliance. The contemporary perception is that the reaction to the excesses of materialism didn’t become apparent until the 1960s when baby boomers rebelled against the affluence and suburban culture of the 1950s.

But in every crisis there is transformation, and Miller was able to notice the changes going on in spite of the Depression. In the same way that iPhones became an embedded item in our economy regardless of the crash of 2008, there were similar changes in the 1930s.

Filed Under: Media & Culture, National News Tagged With: 1987 Montreal protocol, Air Conditioning, Arthur Miller, automobile, Before Air Conditioning, Black Spring, carbon, carbon emissions, Climate change, communism, Corporate America, democracy, Democratic Party, Denmark, economy, energy, fascism, France, Germany, Henry Miller, Hiroshima, history, How Air Conditioning Remade Modern America, Institutional Thinking, Jack Kerouac, Japan, Kentucky, Manhattan, Manhattan Project, materialism, Naomi Klein, New York Times, nuclear, nuclear bomb, nuclear energy, nuclear war, Occupy, Occupy Wall Street, OWS, ozone depletion, Paducah, Republican Party, Salon, Scientific American, smartphones, Southern China, Taiwan, technology, Thailand, The Air Conditioned Nightmare, the American South, The Great Depression, The New Yorker, Thorium, Tokyo, Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, uranium, Vietnam, War, World War II, WWII

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