{"id":35591,"date":"2011-03-12T22:24:03","date_gmt":"2011-03-13T03:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=35591"},"modified":"2011-03-13T06:38:39","modified_gmt":"2011-03-13T11:38:39","slug":"enough-already","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/enough-already\/","title":{"rendered":"Enough Already"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Officials checked for signs of radiation on children from the evacuation area near the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant in Koriyama. Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon\/Reuters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is no ordinary weekend in the history of the world; no ordinary moment in humanity’s relationship to technology. As I write, crews of nuclear engineers are working against the clock to prevent the meltdown of not one but at least two atomic reactors, both of which are being flooded with seawater in a last-ditch attempt to keep the core from melting through the containment structure. It is probable that both have already experienced partial meltdowns, whatever that means. Five separate nuclear plants are in crisis at once. This is the first time in history that we are witnessing and indeed experiencing the simultaneous failure of multiple nuclear devices. These are a mere 170 miles from one of the biggest population centers in the world, in the midst of a powerful technological society that has been brought to its knees by a natural event.<\/p>\n

A nuclear disaster is the time when we need society’s infrastructure the most. And as we are seeing, it’s the time when we’re least likely to have it available. With Japan already devastated, this is the last thing people need to be thinking about; therefore it’s the first thing that the planners of society — and make no mistake, society is planned — should be thinking about but evidently lack the common sense to do so. But somehow I doubt that these same engineers go home and light a candle in a wicker basket next to the drapery.<\/p>\n

I am aware that the veil of denial, secrecy and lies that go hand in hand with splitting the atom have provided us with a population that is largely ignorant of the risks of what happens when you do so. There is not an ‘anti-nuclear’ movement to speak of. There are definitely some dedicated activists and mostly a few informed people who don’t like living an hour away from a decrepit nuclear plant that’s sitting on a fault line, as I am right now.<\/p>\n

Nuclear power is a world of deception. There’s a reason that Harry Truman had to get on the radio a few hours after he ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and tell the American people that God told him to do it, and that Hiroshima was a military base. God didn’t tell him, and Hiroshima was an ordinary city going about its business. There was simply no other way he could justify murdering 150,000 civilians in an instant, and another 150,000 a few days later.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s the nuclear angle of Friday’s earthquake that makes this a global issue. It is the nuclear angle that raises the matter to the highest level of discussion of where technology meets ethics — or where it should. Indeed, the only way to advocate for the further use of nuclear power is to suspend all ethics; to disown any respect for humanity. If you don’t get the problem with nuclear power, you probably don’t get it, period.<\/p>\n

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Kindergarten classroom in the Zone of Exclusion in the Ukraine. Photo by Elena Filatova.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nuclear power is a technology that cannot be controlled. We are seeing evidence of that now. Of course, on a good day, it can be temporarily controlled; but that’s not the day we have to worry about.<\/p>\n

The day we have to worry about is today, when five of these reactors, built on a volcanic island along a fault line, are in some level of distress that we don’t really know the extent of. The fact that we don’t know how bad this problem is does not, in itself, mitigate the problem. In fact, it’s a big part of the problem. Paraphrasing someone who wrote on my Facebook wall, the information time lag on this situation has become one of the most effective political manipulation tools in existence.<\/p>\n

Tonight is the night to think about nuclear power. It’s the night to consider how a society can go from everything being perfectly normal one day to a situation so frightening it’s difficult to look even at a photo; too horrid to consider even a few facts objectively; so sad there are not enough tears to shed.<\/p>\n

My friend Anatoly, the technician who runs the website we share and who accompanies me online about 18 hours a day, lives in the Ukraine, not so far from where the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986. We are both fans and admirers of a photographer named Elena Filatova<\/a>, who has traveled many miles on her motorcycle within the Zone of Exclusion<\/a> of the Ukraine, documenting the devastation with her camera. <\/p>\n

What I love about Elena’s work is how starkly and yet with such utter compassion she portrays what happens when nuclear power goes wrong. She understands this is not a technical or a political issue. She reminds us that it’s a human issue. Please take a look at this short film<\/strong><\/a> she made based on her travels through the city of Pripyat and the Zone of Exclusion.<\/p>\n

Tonight Japan is struggling to control not one but many reactors that are threatening to run out of control. It’s not merely that a meltdown could inflict slow death on many, and sicken tens (or hundreds) of thousands of people, wipe out an entire region of Japan and contaminate the North Pacific region as far away as Seattle. It’s that there are hundreds more of these devices, all of them near population centers, many on fault lines, and all run by imperfect humans. Many are manufactured by General Electric and Westinghouse — two companies I assure you have no interest in safety; they don’t even understand the concept.<\/p>\n

The day we have to worry about nuclear power is today: particularly while we sit here uncertain what tomorrow is going to bring, as brave dedicated people give their lives to try to stop this impending doom, while hundreds of thousands of people are being moved away from their homes, out of the potential path of radiation.<\/p>\n

And the day we have to worry about is a thousand years in the future, when someone builds a city on a nuclear waste dump not knowing it’s there, having no idea what it even is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Japan may not be one of those populations, but it’s easy to forget when you have the benefits of that energy rather than a mushroom cloud vaporizing the population of two cities. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}