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THOUSAND YEAR HALF-LIFE - After the fall of the Berlin Wall --- what was called the end of the Cold War --- many of my generation decided that we no longer had to have the nuclear nightmares which had haunted us most of our lives. I still remembered the "duck and cover" exercises that me and other kids had to have during the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Kennedy Administration in the USA back in the 60s. I remembered science fiction movies telling us that the world would end in a nuclear war and, later, from a nuclear energy plant meltdown like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl... So I breathed a sigh of relief when I was made to believe the nuclear threat was behind us. But it is not.
Now I read that nuclear materials like uranium and plutonium, which I learned as child have a half-life of a millennium, are being administered, or planned to be administered, in MY FOOD. I hear that nuclear energy plants that We the People had said should be decommissioned, ancient plants, are about to be re-activated.
I hear and read and see that my nuclear nightmares --- our nuclear nightmares --- are still with us.
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I started thinking about my food being nuked, and not in the euphemism we use for microwaving food, when I got this press release:
Aug. 30, 2000Fast Flux Test Facility: A Reactor in Search of a Mission Proposal to Reopen Reactor is Reckless
SEATTLE, Wash. In testimony before the Department of Energy (DOE) today, Public Citizen urged the department to abandon its plans to reopen the controversial Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) the most contaminated nuclear site in the western world.The DOEžs rationale for reopening the facility is to create radioactive materials for food irradiation, to make plutonium and to conduct research. "Claims by the DOE that we need to produce radioactive material to irradiate food are absolutely false," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizenžs Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "Using irradiation to make our food supply safe is like using a chain saw to cut butter it's excessive and unnecessary. Cleaning up filthy factory farming and slaughtering practices will provide American families with safe, wholesome food."
The FFTF was built at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington in 1980 to serve as a fuel and material irradiation test facility but was closed in 1993. It was considered unprofitable to keep open solely for research purposes, and commercially viable uses for it could not be identified. Decommissioning the plant would cost about $70 million, while restarting it would cost more than $284 million with an additional $100 million per year to operate at full power.
"The DOE is creating a new taxpayer boondoggle," Hauter said. "Instead of concentrating on cleaning up the environmental nightmare at Hanford, it is trying to restart the reactor to create more radioactive material. It is nothing but a welfare program for the nuclear establishment."
The FFTF is a 400-megawatt, sodium-cooled "fast breeder" reactor, which is more dangerous than standard reactors because it is particularly susceptible to power instability. The United States, France and Japan have experienced alarming accidents with this type of reactor.
"The FFTF is an inherently dangerous reactor that could pose major health and safety problems for the people of Washington and Oregon," Hauter said. "The U.S experience with this type of 'fast breeder' reactor argues against restarting it."
Nukes for our food? I just can't believe it.
AND, unfortunately, there's more: Some of you will remember the "victorious" Gulf War about a decade ago where the United States and its allies drew a line in the sand against the tyranny of Iraq's Saddam Hussein regime.
Well, Saddam Hussein is still in power and still a tyrant. Kurds are still being victimized in Iraq. And American sanctions are considered a travesty by the international community because we are killing Iraqi civilians, by way of deprivation, to no realizable or justifiable end. You won't just read that assessment here. Ask the US Pentagon, the Rand Corporation, the Brookings Institute, the CIA....
Why am I harking back to the Gulf War? For much the same reason we talked about DEPLETED URANIUM (nuclear) WEAPONS in the war on Kosovo last year.
READ THIS excerpt from a Sunday London Times Story:
Dr. Asaf Durakovic will tell a conference of eminent nuclear scientists in Paris that "tens of thousands" of British and American soldiers are dying from radiation from depleted uranium (DU) shells fired during the Gulf war.The findings will undermine the British and American governments' claims that Gulf war syndrome does not exist and intensify pressure from veterans on both sides of the Atlantic for compensation.
[You can read the complete story here. -- Ed.]
For me, it's like "just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water..." I thought this nuclear nightmare was over. I thought we would wake up and stop trying to poison our food, our water, our very air... But I was naive.
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