Choosing Nuclear Power is Needlessly Putting More Tools of Death Into Our Future

Choosing Nuclear Power is Needlessly Putting More Tools of Death Into Our Future: Two existential crises and the obvious alternative

“Atomic Accomplice: How Canada deals in deadly deceit” a book written by Paul McKay in 2009 has a foreword by David Suzuki.

One chapter is called, “Plutonim, the immortal outlaw.” (p 129) The word “immortal” refers to the fact that plutonium remains lethal for 250,000 years.

McKay writes, “As a matter of physics, plutonium is created in every nuclear reactor of every make, model, size, purpose, or country of origin or operation…It takes a mere 8 kilograms to make a Nagasaki-scale bomb….”

He continues, “Each year the odds grow worse that some of this accumulating, effectively immortal plutonium will be diverted by pariah states, or sold covertly for cash, or stolen for a bomb or nuclear blackmail. In 2009, the International Atomic Energy Agency disclosed that its data base includes 1,646 reports of trafficking, theft or loss of nuclear materials since 1995, including 18 involving plutonium or highly enriched plutonium.”

If there were that many reports in only 14 years (1995 – 2009), imagine what is likely to happen in the next 250,000 years - the length of time that plutonium remains lethal!

By choosing nuclear power to “keep the lights on,” and thereby creating plutonium, we are choosing to steadily grow a stockpile of new and unprecedentedly dangerous tools of death and suffering to all who live on Earth for the next 250,000 years.

That argument against nuclear power and its byproducts is stronger than the traditional argument against nuclear waste.

That traditional argument does have merit, but it is dwarfed by the much larger probability that some party(s), in the next 250,000 years will purposely look for plutonium and unleash its deadly powers on the rest of us, or use it as a threat to further their own ends.

Those party(s) could be a small group of people, or any one of thousands of new geopolitical entities or sub-entities that will inevitably evolve or be formed over the next 250,000 years.

By using nuclear power, and thereby creating plutonium, we are increasing the odds that humanity will cause much death and suffering upon itself, or even destroy itself and cease to exist.

That is nature of the existential crisis that nuclear power and its waste gives us.

And, yes, we also face the existential crises of climate change.

Must we use the existential crisis inherent in nuclear power to steer away from the existential crisis of climate change?

Is it necessary to choose between those two existential crises in order to “keep the lights on?”

Are we damned if we do, and damned if we don’t?

No. Renewable energy is the obvious and necessary alternative to both.