NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT IS NOT CLEAN OR SAFE

February 16, 2010 by Elizabeth Barger

As an American citizen, I love my country. As a poet and an artist I live on the edge of incredible beauty and awe overlooking a gulf of horror and despair caused by insane greed for power and control from the thrones of empire.

President Obama has proposed funding 70-80% of the cost of building a nuclear power plant in Georgia. He wants to put more billions of money into nuclear power and several more billions in atomic weapons.

People speak of atomic energy as “clean”. The truth is, it is the dirtiest polluter of all. We talk about nuclear weapons as tactical, but in truth, they are mutually destructive. We forget that at our peril. In the process of enriching uranium for power or weapons, we produce a product, depleted uranium, that is so caustic, it eats away most of its storage containers. It is toxic and radioactive. The alpha radiation is mutagenic, meaning it affects DNA, and it has a half-life of 4.5 BILLION years.

We have sown this depleted uranium [DU] in the Balkans. We continue sowing the seeds of death and mutation in Iraq, Gaza, and Afghanistan. Our troops bring it home in their bodies. We have caused death and disease in American populations, especially Native Americans. People are dying now where destructive mining processes in the Dakotas have encroached on their sacred places and polluted ancient aquifers. Navajo children in Arizona and New Mexico play on hills of uranium mining tailings that are dumped at the edges of their communities.

All this waste lasts forever and we are running out of places to store it. Tennessee has already no place to send the waste it produces from its nuclear facilities. The salt caves under Yucca Flats, called Serpent Mountain by the people who live there, are in an unstable earthquake prone area, and situated over an extensive aquifer that is the water supply for much of the South West. It is unsafe, and Nevada, suffering already from past experiments in nuclear development, doesn’t want the nation’s atomic waste.

There are people in our government who are determined to bomb and kill thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Iran because we don’t want them to develop atomic capability. The US is being arrogant and loose with the truth in this issue. America is the only country that has used atomic weapons against civilian or military targets. Listen to the cries of the people:

Sorrowsorrowsorrow!

“Our children are dead! Our people are dying!”

Beautiful women fall by

in the crying rain of war.

The dust of destruction lives in our seeds

foreboding strange changes,

lying seven times seven over our generations

who must look into the dark glass of pain.

Oh, the laughter cuts so hard.

A smile dies in vain.

Ephraim, my son! My son!

Where are your eyes?

Where are your little hands I want to hold?

My heart is wrung dry with anger.

Will there be enough tears in my sorrow

to even sustain despair?

We breathe the ends of fire

sifting through the window form.

Instead of children calling in,

there comes the awful storm. *

We have hoped for change, yet this administration remains in the pay of the nuclear investment corporations. It is determined to continue the move to increase the crime of atomic weapons that are even stronger and more radioactive, that will kill more people immediately, and will be deadly over the centuries. Why would we want to use our resources to develop more and better destruction? This is insanity and the people who are pushing to carry this criminal insanity out will not be able to escape the consequences of these actions, no matter how safe they may feel from the consequences of their decisions.

Private industry won’t pay to build more atomic power plants. They are too expensive and too dangerous. They have bamboozled the President and Congress into taking taxpayer dollars to back an investment that smart entrepreneurs understand as too risky. But, you can be sure that there is gold for nuclear investors in this dangerous scheme wrung from the resources of working people who will be paying in lives and earnings for generations. Wisdom says that atomic energy is a dumb way to boil water.

The intelligence and “can do” work ethic available in the United States could be better used to disarm atomic weapons, develop alternative energies, and work for ways to resolve conflicts peaceably. It is up to us to stop the insanity proposed by President Obama in budget presented to the Congress and the American people.

* copyright Elizabeth Barger 7-20- 2009. All rights reserved.