Technology -- EEK!

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Technology – EEK!

If an individual were to awaken from a winter of hibernation and read the news today he would conclude from the limited information given that the deaths and destruction in Japan these last two weeks are the result of a nuclear explosion.

There have certainly been explosions enough, hydrogen gas explosions, but there has been no nuclear explosion because a nuclear power plant cannot explode. Our hypothetical reader would also be surprised to learn that the deaths and destruction, including the wreckage of a power plant, are in reality the result of a powerful earthquake and resulting wave action.

Contemporary ideology works within a philosophical framework posited in the grounding myth that all bad things are human in origin, and that the prime cause of evil is that man is a self-actuated tool-maker, not a wretched, hungry hunter-gatherer. In reporting the disasters in Japan, the earthquakes and tsunami are not simply underreported in favor of the it’s-all-some-man’s-fault thesis, they appear now not to be mentioned at all, rather like Hurricanes Rita and Ike.

Japan, with more cause than any other nation to be sensitive to the negative possibilities of nuclear power, is gridded with nuclear power plants, and these power plants have for years operated with great benefit to the Japanese people and economy by producing cheap electricity and warm water. The warm water, by the way, makes for improved sport fishing at the outlets. To the fish in the cold northern Pacific, shivering in their little designer parkas, the waters cycling out of a nuclear reactor are as a dream cruise in the Caribbean to you and me.

To say that nuclear power is dangerous is a truism equal to stating that storing containers of gasoline in one’s living room is dangerous or that building a campfire during a drought is dangerous. Most human activities – welding, bicycling, mowing the yard, building fences, fishing, milking cows, playing baseball -- contain some element of danger. Shall we thus simply cease living? We humans have frontal lobes, and generally know not to give 6-year-olds the keys to the car or allow newly-commissioned lieutenants access to weapons or sharp objects.

As of this writing, not one person has been killed because of the wrecked nuclear plant in Japan.

Further, the American ships that have sailed to Japan with generous gifts of American food and American water and American blankets and American medical care are powered by nuclear power plants. For over fifty years American submarines and large warships have been powered by the atom, and our sailors and Marines don’t come home glowing in the dark and giving birth to children with three eyes. The solution to nuclear safety issues seems to be building nuclear reactors just like those used by the United States Navy.

Finally, while short-term exposure to radiation is dangerous, the long-term implications are less alarming. In 1945, before the bomb was dropped, 419,000 people lived in Hiroshima; now some 1.6 million prosper there. 212,000 folks lived in Nagasaki in 1945; now there are 446,000.

At this point some twit will tweet, indignantly and with two fingers, “So what u sayin is bombin cities is good uh.” No, I’m not saying that at all; the conversation is about nuclear power used wisely for the good of all people.

In an aside we may note that Detroit, which hasn’t suffered combat since the French and Indian War, boasted a population of 1.5 million in 1945; now some 910,000 exist in the ruins of a once-great city.

Nuclear power is good; abandoning humanity to starve in the cold because of Greenist ideology is bad.

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