Tag Archives: Fukushima

Radioactive rat in wood shed

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by Climate Change • Tags: , , , , , ,

As soon as the sale of uranium by Australia to India was subject to criticism the other day the nuclear boosters swung into action to praise the decision as helping India to a low carbon future.

Try to criticise that then you hippy greeny new world order gauleiters, see how far you get.

It’s a variant on the Lomborg gambit – how dare you try to fix the climate as long as one child goes hungry in Bangladesh or Tuvalu. Which is in turn a variant on the “eat up all your peas there are starving children in China who would fall upon your plate like ravening wolves” approach of my grandmother to encouraging eating your vegetables.

Or, perhaps an even closer analogy, Lomborg is the Gerald Ford of economics, unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. But I digress.

It all seems very altruistic, this desire to give every Indian an airconditioner and let them cool the world. Thank goodness for these good people you say to yourself; cometh the hour cometh the nuclear spruiker.

But then it occurs to you that you never used to hear anything from these people about the way the cavalry in radiation suits was riding to the rescue of a warming planet. Indeed, although it is, just, possible I am maligning them, the people telling us to eat our radioactive omega4 are the kind of people you would find in a country pub, or city tv station, explaining carefully that CO2 was good for you and that the warming stopped in 1998.

So pardon my suspicious mind. I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist but I have a sneaking suspicion there is something nasty in the wood shed. For the last ten years or more the fossil fuel industry has been funding a massive disinformation campaign, and lobbying, and buying politicians, and misleading unions, and propagandising against renewable energy, and setting up astroturf groups, in order to prevent action to reduce CO2 output and therefore their massive profits.

OK, clear, obvious, no doubt about what was going on.  Cui Bono (cherchez la femme in French) guides you every time. Coal and oil and gas producers going in hobnailed boots and all, nuclear industry sitting on sidelines, nothing to gain by taking part.

Except, except, I now wonder if they have been beavering away in the background helping their non-renewable cousins make hay while the media sun shines. After all, the longer any action can be delayed (and the Durban talks are now talking about talking about stuff in 2015, another 5 years lost), the more the nuclear industry can present itself as the rich uncle to the rescue. The only hope of saving the planet.

Ten years ago they were dead in the water of the cooling ponds. Nobody wanted a bar of them. Now, even in spite of Fukushima (!), they are again clamouring for a seat at the head of the energy table. Quick, quick, too late for anything else, only nuclear, that clean green energy, can save us now.

Call me cynical, suspicious, if you like, but I smell a radioactive rat. Cold comfort.

For mine

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , ,

I once nearly bought a small farm in what had been a minor gold-mining area in the nineteenth century. The miners had dug deep but narrow pits, presumably found a grain or two of gold, stopped digging because they were too deep, and then moved to the next spot and dug a new hole. When even the grains of gold ran out they abandoned the field – leaving all their holes. One hundred and fifty years later the holes were still there, hidden by weeds or shrubs, forming natural pit traps. Most had animal bones in the bottom. I didn’t buy, picturing my animals, or visitors, or indeed myself, pitching down a hole one day and breaking necks. The lethal leftovers from a mining operation of which nothing was required except counting the gold nuggets.

Asbestos mines didn’t always leave holes in the ground but did leave spoil heaps of asbestos waste, uncovered, untreated in any way. Children once played on the asbestos piles as they do today in India with little environmental concern as they picked up ticking cellular time bombs. Years later those children and their parents began dying of a horrible lung cancer when those bombs went off.

“Making good” after mining seems to be a thing of the past. Mining for coal, iron ore, and silver lead zinc all leave both dirty big holes on the ground, old spoil heaps, and toxic dust blowing everywhere, including on to schoolchildren’s playgrounds and lunches. Coal mining now pushes under river beds with bad results, and the new coal seam gas drilling and “fracking” pollutes soil and rivers and water tables in rich farm land. In Japan mothers take geiger counters to the shops to try to find vegetables that are not radioactive after the Fukushima nuclear accident, and the mining of uranium back in Australia frequently causes concern about pollution of land and water. Apparently oblivious to such concerns the government has just announced more uranium mining and sales to India in addition to the other export markets.

All mining leaves some sort of toxic time bombs (perhaps even actual ones in the case of uranium) and we need to stop being so blase about it. Does anyone really need to be told twice that CSG drilling in prime farming land is a suicidal process for our future well-being?

And CSG coal mining leave another toxic legacy. Not quite so obvious, being colourless and odourless (though not weightless). Carbon dioxide, as we all now know, is heating this planet up at a frightening rate.

Digging stuff up faster and faster that pollutes farming land and changes the climate for the worse?

Think we are in a hole and digging deeper.

Blowing in the wind

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by Environment • Tags: , , , , , , ,

There was once, my older readers will remember, a Victorian premier called Henry Bolte. Remembered now only for ensuring that he would be the last state premier to order a hanging in Australia, and for his famous response to the growing concern about the environment in the 1960s. “Air pollution? The wind blows it away. Water pollution? The sea washes it away.”

He would have thoroughly approved of the work at the crippled nuclear reactors in Japan, as water rich in radioactivity was pumped out to sea. What could go wrong – radioactive fish? As indeed what could go wrong with pumping chemicals down into coal seams to extract gas in rich farming areas with deep alluvial soils? I mean, where could the chemicals finish up – in bore water? Or open slather import of foods (exploding watermelons anyone?) and toys (high lead levels anyone?) from other countries with poor safety and regulation records, no chance of any problem there for our children?

Look, maybe I am an extra bit sensitive at the moment, given circumstances, but I think we have all got a bit blase about chemicals in the environment. Concern in the 1960s eventually got smoothed over, wished away, regulations gradually relaxed in the interests, you understand, of increasing profits. But now I wince when I read about coal seam “fracking”, shudder when I see trucks spraying weeds along roadsides as I drive past, groan when I see a bunch of grapes in a supermarket labelled “exposed to SO2″, worry about the nuclear industry push in Australia. And each time I read a study showing an inexplicable increase in some childhood (or adult) medical condition once largely unknown I wonder whether the pollution Bolte so blithely waved goodbye to as it blew away from Victoria has gone around the globe and come back to bite us all.

And I don’t know what we can do about it. I was as careful as could be about what I ate and drank and used in the garden, on the farm, but if there are invisible tasteless chemicals, in the air we breathe in the city, or the food we buy in supermarkets, or the water we drink in the country, then careful doesn’t really cut it.

The environment needs the old Hippocratic oath applied to it – first do no harm. After that make all the profit you like. Henry Bolte believed in the reverse, but then he believed in hanging people too. Times are a changing, aren’t they?