Dawn

I watched a fascinating documentary last night – The Power of Nightmares. It presents the position that the US neo-conservatives use organised terror as an excuse to rally support and that the terrorist threat is miniscule and disorganised contrary to the US propaganda.

What I didn’t realise was that the same group of neo-cons were responsible for setting up the perception of threat from the USSR in the 1970 – 80s despite the CIA evidence showing that this was not the case.

I can remember the terror this group caused me and can not forgive them. It also jaded my view of and US administration and Americans in general for supporting such extremist groups.

Here is my story.

One morning when I was 15 or 16 I woke up just before dawn. At the time some volcano in South East Asia was active. As I lay in that transition from sleep to consciousness I opened my eyes and saw the room was bathed in an unusual light. I looked to my window. The sky was a ruddy purple colour – unlike anything I had seen before, I couldn’t hear the usual chorus of birds; everything was quiet. My immediate thought was that it had happened. The bastards had started it. This was it, nuclear winter here we go (there had been a string of made for TV movies showing the horror of a post nuclear holocaust so I was “well” informed).

My heart was pumping as I went to the window, a thousand horror scenarios running through my brain.

Slowly I began to fully wake and then realised that it was just atmospheric pollution from the volcano but something changed within me at that point. I became anti-nuclear, anti US and more liberal/left-wing. Even then I understood that the US administration of the day had manipulated the truth for their own agenda. It had been widely reported.


The anti-nuclear stance was partly wrong. Building nuclear arms is wrong, they should never have been built and should be eliminated from this planet – I am still 100% convinced of this. Nuclear power was caught in the cross fire. I now realise that this is a technology that can be safely used and should have been pursued.

The waste problem is not a problem and never was. Waste is a huge problem for light water reactors but not for fast neutron reactors. This type of reactor can be designed to either consume or produce weapons grade plutonium. A technology that would have delivered the nuclear promise was effectively banned by the IAEA via pressure from the US ostensively because its potential for production weapons grade material.

Now we find hundreds of light water reactors producing thousands of tonnes of extremely hazardous, long half life, waste. The alternative was thousands of fast neutron reactors designed to consume all fissile material while producing about 1/10 of the waste of short half life light isotopes with no military use. Yes, you can design these reactors to do this while not producing weapons material.

Imagine, the known deposits of uranium would be enough to sustain our current energy demand for 100+ years, producing waste with a half life of several hundred years (for the worst case isotopes). Light water reactors producing at this rate would deplete our reserves in less than 20 years and produce mountains of material that will be hot for hundreds of millennia. I guess it will be 15 – 20 years before any significant move to fast reactors is made – climate induced economic collapse may interfere with that time line….

Oh well, at least it has kept the oil and coal interests happy, to bad about the global climate.