In today’s Star Tribune, one of the front page articles was describing the great anxiety surrounding the Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine that is in the midst of the war in the Ukraine. As has been reported in the news, there are nuclear reactor inspectors going to the site, under incredibly dangerous conditions, to check on the status and safety for this nuclear power plant.
Vladimir Putin is like the perpetrator of domestic violence who decides that if he cannot continue to abuse and control his victim it is far better to kill the victim and himself. Lobbing artillery shells in an around the nuclear power plant is Putin’s way of demonstrating that if he would prefer to blow up Ukraine and put it under a nuclear cloud, then allow Ukraine to have its own sovereignty.
What this crises demonstrates so clearly is the dilemma in which the world finds itself these days. As the disasters that have occurred at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima among other nuclear power plants have shown us, nuclear power, while giving us non-carbon emitting power possesses in many ways is more dangerous and destructive. The half life of the plutonium waste ranges from 10,000 years to 24,000 years.
I remember an article written by a photojournalist who took pictures of the town of Chernobyl many years after the nuclear disaster (level 7). The photojournalist had to wear very special protective gear that measured the amount of radiation being received. The photojournalist had to leave the site after 30 minutes when the radiation levels were getting dangerous. There are still about 100 people living on the fringes of Chernobyl, and animals, e.g. horses, fox, rodents etc, abandoned by the fleeing human population, are thriving, it is unknown how long they can survive such a dangerous environment. For the most part Chernobyl is a nuclear ghost town.
Years after the 2011 nuclear reactor disaster at Fukushima (an earthquake triggered an enormous tsnuami that flooded the nuclear power plant resulting in the meltdown of the reactors, the radiation is still so intense within the shells of the reactors that unmanned robots melt down unable to measure the damage done to the reactors. The land and the water have been poisoned by the radiation caused by the meltdown.
With Putin threatening to destroy the nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the question must be raised as to if the danger of nuclear power plant meltdowns is a better alternative than the destruction of the environment by carbon burning power plants.
It has been very clear for many, many years that obtaining energy from carbon burning power stations, and carbon powered engines/motors is destroying our planet. Droughts lasting five to six years, far more destructive and frequent hurricanes along our coasts, the melting of both the Arctic and Antarctic polar ice caps is raising the sea levels precipitously throughout the world.
In 2021, severe flooding, as a result of global warming, destroyed German towns. This year Germany and France is hit with a severe drought pretty much drying up the Loire River, pictured above, and lowering levels so great on the Danube River that the rusting hulks of German WW2 war boats scuttled by the Nazis, are now revealed.
On the other hand, severe flooding is destroying property, crops, and the lives of people all over the world. In the United States, pick your state in which severe flooding has occurred in recent days. It is ironic that while Arizona, Nevada, California are suffering from multiple droughts so severe that the bodies of Mafia victims and those who died by drowning/suicide are being uncovered in Lake Meade; while, at the same time entire communities both urban and rural are being flooded out in many Midwestern States.
We are literally caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, for it appears that if we try to address the need for power by continuing past practices of burning fossil fuels to get that energy, we doom our planet and ourselves. And, if we try to address the global warming disaster that is occurring by utilizing non-carbon burning nuclear fission, we will eventually suffer a nuclear disaster, aka Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, caused either by war, as in the present crises in Ukraine by Russia, or by natural disasters such as the tsnuami that destroyed the nuclear power plant in Fukushima. The paradox of a natural disaster destroying nuclear power plants is that the destructive forces of nature will be caused by global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. It seems like we are “damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”
So what do we do? It is clear that we cannot choose between the better of these two evils. They both ultimately lead to the destruction of life on our planet. We can either: a) accept our fate and adopt the defeatist “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die” attitude of Medieval Europeans being decimated from the Bubonic Plague; b) combine our sciences, our knowledge, and our resources with other nations, and fast pace our ability to harness solar, wind, and water power to provide us with an inexpensive, renewable source of power. This will require us to use both nuclear and carbon burning methods of providing energy for a time, with the goal of reducing these sources of power significantly over the next 20 years. While we can dream of using fusion instead of fission to generate power, it seems that that technology is still beyond our present reach. What is important is that we begin this process now.
To entertain the notion that we do not have a problem with global warming, that time is over. All politicians, all people who embrace that false doctrine need to be jettison from the very needed conversation and policies required to save our planet and ourselves. If we do not, then our future, regardless of where we live, will resemble that pictured above.
Lest we throw our hands up in despair, sit in sackcloth and ashes on the dung heap our world has become (e.g. Job), I wish to end with the wisdom of a Medieval anchoress and mystic, who, in the midst of the enormous loss of human life by the Bubonic Plague, by war, and religious persecution wrote these brilliant words.
“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.
In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”
“And all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be exceeding well.” (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love)
I offer to you this conclusion. Let us pray to whatever “Higher Power” in which we believe to guide us and guard us, AND, use the abilities with which that Higher Power has blessed us and seek together the science and means by which we can save ourselves, our planet, at the same time provide for our energy needs.
