Atomic Power Investors Say Everyone is Radioactive Already-No Worries

Numerous talking heads defending nuclear power plant construction and the no-danger nature of atomic fission piles producing electricity have reassured the public that everyone already emits radiation themselves and a little more won’t hurt them. They also say that nuclear power plants are a ‘smart choice’, yet each premise is false.

Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State still has an unfunded 50 billion dollar clean-up cost. Hanford was the site of the nation’s first federal nuclear power facility and has a few mothballed plants there that cost taxpayers billions and billions.

Market forces have conquered U.S. government economic policy planning. President Obama threw in the toll on ending Bush era tax cuts wholeheartedly indicating his underlying market political philosophy. That market philosophy of government is based on economic and social science theories since the 70’s the government isn’t capable of rational economic intervention-it can only bail out large market players when they stumble because of imperfect knowledge of the market conditions.

That is a kind of rational market existential philosophy. The poor are deleted from Democratic political concerns, as is full employment as they have signed off on a natural unemployment rate versus rise of inflation (NAIRU) paradigm as an unavoidable deterministic fact.

Market philosophy dominance of politics can neutralize the reality of democracy. Democratic governments, it is held, should not moderate economics through public sector goal setting and intervention. Instead, they should reinforce the market and let the democracy of buying stock be the rationality that determines governance. Power is implicitly found in the market culture. Electrical power supply and consumption management should be a part of government duty in regard to national paradigm setting. Absolute power supply and consumption in itself may become absolutely corrupt when market forces alone determine the philosophical parameters of its use. All of nature-all of the mass that exists is an equivalent of energy. Atomic fission and fusion of mass to release energy is best left to nature, and the natural history of evolution of the cosmos, for the stars and other processes. Human and other biological life exists at a much different temperature range and should innovate more benign methods of harnessing power to sustain itself and its life processes.

A blind government reliant upon the magic hand of market structuring of society is one that finds atomic power plants ‘smart’. It also support coal, cap and trade, oil consumption and whatever else develops on the market. The ideas of government setting goals and criteria for the market are lost. Democratic governance becomes dumb.

If the U.S. Government were to make nuclear plants, coal plants producing emissions, strip mining of coal and hydro electric dams illegal the national ecology would reasonable be better off. The market values increased consumption however, and thus atomic power plants are regarded as ‘smart’ ways to keep the nation’s power consumption increasing.

Ecological values and values for human survival as well as national independence differ from pure market values quite often. In fact many value theories and systems exist from which a democracy may select those that best enhance the quality of life of the citizens. If dangerous, ecospherically disruptive energy technologies are banned in the United States the market would evolve, like a forest in the devastated St. Helen’s eruption aftermath, to grow a new forest to fill in the empty wasteland.

The market finding atomic, coal and hydroelectric power banned would value wind, solar, geothermal and fuel cell power highly and invest in tech races to supply new power technology. Superconductor technology would be applied along with better building design and insulation strategies. Smart new methods of living and producing and using electricity would flow directly into the voids left by the departure of 1920’s era coal, oil and hydroelectric power along with half century old nuclear-power for peace paradigms.

Atomic power plants are high on a list of implicit threats to life on Earth. In some future global conflict thousands of the plants could be destroyed and hundreds or thousands of years of destruction and/or mutation to human and other living species become a routine fact of the planetary surface and oceanic depths.