Beware of Putrid Plutonium Propheteers

The powerful nuclear industry has been campaigning to construct new plants in Idaho and many have been preparing to buy it. Some have written letters beseeching Idahoans to embrace nuclear power, so that we can be first in something for once.

To paraphrase Lee Halper from a recent radioactive-hot forum, “Idaho is already first in many things. We're almost first in cow crap. We're first in lack of ethics in the Legislature. We're first in ignoring what doesn't work in other states will work here and we're first in having the most NUCLEAR waste seeping into our drinking water. We could be first in geothermal, wind, solar, hydrogen and conservation of energy but people who look for the silver bullet like NUCLEAR, are those who want us to be first in line for Superfund status.”

I agree with Lee; let us not be first in foolhardiness. The poisonous nuclear industry kills much more than charging windmills do birds. For the next 40,000 years, we will have to develop warning signs decipherable long after the English language has died out. Think about it, the proud legacy nuclear waste leaves, will endure an epoch tenfold longer than the most ancient Egyptian pyramid. The gist of it is; no one wants to be known as the one who killed the goose that lays golden eggs, even if they are speckled with plutonium.

Now a French company “committed to fueling the nuclear renaissance,” is on their way to getting generous tax breaks for mining Idaho uranium. Let’s be first in common sense again, by swatting away pests who desire to salt our fragile freedom-fry spud fields with a radioactive twinge. While it is true that France uses 80 percent nuclear power, don’t think that there is not a big brouhaha going on over there about the wasteful thinking. And where are the elite French trying to lay their insidiously deadly toxins to rest for millennia? Why it’s being shoveled into poor peoples backyards, of course. Affecting many Muslim communities. And that’s just dandy?

Perhaps Idaho newspaper editors should convene to develop a writing contest, for us to draft letters of apology to our grandchildren’s grandchildren, for how we have wrongly ‘warshiped’ Mother Earth, to insert in a time capsule, next to the Yucky Mountain radioactive warning cryptograms. Winners could receive protection suits, fitted with alarming Geiger counters.

The bad spin about wind turbines is very overblown. Improved energy gaining methods from the wind have been developed using large high-tension bands, which kill no birds. Think how much better off we will be, when we invest only one-tenth as much Research and Development into the dozens of other viable solar and wind parametered projects, as we do into killing innocent civilians over oil-Euros.

Although most of us are now war-weary, it’s inspiring to see that many Idahoans are not allowing themselves to be blinded by plutonium propheteers rushing in with desperate short-term energy solutions, which leave long-term radioactive stains, ten thousand-fold worse than cow-crap.