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Nuclear Power/Nuclear Weapons

October 18, 2019 By Bob Kinsey

Peace Train 18 October 2019
By Judith Mohling

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are strangely entwined in a Gordian knot. They cannot be separated.
The two nuclear fission bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, together killed more than 200,000 people. The bomb that destroyed Nagasaki released an amount of explosive energy equivalent to a pile of dynamite as big as the White House and had been contained in a sphere of plutonium no bigger than a baseball, according to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
On the other hand, when nuclear power was first commercialized in the mid-1950s, many viewed it as an ideal solution for the electricity needs of a growing global population. One pound of uranium-235 can produce two to three million times as much electricity as one pound of coal or oil. Wow, how seductive is that? Many people are now saying that nuclear power is the answer to climate change.
However, the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 remains the most serious nuclear power accident in U.S. history. Then came the tragedies of Chernobyl, in 1986, followed by the catastrophe of Fukushima Daiichi in 2011.Thanks to the world’s ocean currents that connect us all, radiation from Fukushima first showed up on the U.S. Oregon coast in 2016.
The mighty jet stream in the blue sky above us all now carries radiation from Fukushima according to Scientific American.
We now have about 450 nuclear power plants operating in the world each with its own nuclear reactor where the fission takes place, generating 10% of the world’s electric power according to the World Nuclear Performance Report 2019.
These 450 nuclear reactors also produce the key nuclear materials needed for the production of nuclear weapons. All of the more than 400 nuclear power plants now operating in 32 countries produce large quantities of plutonium that, when chemically separated from spent fuel, can be used to make reliable, efficient nuclear weapons of all types; a constant temptation for countries that want to keep up with the arms race.
Nuclear waste from these reactors is steadily building and it is radioactive essentially forever, with no place to store it that renders it harmless.
Clearly we need to phase out all nuclear power worldwide and accomplish this while being responsive to climate change and at the same time get nuclear weapons dismantled across the globe. Whew.
The Gordian knot cannot be untied. We are collectively facing new choices.

Filed Under: Perspective, Uncategorized

About Bob Kinsey

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Disarmament Quotes

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlisterKings Bay Protestor 2019

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford"The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

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