RANTS: ATOMIC PENCILS AND RADIOACTIVE STENCILS

I READ AN OLD SIFI STORY A WHILE AGO WHERE a character had a dream about the future and how his neighbourhood had changed. Now, it was prosperous, with happy people, small businesses, new store fronts and so on. There were bright neon signs and fixtures and streetlights in abundance. It also had your friendly, neighbourhood nuclear reactor to power all those shops and electric doo-dads. In his dream, the main character walks by the facility. It is glass-fronted and about the size of a small craft brewery, the kind where you can look in at all the vats with their yeasty suds ‘a brewing. He walks by the windows, looking at the turbines and steam pipes, and the nuclear core encased in cement and buried below street level. Just another evening's stroll through Atomic City. The point is—this was seen as a good thing; I didn’t read it as an ironic or foreshadowing moment in the story. Maybe I missed something; I hope I did. But it seemed like mini-nuke plants on every street corner was progress and a sign that prosperity was just a split atom away. It was uber-wonderful, though I’d definitely be wearing my lead shorts to take Fido out for his nightly stroll. Definitely.

How times have changed. The story was written in the mid-60s, when they were doing above-ground nuclear bomb tests and strontium 90 was being gently dusted into mother’s milk around the globe. But just a smidgen, so I guess that was okay. Actually, it wasn’t, and you would think the nuclear arm’s race and all the craziness happening back then (Cuban Missile Crisis, anyone?) would make such foolish dreams appear foolish. Back then, there was still hope for a safe, atomic world, with electric power so cheap that “it couldn’t be metered.” Yeah. That was just around the corner. Such imaginings were part and parcel with the unwavering and near-universal belief in the god of Progress and  of infinite growth on a finite planet. But life was good and drugs were cheap. [NOTE: It’s really a bit difficult to judge other people’s craziness and insane machinations, when you’re insane yourself. Today, lest we forget, the Doomsday Clock stands at two minutes to midnight! Synchronize your watches, folks! Ed.]

Turkey Point Station

That was a decade or so before the melt down at the Three Mile Island facility in New Jersey. Chernobyl and Fukushimi were on the horizon like petulant mushroom clouds. And yes, Virginia, dreams really do go up in smoke. Yes, they were times of prosperity, at least in the developed world, but a prosperity based mainly on cheap fossil fuels, with nuclear power tooling around town like the fancy, sports-car model of energy generation--all glitz and glamour, but at what cost?

Alfred E. Newman

Today, there is an aging nuclear reactor—twin reactors, actually—at Turkey Point, some twenty-five miles south of Miami on the Pacific coast of Florida, that's nearing, or past, its pull-by date. So...hmmm? An aging nuclear plant. Increased hurricane activity. Sea level rise. Miami predicted to be underwater by the end of the century; the Keys meanwhile going glub-glub. What could go wrong? There are many such turkeys around the globe, barely above sea level, and unless we round them up in some sort of sane fashion and reign in all those flying electrons, future generations, for centuries, millennia, to come, will curse our bones. 

I don’t know why I’m on about atomics today. I guess because, like the DDT-impregnated shelf paper that we lined our cottage pantries with in the 1950s, the metastasized suburbs, the twelve-lane superhighways we continue to bind Mam Gaia Kinbaku-like with--nuclear power and the Bomb and “battle-field nukes”, and all the rest, all of them, seem to be part of our subconscious Id, that giant, squalling pile of “I want”, without any adult checks and balances in the room. The Id just grows and grows until it’s ready to explode out of its shell, with the good chance it will die along with everyone else. And it’s not so much that we have mad scientists—we can’t single out physicists for blame—it’s like there's a general psychosis that’s gripping everyone. Or perhaps we're living in a dream and sleepwalking toward a cliff. We seem incredibly short-sighted; willfully so. We can barely think beyond one or two generations let alone seven, as some First Nations teachings would have us do when considering the consequences of our actions. 

Professor Morbius

But, as the late, great Alfred E. Newman always said, "What, me worry?"

Well, there are people starting to worry. And there are more and more of them, all the time. And that's good. So, I shouldn’t be so negative, by crumbies! Well, sorry. I ranted on a bit. It's time to hit the sack. I think I‘ll make  myself a glass of warm milk and turn up my atomic heater.

Cheers, Jake.