The energy policy catchphrase that has been operable for the last several decades is that we have to wean ourselves off of our addiction to foreign oil. Our leaders have mouthed this phrase repeatedly while wasting our treasury on useless wars to secure our place in line to feed our habit. But if our dependence on foreign oil can be likened to a prescription drug habit, then our deeper darker secret addiction, the one that is only let out of the closet dressed as a boon rather than the sickness that it is - that addiction to dirty, leaky, ancient, dangerous, always potentially catastrophic, city, state and region threatening, human tissue and chromosome altering, mutagenic and food chain destroying, forever future altering addiction to nuclear power should be likened to a full blown heroin enslavement - the kind where we’re willing to prey on our own to feed our habit. The pushers that told us that Fukushima was safe are the same people who even now, in the face of a disaster that can potentially dwarf Chernobyl, are proffering up the tired old canard that nuclear power is safe, that the plants now straddling major earthquake faults on the clearly active Pacific Rim of Fire and elsewhere, are immune from any potential disaster as though they know better than God what can happen next, like they knew in Japan.
It is time to take our future back from the purveyors of doom for profit. It is time to decommission all of these plants. It is time to come clean with ourselves about our addiction to electricity and to find ways to make it cleanly, and if that means making do with less, then we should willingly make that sacrifice. If we value life itself, civilization and our grandchildren, we will make honesty our number one priority, and demand honesty of our leaders. Honest leaders will admit that as a civilization we are incapable of safely utilizing nuclear power. Honest leaders will admit that over their life span, nuclear power plants are net energy losers anyway. Ask any politician or nuclear industry apologist if they are willing to send their pregnant daughter or grandchild into the exclusion zone. If they are not, then pray tell, what gives them the right to continue to manipulate the narrative in such a way that the rest of us might end up there?