As pro-nuclear energy spin and PR damage control go into high gear as Fukushima continues to unravel and expose the type of lies and deceptions that have misled even well intentioned commentators, like George Monbiot, into accepting the negatives of nuclear energy for some (deluded) idea that it is a lesser of evils (this concept is itself a notion created by the nuclear spin industry, I am virtually certain) certain parts of this project become increasingly well defined. The thing I find most revealing is the notion, put forward by pro-nuclear apologists, innocently, or less so, that normal people are suffering from an irrational fear of radiation.

These types of falsehoods and misrepresentations of what is actually going on form the essence of all modern public relations, especially for heavy industrial consumers of non-renewables of all types, constitute a steady chipping away at a very accurate human response towards radiation, one that I would suggest is in fact highly rational. It is especially discouraging to find such things repeated by those who might otherwise pride themselves on being somewhat critical in their view of modern society.

What I find totally and utterly irrational is that when faced with the total inability to handle a process that was never meant to exist on earth, people continue to pretend that it’s a rational decision to create it. This is simply false. It was a refusal to start winding down power consumption, coupled with a military requirement to obtain nuclear materials for nuclear weapons, that was directly responsible for humanity entering this lunatic course of action in the first place.

The entire nuclear project has always been totally irrational, on so many levels it’s really hard to pick just a few, but here’s some: assumption, despite ALL history as positive proof against this faith, that societies will. continue to be able to handle these toxic systems as they change in fundamental ways. Poster child for this? Ukraine, today, requiring about 2 billion euros to create a new sarcophagus for Chernobyl.
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Now and again it’s worth looking at some of the points raised on issues of sustainability and the end of life as we know it.

I see as a given that our current system is going to change, and change fundamentally, as resource depletion continues to alter the ease with which we extract, and waste, non-renewable, or not quickly enough renewable, raw materials. I find myself tending to agree with John Michael Greer (aka: the ‘Arch Druid’) re the time frames over which the ensuing changes will occur, mainly because Greer’s views tend to match reality as we find it documented in our histories.

Greer also makes an effort to study actual history and related areas that touch on these questions, unlike most of the other commentators out there, and he also is pushing out information that tries to help deal with the issues, which you’ll see at the end of this essay, is really the core difference between those prophets of doom and those who will actually find the way forward as our present grows into the future.

However, I also believe that significant portion of people who think we will see a sharp steep global collapse are simply confusing a drop in available consumption levels with the end of all life (aka: The End of Life as We Know It).

A Realistic View of Real-World Change

The way this so called collapse (better called: change, adjustment, alteration in prevalent mythologies and deeply held cultural biases) develops will be regional, not global. I’ve thought that for a while now. This is, by the way, another reason I don’t consider myself a ‘doomer’. Regional alterations do not make for a unitary moment of doom, they are something we have seen throughout history. Remember, Italy in its center was largely empty after the Roman Empire moved its center to the east, and the Barbarians had invaded one too many times. Then time moved on, and Italy wasn’t empty any more. Norway’s northern regions were emptied of Norwegians after the black plague, but NOT of human habitation, the Saamies (Lapps) were happy to move back in and occupy the land with their nomadic reindeer herding way of life until very close to the modern era. There is, I think you have to agree, a certain ethno-centrism involved in the belief that the failure of a single means of human social organization is somehow ‘doom’, when for others, it might be the ticket to the possibility of living a real life again, freed from the bonds of industrial non-sustainable production. It all depends on your point of view.

The notion, presented by Greer, among others, that changes will occur in staircase form I think doesn’t require much of a leap, since changes are coming in staircase form already. Just as an example: Colin Campbell (retired petroleum geologist, and prominent peak oil observer and analyst) points to the technical peak of global oil extraction as being marked by extreme social, economic, and political volatility. I look around myself in 2010 and find just that. Resource wars ongoing, political instabilities, ongoing. So that part seems pretty much right on.

The Real Turning Point

I don’t like getting into more sci-fi speculations, but to me, it’s fairly obvious that the reason 1970 was the real turning point for the global human culture based on non-sustainable resource exploitation is that is when the global population went into serious overshoot, beyond carrying capacity. The real warning flag back then was the requirement of instituting industrial, non-sustainable farming techniques, called, in Orwellian style, the ‘green revolution’ in order to avoid famine and provide enough food stuffs to feed the now clearly non-sustainable population numbers created by ceaseless population growth.
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Sometimes a comment is made in an online discussion which really warrants a response on a much deeper level, because it reveals so much about how we look at our world and planet.

It’s very important to look at such views and see what’s actually driving them, because to do so gives us a way to learn how to see our real world environment.

“if the Worst Possible Scenario happened at all the world’s gas/coal power generation stations simultaneously” – well it happened, in part, there, we call it global warming these days. Not as spectacular as exploding reactor roofs, not as fast as a cloud of radioactive debris, but the effect is here with all of us, it is enormous and irreversible. But it’s out of interest when people make their judgements.

If all four units in Chernobyl would have burned as #4 obviously it would have been much worse, yes, it would have contaminated Europe badly, but far from inhabitable. And that reactor design was a goddamn pit of hell compared even these 40yr old BWRs. Now Fukushima looks like crap, it will do some harm, it will hurt people, but not to the extent you believe.

Of course nuclear waste from all plants must be taken care of, there is research, I believe there are already finished plans for reactors that besides producing power, burn this “spent” fuel to shorten it’s dangerous effects to about ~2 centuries, which, while I agree is a lot of time, still looks somewhat shorter than it would take to remove all those greenhouse gases your gas/coal plants gushed into the atmosphere.

60 years of nukes vs. 120 years of ff power generation, yet the negative effects are hard to compare.
(src: theOilDrum 2011-03-16)

No known human non-sustainable, large scale, centralized, culture has been able to correctly predict the condition of that human culture 2 centuries in its future.

Just 65-70 years ago bombs were being dropped on all key facilities in Europe, Russia/USSR, China was being bombed, Japan was bombed. That’s only 70 years, not even remotely close to 2 centuries. And that’s only one way things can and do go bad.

Yes 2 centuries looks shorter than multiple thousands of years, but there is no way this heavily industrialized system is going to exist in 2 centuries, sorry. It’s a blip in history, a dip at the bottom of the pit. Also, what we have to look at is our present, not some uncreated future.
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