Reaction To Reactor

The world witnessed a great tragedy in Japan last week on March 11, with an 8.9 magnitude earth quake followed by a 30-40 miles per hour (of about 1,700 pounds of water per square yard) tsunami. The following day of the earthquake and tsunami, people woke up to a second disaster, worse than the first one, and not an act of nature, but dangers of destruction of a crippling nuclear plant. This disaster was brought upon people as a result of human recklessness and greed. We have been able to change our environment to a condition livable for us, although there still are wild acts of nature which are unpredicted and uncontrollable. Considering the history of human evolution, science makes progress to a point that all natural catastrophes and calamities can be harnessed in the near future. As most of the people try to advance themselves to a better, more comfortable, more tranquil, and more peaceful society, there are those who maximize their gain at the cost of other people’s lives. Those who construct nuclear reactors for profit, fame, or military ambitions threaten the rest of societies with an unpreventable doomsday. Every nuclear reactor is proven to be a shortcut to human obliteration, summing up all the costs and benefits the plant may engender in short term. I am not sure how many Three-Mile-Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi catastrophes it will take until the conscious of the heads of governments will rise.

Scientists, environmentalists, and thinkers, have reported future dangers and perils of nuclear. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to FDR, then president of the US, warning him of the dangers of atomic energy. This was about six months after the discovery of uranium fission. In an arm race, governments hurry to join nuclear states considering it as a shield from any military aggression, or simply as an icon of power. Japan with all the earthquakes and tsunami it has experienced in its islands in the past, possesses 24 nuclear facilities. There are enough atomic stockpiles in the world to destroy the earth several times over. We are living at the mercy of our governments for their transparency and their forthcoming. Afterwards, we are at the mercy of the nature inhibiting its devastating power of earthquakes and floods near such plants. Perhaps nuclear governments keep their stockpile of nuclear waste and atomic facilities in order to keep us in constant fear. There are new uprisings in many parts of Africa and Middle East in recent months, against dictatorial powers who have no shame in beating, jailing, torturing, and raping their citizens. It is the so called democratic world that does not act so violent in the open, but keep their citizens in fear through threats of war and hunger. Those with nuclear power can exert their power by creating trepidation of a nuclear holocaust. If we realize that a sizable majority of the world is subjugated, and this majority is many times larger than the minority government officials, big business, and their allies, we may be able to band together to fight all evils of societies brought to us by corrupt governments; evils such as hunger, racism, sexism, inequality, unemployment, and most important of all, nuclear reactors.