LLAW’s ‘All Things Nuclear’ #461 (11/25/2023)
LLAW’s ‘All Things Nuclear’ #461 (11/25/2023)
“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
LLAW’s COMMENTARY:
My comments tonight and every night are based on reflections I’ve had about nuclear energy since I first signed up in the business as a 20-something looking for a well paying job for my young family and me, as an accountant for a mining company in central Wyoming known as Lucky Mc Mine, (pronounced ‘Lucky Mac Mine’) and owned by a well-known growing corporation named Utah Construction and Mining Company, based in San Francisco, that had been the managing company in the construction of the Hoover Dam and other major projects around the country. The uranium mine was their first venture into the nuclear business, although they had large coal mining operations in Utah and New Mexico. I learned the basics of the entire business there and in a couple of years had been promoted to administrative manager.
I soon began to commute between Riverton, Wyoming, and San Francisco where I was able to get a strong feel for how the company and the general nuclear industry worked at all levels up to and including pricing of our mined and milled prior to further refined uranium fuel product, known as U308 or Yellow Cake, all over the world including selling our product to Germany, France, and other foreign countries and dozens of nuclear power plants here in the United States after the TVA and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission allowed independent sales directly to commercial power plant facilities, directly, also, from the selling corporations’ mines. By the late 1960s we had expanded to two uranium mining operations in Wyoming during those early years, enjoying those hay-days of the uranium industry.
I loved the job, the association and camaraderie with the people I worked for and with, and was definitely “sold” on the future of nuclear energy and the insane idea of fueling the world with our very rare enriched uranium product (U235) for nuclear power plants instead of coal, oil, and gas. There was a bit of an environmental pride involved in what we were doing, and we thought of our product as a much more efficient and cleaner product than the other fossil fuels, and just those two advantages made me feel like uranium was the epitome of providing fuel for energy-producing power forever.
And then, in the spring of 1979, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, caused by a cooling malfunction that began to melt the core in one of the two nuclear reactors. The plant had been constructed and designed to shut itself down in such a situation, and luckily, the accident was minimal compared to what could have happened, but large amounts of radioactive fuel were released to the open atmosphere and the situation that a meltdown remained a possibility that was eventually avoided. Many scientists, nuclear operations managers, environmental experts, politicians, nuclear protestors, and others exploited the ‘what if’ element of the accident and the industry’s never-ending and constant vulnerability, but the entire corporate commercial side of the industry looked the other way, debunking the idea (or fact) that nuclear accidents were an issue, then, or in the future. The corporate presidents, to a man, took an extremely negative position about the concerns of a huge group of knowledgeable scientists and a nervous, even frightened, public opposition. The entire industry rallied around the dark rallying phrase, which I heard personally at an early meeting, involving corporate management and strategies to contradict the growing outrage against nuclear power and the nuclear industry.
The first speaker at the assembly, whom I will not name, stood before dozens of us in the audience, and his opening words were, “Let the bastards freeze to death in the dark.” I was instantly revolted at the words and what they meant — it was like a declaration of war, completely the opposite of how I thought our industry would have handled the dangerous situation that an accident at any nuclear power plant could be responsible for killing thousands upon thousands of people, and I knew from general industry knowledge that ‘accidents’ were an issue at many start-up and/or the few actually operating nuclear power plants in those days. Because of those nine words, representing the entire nuclear industry, I decided, with a sad heart, to get out of the nuclear business entirely.
Had the message been something like, say, “Folks, we have a problem!”, I might have been of a mind to remain in the industry in order to help ensure the future safety of ‘all things nuclear’. So I transferred out of that part of the corporation that had grown over the years to have mines and production facilities all over the country and the globe, into a major subsidiary of GE, which had long before begun to build nuclear reactors for commercial use in the mid 1950s. I moved on to their more docile and reliable tungsten mining and production operations, or the ‘light bulb' industry, if you will. But in the spring of 1980, I resigned from the company and created my own start-up gold exploration company.
Since those days I have been against the idea of ‘all things nuclear’, but kept my thoughts mostly to myself, even quietly enduring the tragic (that still remains so) of Chernobyl and Fukushima in silent disapproval, but with the beginning of the Russia/Ukraine war and the Russian attacks on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which I, and many others, view as an act of nuclear war, if only in its infancy, that it is incumbent on me to tell the world that if we are to survive as a human race, we must do away forever with ‘all things nuclear’. I would know how to do that, but humanity must do an instant‘ about face’ to allow it to happen. Ant I do believe ‘time’ is of the essence.
Tonight is my written public protest number 461, all in succession, without an evening’s break, to explain to the world that we are, as supposedly intelligent and humanitarian human beings, rapidly creating a probable death march to the 6th Extinction of all life on our beautiful blue/green/tan planet Earth that has only endured five extinctions in its 4.5+ billion years of existence, and the first one that we humans, whose sole fault it is, are involved in because no humans existed in those days. What a totally unnecessary and pathetic shame! Our planet Earth, and our Mother Nature, deserve better. ~llaw
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category. There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in this Post. If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today.
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TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS:
All Things Nuclear
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NPP preparing for possible de-energization of south of Ukraine | Ukrainian news
ukranews.com
... power plants came out of emergency repairs ... power plants nuclear power plant Ukrainian NPPs NPPs of Ukraine South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant.
Nuclear War Threats
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'Nuclear tinderbox': Kim's threats put North Korea on wrong side of history | Simon Tisdall
The Guardian
One worry is that wars in Ukraine and Palestine, and high-profile US-China sparring over Taiwan, are obscuring greater, existential dangers posed by ...
The Nuclear Arms Control Architecture is Collapsing - IDN-InDepthNews
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... nuclear Hamas, along with the growing nuclear threats from North Korea. ... The destruction by thermonuclear war and resulting humanitarian and ...
Bunkers become a boom industry amid fallout from world's conflicts - Yahoo Sport
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... nuclear threats - Panic Room Company. How to protect your family in the ... nuclear war. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 ...
Yellowstone Caldera
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Bagana Volcano Volcanic Ash Advisory: CONTINUOUS VA TO FL100 MOV SW OBS 24 ...
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List and interactive map of current and past earthquakes near Yellowstone volcano. ... Santorini is one of the most beautiful islands in the world, ...