LLAW’s 'All Things Nuclear' #552, Monday (02/26/2024)
LLAW’s 'All Things Nuclear' #552, Monday (02/26/2024)
“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, owned by PG&E, at Avila Beach, California, just 11 miles southwest of San Luis Obispo.
LLAW’s COMMENTS, Monday (02/26/2024)
As our 2nd installment, the last half of the Prologue to my upcoming novel “El Nuclear Diablo” to be written and produced right here beginning with Chapter 1 on Thursday, March 14, 2024, and since there is not much in the way of critical ‘All Things Nuclear News” today (although, as always, the ‘Worlds Nuclear News’ is posted below), I am reposting the first half of the Prologue from February 14th just in case you are interested and haven’t had a chance to read it, or to refresh your memory if you have forgotten what I had to say two weeks ago. ~llaw
El Nuclear Diablo
“Let the Bastards Freeze to Death in the Dark”
~ a retaliatory and unkind Nuclear Industry Quote after the 3-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, directed at concerned Scientists, worried citizens, and public protesters.
By Lloyd Albert Williams-Pendergraft
Prologue
Juneau, Alaska
Spring, 2026
Does it really matter who, exactly, is to blame, or why humankind is savagely devouring the native resources of planet Earth until there soon will be nothing left but lichenless barren rocks, the salty seas, countless grains of sand, and a poisonous atmosphere? It ought to be not enough to just know it is a critical unvarnished ugly truth. The question should be more like, “When will it happen and is there no way out of it?” Should it not?
I can only wonder if highly intelligent, but virulent, forms of our human species have, for countless eons, long traveled through the universal cosmos continually seeking, finding, and lavishly consuming, ultimately ravaging the natural resources, the flora and the fauna, devas ting the environments of this and other living rich blue-green planets also once full of fossil fuels and innocent living resources similar to Earth's in order to ensure and serve their own survival at the expense of all else in their way. Obviously, we are the only species on this planet who rape and ravage the earth with such savagely uncontrolled vigor on such a large scale. We are the ultimate u ultimate fungus, the ultimate lethal mushrooms. And I have to also wonder if there are not multiple, or at least two species of us.
Not to ridicule Darwin at all, but does his theory of evolution, based on studies of inbreeding pigeons and chickens, really make much sense to you in this context? Does it not seem to you that we humans may be collectively aggressively demanding, ruthless, impolite, unwelcome extra-terrestrial galaxy-trotting invaders doing our parasitic thing here on Earth rather than a native natural-born integral integrated key part of our indigenous homo-sapiens and the native animal population—as Darwin would have us believe? What about the Octopus, sir?
Could it be possible we or they are simply biologically genetically patterned to look and act like homo sapiens? Or perhaps vice versa? At least some of us? Maybe even a whole lot of us? How do we know the difference between the real human beings and genetically altered or cloned ones? Which one am I? Which one are you? Do any of us know? I use the terms “we”, “us” or “our” and “they”, or “them”, or “their“ interchangeably here because in this context I don’t know who or what I am—an “us” or a “them”.
I just know that I am extremely uncomfortable with our or their willfully passionate desire to destroy everything on the planet for personal power, wealth, and a life of comfort at the expense of the rest of us or them. I don’t know about you, but it sure seems to be that way to me, so that’s why I consider myself to be an us.
At the very least we need to consider the possibility of at least one species of them and one of us. The only way we will ever know who we really are is through our unfettered natural mindful emotions—our feelings of love, care, and respect for Planet Earth, ourselves, and all her fauna and flora—or, conversely, our unnatural lack of those emotions or feelings. Yet we often disguise these characteristics, presenting the opposite of ourselves as themselves, or the other way around. But despite the hidden complexity, our future may depend on solving this psychological dilemma .
If our demise (at least partially) has happened before, it will likely happen again. And there is, in today’s worlds, a very quick, relatively easy long-lasting, if not eternally, way to create such a scenario as an extinction level event, not from an act of nature or a god, but from our own actions. ~llaw (Winter, 2026)
# Before the Beginning of the End
Our small party of seven women (including two teen-aged daughters) and five men (one a teen son) left California from Carmel Bay bound for Juneau, Alaska, on a rainy Friday morning five days after the “accident” that began at Pacific Gas and Electric’s El Diablo Cañón nuclear power plant on a sunny Monday morning, disrupting the entire United States electrical power grid system in a single day before becoming a global disaster by Thursday afternoon. We all knew what had happened and we knew it was not an accident like the MSM was reporting to all of us around the world until by Thursday morning there was no reporting at all. What our little group did not know was who and what was responsible, but we all had our own suspicions. No one wanted to discuss them, because at this point it didn’t really matter anyway. The irrevocable damage was done. We also knew the rain was not a good thing now, or in the long run as time goes by. But, laughably enough, one of us who had the foresight to bring along a Geiger counter reported excitedly, a wide grin on his face, “Hey, it’s okay for now.” No one smiled back. We had a long way to go and we were no more than a mere one hundred and fifty miles north of the remains of the Diablo nuclear facility releasing massive doses of nuclear radiation from every ruptured cell it had, both internally and from its own filthy poisonous airborne waste.
# Back in the Day
More than fifty years have passed since I first learned that nuclear power plants and weapons of mass destruction were fueled by uranium, an element my well-worn dog-eared Webster’s 1940-something dictionary defined essentially as a “worthless low-level radioactive mineral found in the ground.” The reason I remember this definition is because of a letter I received in January of 1969 from a mining company in central Wyoming’s “Gas Hills”, oddly named Lucky Mc (pronounced “Lucky Mac”) Mine, inviting me to an employment interview at the mine site and to please call to set up a date and time for the meeting. I had that old broke-spine 1940s Webster’s dictionary on my bookshelf in our small trailer house, so I looked up the definition. What the hell had changed? What were nuclear plants’ and nuclear bombs’ ingredients if not refined uranium? Of course, I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
The mine, I was told in the letter, was owned by a company known as Utah Construction and Mining Company, which was then best known for building the Hoover Dam, but was now a major player in mining, primarily of coal and uranium. Intrigued, I found a pay phone at the General Store in Elk Mountain, Wyoming, and made the telephone call.
The interview took place a couple of weeks later in mid-January, and I was offered a job as a senior accountant, which I immediately accepted, ending my old job as a field office manager for a highway construction company that had recently transferred me from Grand Junction, Colorado, to a new project between Laramie and Rawlins in southern Wyoming. So I had set up shop in an office trailer halfway between the two towns, preparing for road construction to begin in early spring.
But having a growing family with two young pre-school children and an infant daughter, I was thankful for the opportunity to settle into a new life in a more permanent location than highway construction offered, so I was pleased to accept the job offer.
As I learned my new job, I soon became the chief accountant and then the administrative manager at the mine, directly overseeing more than one hundred employees white collar employees. The company grew rapidly in its uranium branch to include a new mine known as the “Shirley Basin Mine,” blossoming Utah Construction and Mining Company into a new and more sophisticated reformed Utah International Inc, and a bit later, a major subsidiary of General Electric Company, which, among other well-known products, manufactured not-so well-known nuclear reactors. Eventually, the uranium mining division was spun off as Pathfinder Mines Corp. to avoid potential conflicts of interest. During those early days, I learned a lot about the mining and milling operations, including security, health and safety, as well as how the fuel production, the multi-step enriching process, governmental regulation, and how the marketing and selling of uranium was accomplished. In the beginning the only customer the company, as well as the entire uranium industry, had was the United States’ Atomic Energy Commission, and we were the major producer and provider of relatively stable basic enriched uranium (U308), which would be refined into U238, the active isotope in nuclear reactors, to the government (including the TVA) until deregulation allowed us to sell mill refined U3O8 uranium to operational nuclear power plants as well as plants under construction and in development.
One of these new nuclear power stations was Pacific Gas and Electric’s under construction facility, known as the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, in San Luis Obispo County, California, near Avila Beach. The original facility, Unit 1 of course, began construction in 1968 followed by Unit 2 in 1970. During the following decade Utah Construction & Mining Company, by then known as Utah International Inc, profited immensely from our sale of uranium to American, Canadian, French, German, and other nuclear power facilities around the world. Doing business with PG&E was one of my first clues that rules and regulations were meant to be manipulated and broken by aggressive dollar-worshiping companies. But that’s another story, part of which I will relate later in the book.
What happened at Diablo Canyon between early 2024 and its planned decommission in late 2025, and the beginning of the horrid global devastation that followed just two short years later, is what this story is all about, and it shames me every day of my life that I was once a willing contributor to the shape of the macabre issues to come within the nuclear power industry. There are few of us left alive who know the factually complete and chronological entirety of this doomsday tale, but I am thankful and even proud to be one of the few because I have the knowledge and the motivation to relate this horrific tale. I have an absolute moral and ethical obligation to pass my knowledge of this world-class man-made armageddon (spelled here with a small but still doomsday-deadly “a”) event along to those few who will come after the rest of us, hoping to go a different way whether it be for better or for worse. Your choices and your chances are extremely limited, and I wish you, as well as all of “us”, all the best.
At an overly ripe eighty-something years old, as I write this dystopian-like tale, my mind is clear and fixed on the events that led to this catastrophe that with proper regulatory enforcement and diligent responsibility of the American government and industry corporate officials might never have happened. A common failure of mankind is to brazenly think of ourselves as collectively invincible, making us just delusional enough to fool ourselves into believing that we are smarter, brainier, and more resourceful than Mother Nature. We have proven ourselves wrong countless times concerning thousands of vital issues, but through the ages we have made and continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Who was the wise man who said, “The definition of insanity is making the same mistakes over and over again but expecting different results.”?
Just the relatively minor accidents at nuclear facilities (most of them politically covered up or not commonly known) over the years including the more well-known Hanford (Richland), Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—along with the common political knowledge that several nations’—not all of whom were American allies—ability to cyber-attack our nuclear power plants and our electrical distribution grid systems, ought to have been enough to give us fair warning that—contrary to pseudo-science, corporate greed, political belief and public opinion—nuclear power was never safe, but in reality was the single most dangerous and destructive power generating concept ever developed for all kinds of reprehensible reasons. When something goes nuclear wrong, it goes irreparably wrong, most likely impossible to control or recover from the impending disaster that will last for several hundred to a few thousands, although the half-life of bismuth radiation has been measured at twenty billion billion (yes, twenty billion-billion), years so we in this lonely corner of the universe might consider ourselves lucky. In 2022 there were four hundred and fifty nuclear power plants operating world-wide and sixty more were under construction. Today, of course, there are none.
Despite Meriam-Webster’s innocent grandfatherly definition of uranium, this same earthly tragedy (but on a much smaller scale) has apparently happened on our planet at least once before — more likely twice — though much hypothetical theory (including Biblical references, quiet speculation, and outright loud conspiracy theories) have been written about the evidence of the possibility, few of us seem to understand or have ever cared that a similar nuclear world with massive devastation actually occurred, at least once, thousands of years ago, nor that the archeological and anthropological scientific community has not investigated, researched, endorsed or even acknowledged the historical evidence. This does not surprise me, but today what scientists and historians believed is immaterial because now what is left of our world is all that we need to worry and care about—events of the past, rightly so, mean nothing today. We are long past the life-saving threshold of learning from our mistakes, including our willful ignorance.
We humans, them or us or together, seem to have been running a rigged three-legged race against one another to rend asunder the entire planet against the natural environmental care and protections of Gaia, the Goddess of Nature. In a blind and greedy rush to subconsciously exterminate ourselves and fatally poison our only home—planet Earth and all her abundant bounty—we have, through American style financing of intentional international environmental degradation, hawkish threats of nuclear war, or the patriarchally personalized political, bureaucratic and corporate industrial pandemic earth-cancer super-spreaders that I call those who would allow humanity to “freeze to death in the dark.” I personally heard this same man say this same phrase, with their -- often profane -- variants, more than just once or twice. The phrase was coined by the President and CEO of a major mining company I was involved with, echoing his indignant objections to public protests over Three Mile Island in beginning in 1979. Note that all of these doomsday contestants during their race toward human extinction—indeed, by natural extension, including all life -- had their in-common triple arsenal of the half-life of airborne nuclear radioactive emissions teamed up with ground and waste water airborne radiation, their three legs at the end entirely unbound, allowing them to overrun the basins and ranges without restrictions, making all of them self-proclaimed “winners” of their race into the likes of Dante’s, or someone’s, Inferno.
(Stay tuned for the next Episode in two weeks on February 29th.)
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear War
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
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 (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available tonight.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/26/2024):
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Why This Is the Tensest Nuclear Moment in 60 Years - New York Magazine
New York Magazine
... all concerned about the possibility that they were supporting the spread of nuclear weapons. For decades, the United States has been worried about ...
Government 'talking the mantras of renewables' without understanding the transition
YouTube
Australia is already a 'nuclear nation': Why we should forget about renewables ... 'Labor has got it all wrong': Government rules out support for ...
Recent events raise questions about the role of space in global politics
Little Rock Public Radio
News of a Russian nuclear-powered space device has brought attention to how space is being weaponized ... All Things Considered. Next Up: 6:30 PM ...
Nuclear Power
NEWS
Nuclear energy experts train researchers to meet future nonproliferation challenges
Idaho National Laboratory
As nuclear energy is increasingly recognized as a vital component of the clean energy transition, American companies have answered the call with ...
Signature House nuclear package to get a floor vote - E&E News by POLITICO
E&E News
The “Atomic Energy Advancement Act,” H.R. 6544, from Reps. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), chair and ranking member of the House ...
America's nuclear energy abandonment doesn't make sense | Opinions - Collegiate Times
Collegiate Times
During the OPEC oil embargo, nuclear power seemed to meet high energy demands. In the 1970s, new regulations derived from studies claiming ...
Nuclear War
NEWS
Germany's call for the bomb - World Socialist Web Site
World Socialist Web Site
... nuclear war.” This turns reality on its head. In fact, with the ... attack with a major nuclear counter-attack.” The basic issue was “that we have ...
Ex-Russian President Tells Putin To Take 'Revenge' On West; Warns 'They're Our Enemies'
YouTube
4:05 · Go to channel. Putin's Big Statement After Biden's 'Nuclear War Fear' Alert; 'Nearly All Russian Nuke Forces Now…' Hindustan Times New 202K ...
Fact Check: Has Putin Made New Threat About Ukraine Joining NATO? - Newsweek
Newsweek
... nuclear war. "Are you ready to die to defend Ukraine? I'm not. This needs to be de-escalated immediately." In the clip, subtitles stated that Putin ...
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
Why This Is the Tensest Nuclear Moment in 60 Years - New York Magazine
New York Magazine
Where would you place the current threat level compared to the Cold War era? This is by far the most intense set of nuclear dangers that have ...
Putin threatens to go nuclear — because his military is suffering badly in Ukraine
New York Post
... war and secure democracy in Europe. Putin's nuclear threats must not go unanswered. Washington must confront Putin just as President John Kennedy ...
'Proliferation Everywhere': How Space Force Will Answer New Threats
Air & Space Forces Magazine
Revelations that Russia is developing a space-based anti-satellite nuclear weapon made headlines earlier this month, posing threats to military and ...