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Something to ponder, by Jim Hopkins Oh, say it isn’t so. If what appears in this issue is correct, we’ve been up to our elbows in uranium from the start! Unbeknown to most, we even supplied four physicists to work on the Manhattan Project.
This will not sit well with Greenpeace. The poor dears will likely go out and chain themselves to something. (Please, God, make it an anchor!!) Best let it lie, perhaps. We’re meant to be clean and green and nuclear free, a beacon of virtue in a Big Mac, Cadillac, warhead world. Others may be loaded to the gunnels with naughty nukes but Gaia’s little downunder eco-angels have never touched the stuff. Or so the myth would have it; a modern myth, for sure, but hugely pervasive. It’s even been used to sell beer. You must have seen the ads. Everybody’s seen the ads - even Shane Jones. A couple of famous American actors (Harvey thingamebob and William what’shisname) wander round telling us how pure we are, before proving how much they love us (and the fee they’ve been paid) by quaffing a plucky l’il non-aligned ale. Heck, Willy even points to an enormous aircraft carrier and tells us it can go anywhere it damn well pleases, except here because we’re the fearless dudes who said “No!” Willy says we were very brave to tell the biggest, meanest, most imperialist kid on the block not to turn up reeking of uranium. That’s the Kiwi way, he says, Steinlager, yes; Einsteinlager, no! We love it when other people say this. It confirms what we’ve been telling ourselves for years - that we are the fuel rods of hope, radiating nothing but zeal. Except, that’s not what the history outlined in this issue suggests. If we want to be proud of anything, perhaps it should be that we contributed so much to the development of such a powerful energy source - and not just powerful, but generally benign. So benign, in fact, that James Lovelock (the geezer who gave us Gaia) reckons nuclear power is the only way to go, especially if we’re, like, Greenpeace serious about the looming doom of global warming. Sure, there might be the odd meltdown, says Lovelock. We could have a Chernobyl or two. But consider the apocalyptic alternative; melting ice caps, rising seas (full of dead polar bears), floods, famine and an earth slowly roasting in the oven of its own atmosphere. Even if you don’t believe such Old Testament horrors will be visited upon sinful humanity - which you shouldn’t, ‘cos it’s bollocks - nuclear power remains an option we should consider. Especially now that one of the giant Japanese companies (from memory, Toshiba) has developed little micro-nuclear power stations reportedly now being trailed in a couple of remote Alaskan settlements. Them as doesn’t want our wild rivers dammed or endangered snails uprooted should be looking on Trade Me to see if there are any old nuclear subs for sale. If there are, we should buy one, moor it at Princes Wharf, plug it into the grid and, before you could say “Guy Geiger”, we’d have the world’s first glow-in-the-dark super city; no half lives here, just a great big Party Central fission statement. In July, the luvvies at Greenpeace launched a petition demanding, ‘No new oil - No new coal’ (and presumably no new progress and no new money and no new people either). Well, if we can’t Dig for Victory and we can’t Drill for Victory, it’s time we Split for Victory. Up guards and atom, that’s the answer!! If it made sense on the Kaipara in the 1970s, then it must make more sense now! So let’s bring back the good old rays!
Energy NZ Vol.4 No.5 September-October 2010 |
When the Brits approached us in 1944 and asked if we would lend our brains to Oppenheimer’s team, we agreed - a fact proudly announced by the New Zealand government just days after the first atomic bomb was dropped. Like it or not, we were there. We helped make it happen.