The planet is currently watching another devastatingly toxic tragedy unfold as the recent 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck the north east coast of Japan triggering multiple explosions at the Fukushima Diachi nuclear power plant. Over the past week since the earthquake struck the situation at the Fukushima plant has consistently deteriorated, though so far none of the effected reactors has become a full scale meltdown, or at least there has been no official confirmation of a meltdown. The internet blogosphere and social media sites lit up with all kinds of speculation in the days after the initial explosions about how far reaching the radiation cloud would be and how potentially toxic. Noticeably absent from the sea of fresh content was any official news source confirming or denying the negative potential of a radiation cloud on North America and the overall environment. However, as in any case with the potential for widespread panic and social chaos, there were many voices essentially dismissing any threats or any precautionary measures.
Certainly no one would make the case that an over reaction is an appropriate response, it's an over reaction specifically because it's an inappropriate response. Unfortunately, we live in a world of information wars, and there is nothing in the definition of "Information" that denotes fact, or even veracity. Therefore lies qualify as information even when the liar is fully aware of the veracity of their statements. But we as humans tell many lies that we aren't aware of, we often call this denial when we choose to believe the information that makes us feel better and dismiss the information that can cause us pain and suffering. Sometimes our denial is apparent to those around us as the truth is difficult but not impossible to deny. But in the case of the Fukushima disaster and nuclear power in general, we have a collective incentive to brush off any information that may cause a panic among millions. And to make things even less clear, the nuclear industry is heavily invested in by governments and individuals and therefore we simply cannot trust those who stand to gain from understating any threats.
Scientists are more likely to come out and tell us when there is a serious risk in a technology that they have been contributing to, but they are dependent on grants from industry and government and are often silenced or marginalized for speaking out in an effective way. And when science does address design flaws and potential hazards with new designs and technologies the implementation of newer, safer technology is dictated in the boardrooms with a profit first mentality. Industry heads know that there is a public out there that demands to be informed but they have subverted much of the institutionalized media to produce disinformation when it matters most. Main stream media is commercial media, it is payed for by industry through the purchase of advertisement and the underwriting of programming. In the same way that significant political campaign contributions often have strings attached, so does this money that keeps the 24 hour news channels pumping out "information."
Our universities are equally vulnerable to this kind of manipulation from industry as they underwrite large grants usually to the university science departments. This was the case when British Petroleum gave UC Berkeley half a billion dollars to start a new research institute on the campus bringing into question the influence of the global oil giant on academic freedom. Within a short while after this controversial grant BP was embroiled in the unfolding tragedy in the gulf coast as one of their deep water offshore oil rigs exploded creating an under water leak spilling millions of gallons of crude oil into the gulf. It hardly matters who exactly is to blame for the explosion and subsequent oil spill, there is no doubt that many of the parties involved we're negligently sacrificing safety for profit. And the University of Berkeley was in no position to criticize BP with whom they had recently formed a $500 million dollar relationship. If the oil industry would take their PR budget and political campaign contributions and instead invest it in safety measures, last years oil spill may never have happened at all.
But there are a lot of common threads running from the BP oil spill to our current Fukushima nuclear disaster, especially in the similar ways the nuclear industry is invested in the nexus of media and politics. But there is little discussion of the BP oil spill in this new year of 2011, almost as though we were experiencing a collective denial, it's too painful and we're just glad it's over. Our atmosphere is very much like the ocean, in fact the ocean can be seen as the heaviest and therefore bottom layer of our stratosphere. Fish are like birds who fly through water and birds are like fish who swim through the air. The main difference is that we live above the water and we fail to recognize the physical properties of the air all around us simply because it's invisible to us. When we saw the images of the BP oil spill on the sea floor with sea creatures swimming through the toxic plume, we all died a little, seeing the impact of our oil dependency on the other creatures in the environment. But now we are watching our own environment being directly affected with this toxic nuclear plume that threatens to continue spewing radiation into our sea of air for at least as long as the oil spill continued to leak.
I wrote then that oil was a dark, powerful substance that we fail to fully comprehend but has parallels in our spiritual world. Uranium and Plutonium are also deep, dark, mystical forces that have parallels in our spiritual world, and these powerful substances are not understood enough to be manipulated for our petty short term gains. No matter how many scientists work on this puzzle, no matter how many billions and billions of dollars we throw at this nuclear mystery, we humans are but infants playing with a loaded gun, sucking on the barrel and fingering the trigger. We are sadly aware of the fact that no living human has the capacity to give us unequivocal (or unbiased) facts that can bring us some assurance that nuclear power is safe. But that doesn't stop many people (amateur to top scientist) from making this claim ad nauseum. For those of us who are aware of our collective naivety on the matter, these false assurances are a sure sign that the information source is unfortunately corrupted or deluded and simply cannot be trusted. This is not to say that we must live in a state of constant fear, but until we make this collective realization we fail to respect the dangers we face.
Nuclear power is Unclear power, we attempt to consume it at the risk of being consumed by it.
