The crisis in Japan, with its nuclear reactors and storage facilities getting closer and closer to meltdown, should give the world cause to pause and to reconsider its future - at least as far as nuclear power is concerned. I am in total despair about the inability of politicians to act decisively, in the right way and at the right time on anything. One fundamental problem from which they all suffer, is the fact that they spend all their time talking to each other. So, every crackpot idea and fundamental misunderstanding goes around the world, unchecked, un-discussed and undisputed. Many a problem is ignored, misinterpreted and pushed into the long grass. Some questions, some problems are too difficult and the hope is that they will somehow go away or sort themselves out. They will not and they do not.
The disaster of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan were horrific events - now made worse by an uncontrollable industrial complex that should never have been built. There is no doubt that this event will make it much more difficult for the world-wide nuclear lobby to get the go-ahead to build any more nuclear power stations. If that happens, some good will come out of this. But we can expect in the next few weeks that attempts will be made to spin the news, under-state the levels of radiation; tell us how swiftly any contamination will disappear; the story will be modified in an Orwellian sense; Newspeak will re-write history. But this time I hope they will not get away with it. With Chernobyl they could go along with the Soviet news blackout and the subtle understatement - and claim that Chernobyl was an old fashioned poorly controlled Soviet reactor and such an event could not occur in the west. Now it is occurring and the disaster is already being covered in a thin coat of whitewash. Even Japanese citizens in the province around Fukishima are being kept in the dark and denied the truth. Nuclear power is attractive to politicians; in principle it is simple; doesn't give off CO2 and it seems very modern. And it is supported by a very powerful lobby. But I demand that they abandon nuclear power generation and concentrate on old fashioned systems. If we had spent the last 20 years working on cleaning up coal rather than prevaricating about the nuclear option, we would have had a world lead and we would have been able to deal with the CO2 emission problems.
My belief is that earthquake, floods and tsunami disasters will occur more frequently in the years ahead because of global warming and the uncontrolled growth of the human population. So many countries are now very over-crowded such that every extreme climatic event is certain to be a disaster. But no one wants to face up to controlling the world population - for all kinds of pathetic political reasons. It its present form, the world operates with 2/3rds of the human population living on the edge of starvation. That will get worse. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer - as Karl Marx predicted. If we want the whole of the world's peoples to live a life with a decent standard of living, then we have to reduce the population. It would also help other species. Most large land creatures are threatened with extinction as mankind swallows up more and more of the land area. I expect that the world will have to rely on periodic mega-disasters in order to regulate population. Politicians certainly will never do it. In medieval days we had the Black Death, which in about 3 years knocked off about 33% of the world's population. When will we have our own version of the Black Death? Anytime soon!
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