From Rick Cromack

[Re-posted from my FaceBook Page]

Today, after much investigation, discussion, and reflection, I've come to a pretty significant decision: I CAN NO LONGER ADVOCATE THE EMPLOYMENT OF NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGIES IN WHOLESALE PUBLIC ENERGY PRODUCTION.

I am, in short, as of this moment a functional ANTI-NUCLEAR ACTIVIST.

This is a fairly major turnaround for yours truly. For my entire adult life, I've been a VERY vocal proponent of nuclear power; although, like many high-schoolers of the age, I watched in horror as the revelations about the Chernobyl disaster trickled out in the Spring and Summer of '86, by the time I entered the Navy three years later -- joining, naturally, the nuclear submarine force -- I was solidly behind nuclear power, even as I came to respect "The China Syndrome" as a potentially prescient film. As I became more aware of the environmental challenges posed by other energy-production media -- as well as the potentialities of related disasters, such as the 1989 Prince William Sound, Alaska oil spill -- as well as difficulties related to power transmission, storage, and alternative- / emerging-energy technologies, I increasingly came to rely on nuclear power as a truly "green" alternative. "The future of energy is green... and GLOWING!" was a popular phrase I used throughout the early 2000s.

...And then, Japan's Triple Apocalypse happened last March, along with its Triple Meltdown, and Pandora's Box yawned open to reveal the potential Hell at the bottom of a technology I had long presumed -- and pronounced -- "safe". Within 24 hours of the tsunami, even as the terrible footage of water sweeping across coastal farmland and into Japan's northeastern cities began airing on CNN, I had a cold pit growing in my gut; I know all too well that nuclear reactions, once begun, CANNOT BE STOPPED, only controlled. When containment buildings began explosively venting to the sky, followed swiftly -- but not rapidly enough -- by the deployment of fire trucks in a desperate effort to cool fuel assemblies that were in the process of morphing into puddles of thousand-degree radioactive slag, I began to mentally count down to the dawning of a day that might look very like the final reel of "On the Beach". I reached out to several former "nucs" -- nuclear technicians in the modern Nuclear Navy -- and asked one, "Riddle me this: How do you stop a runaway nuclear reaction?" His sobering response: "You don't... God does, if He feels like it."

We survived 2011 without a Shulteian armageddon, but now ominous reports are tumbling out: Continued saturation of the Pacific Ocean with levels of radioactivity never before recorded. Small, but measurable increases in certain exotic radionuclides (non-naturally occuring isotopes, byproducts of fission events) in store-bought milk, ten months after Fukushima's reactor cores went critical. Statistically significant increases in thyroid cancer across America. These are not random events. They are, in a metaphorical but tangible sense, fallout.

And so it is that I have concluded that this is a technology that humankind, at this stage of our evolution, is simply unable to either control, or mitigate the potentially civilization-threatening consequences of. This is a djinn with capabilities both wonderful and terrible to behold; a radiological diety offering us nearly limitless power in one hand, and annihilation in the other. And, if Fukushima has taught me one truth, it is this: This was NOT an isolated incident. It WILL happen again, and again, and again. And each time it does, humanity will come that much closer to making itself extinct.

I do not wish for ALL nuclear-power technology to disappear, or to be proscribed. We need to continue our research into the development of safer power-generation templates, and particularly into enhanced safety systems and redundant backup protocols that offer TRUE "defense in depth" against ALL known dangers. However, it is, predictably, the UNKNOWNS that ultimately will rear their unpredictable heads to tear down our assumptions, quash our confidence and throw down our illusions of control. And I do not know how you CAN prepare adequately for that which you are unable to imagine, define, or predict.

And so it is that I am now, and irrevocably I believe, ANTI-NUCLEAR. I do not know, of course, what miracles of science and innovation the future may hold. I do believe, however, that in the past ten months we have been given a glimpse of what is possible on the OTHER side of those miracles -- their apocalyptic opposite numbers -- and, perceiving clearly what I now consider to be the "KNOWNS", I no longer desire to tempt the Fates by ignoring the "UNKNOWNS". To continue to do so would be foolhardy, at best... And, at worst, suicide.

And that's about all I have to say about that.

Rick Cromack.