The Hype of a Nuclear "Renaissance" - TomDispatch.com

The Hype of a Nuclear "Renaissance" - TomDispatch.com Joshua Frank, Nuking Us All Posted on July 18, 2023 On August 6, 1945, when the mushroom cloud from the first atomic bomb rose over the devastated Japanese city of Hiroshima, who could have imagined the “peaceful atom”? And in the decades that followed who could have imagined just how unpeaceful that second version of atomic power might prove to be? I’m thinking, of course, about, among other disasters, the 1979 almost-meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, cleanup from which took more than 15 years and cost a billion dollars; or the all-too-peaceful 1986 total disaster at a Soviet nuclear plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, that killed 30 people, led to the evacuation of 350,000 more, and caused “the largest uncontrolled radioactive release into the environment ever recorded for any civilian operation,” sending fallout over Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia itself; or the one at a nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, thanks to an earthquake and tsunami, from which, 12 years later, significant amounts of treated radioactive wastewater are soon to be released into the Pacific Ocean; or the one that, at this very moment, continually threatens to occur at another vast “peaceful” nuclear facility, now occupied (and possibly mined) by the Russian military at Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, in the midst of a devastating war there. And then, of course, there’s the peaceful nuclear waste produced by the creation and running of any nuclear facility. That’s something TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank has focused on in a devastating fashion in his book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington, the place in this country most likely to give us our own Chernobyl. And to make matters potentially worse, as he reports today, there’s a whole new kind of “small” nuclear facility that lurks in our future, ensuring that ever more nuclear waste will be humanity’s fate even if another nuclear weapon is never used (and don’t count on that either). In a better world, the nearly $2 trillion that the U.S. military is planning to spend in the decades to come to sustain and “modernize” the American nuclear arsenal might be used to begin to denuclearize our world. With that in mind, consider Frank’s latest thoughts on a deeply troubling subject. Tom