Nuclear wastelands

   Children outiside Arlit, Niger, site of a France-Areva uranium mine, play and walk on radioactive uranium mining waste.
                                                                                                              Photo Credit---Dr. Bruno Chareyron, CRIIRAD

"Nuclear is the answer being adopted by virtually every other country in the world," says Australian Opposition leader Ian MacFarlane, quoted on the website of ABC-Australia.  

That's a curious statement, since South Africa is the only nation in Africa with a nuclear power plant now, and few other nations in the Global South have nuclear power plants either, but, nevertheless, the answer to what?  Global warming, MacFarlane claims, like most proponents of the nuclear renaissance, though I suspect that he also feels secretly anxious, like so many leaders of nations without nuclear weapons.  As Ralph Nader pointed out in the 2008 presidential election, nuclear power plants are feedstocks for plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear bombs.

Sweden recently overturned its ban on nuclear power plants, as did Italy, whose leaders announced, on August 3rd, that EDF, (Electricité de France), and Enel (Ente Nazionale per l'Energia eLettrica), will begin to develop third-generation nuclear reactors there, ending the nuclear power moratorium created by an overwhelming Italian referendum in 1987, in response to the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident.

But the question remains: what about the waste?   California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger thinks we can find a way to “use the leftovers”—nuclear reprocessing, the only proposed “solution,” aside from “uranium repatriation,” which means dumping nuclear waste back on the same people whose land you contaminated to mine it in the first place.

Nuclear reprocessing has created a toxic, virtually insoluble mess in the U.S. and in Britain, and Kenyan environmentalists are now understandably unhappy about the Oloolua reprocessing plant being built there, though Kenya doesn’t even have a nuclear power plant producing waste---or, producing electricity for Kenyans.

A nuclear power plant has been proposed in Kenya, to make the Oloolua plant look less like imperial pollution, but, more likely, to power an aluminum smelter for Western manufactures.

Greenpeace points out that nuclear waste has been rebranded "recycling"---a verb born of the environmental movement.

Like most all nuclear power and weapons enthusiasts, nuclear's new advocates ignore the first step of the process, uranium mining, one of the worst toxic assaults on Native America, indigenous Africa, Australia, Canada, Latin America, and the rest of the indigenous world, and, now, on the rougly 30 million people who rely on the water in the Colorado River Basin, on the roughly 30 million people who rely on the water in the Colorado River Basin, as I described in "Don't drink the uranium."   I've also written about uranium mining here, in "Uranium mining and weapons poisoning on the Navajo Nation," "Imperial nuclear power, " and "The worst nuclear accident in U.S. history: July 16, 1979, Navajo Reservation."

Anyone considering support for nuclear power in the U.S.A. should also reflect on the environmental racism at Entergy’s Grand Gulf Nuclear Power Plant, on Grand Gulf Island in the Mississippi River, next to the majority African American community of Port Gibson, which is so poor that they agreed to a nuclear power plant in their community, despite the environmental risk, in hopes of creating a corporate tax base for schools and social services.   The taxes were distributed, instead, throughout the State of Mississippi.   And, now, Entergy is constructing another reactor in their community, on Grand Gulf, despite repeated alarms, and, failures of the current reactor’s alarm systems.

There are nuclear power plants all up and down the Mississippi River, from Prairie Island, on the Dakota Reservation, and 50 miles southeast of Minneapolis St. Paul, to Grand Gulf Island/Port Gibson, Mississippi, and River Bend, Louisiana.  Like coal-fired power plants, they use lots of water, the natural resource that most expect to cause the next round of resource wars.