Keeping your neighborhood atoms together

There are a lot of babies in my life right now. My friends Greg and Shana have a one-month old boy named Forrest, who is quite adorable and lively. An old friend in Chicago gave birth at the beginning of summer to a girl, Taryn, whom I have yet to meet but is pretty photogenic so far. And my old friend Natascha gave birth way back in April to her first son, Ian, who I am very excited to meet on my next visit to D.C. Yes, this autumn will be full of changing leaves and changing diapers, frosts and knit hats to stay warm, and hundreds or thousands of digital photographs carrying baby news like Mercury to the far corners of the world.

All these babies make me think of the future. I think about them growing up, scraping elbows, going on first dates, and differentiating themselves from us, their predecessors, who are shaping their future as we live in the present. I think about what they'll say of our current actions, once we've rolled the dice and gone ahead with our best laid plans. What will 20 years of hindsight tell them about what we're doing now?

I look back on the generation before me and what they did, and scratch my head a lot. Buddhism expanded in the United States, and became part of the popular culture. Star Wars was a movie and a national defensive strategy (that sadly has yet to really die). Some diseases were eradicated in parts of the world; others came on strong in new ways. There was an "energy crisis," the president called us out to conserve and think differently, and we replaced him with a teflon-coated actor. People who wanted to drop out of the System formed fringe communities - some failed, some persist, many are still trying new variations. Recycling programs spread around the country and the world.

Why all this retrospect in my blog? I was sweating out a tough 55 minutes on the stairmaster a few weeks ago, flipping through Maclean's (a pretty thoughtful Canadian current events magazine). Just when I thought my heart rate couldn't go higher, I turned to a feature story about the return of nuclear energy. The instructions on the machine said to stop if I became "faint, dizzy, or short of breath." So I closed the magazine and pretended that I hadn't seen it, and felt much better as I finished my workout.

Where did nuclear go and what's going on with it now? After the meltdown incidents at Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl, it seemed like you couldn't get any more three-inch deck screws into the coffin of nuclear energy. Everybody "knew" you couldn't trust it any further than you can throw it - and heavy water is pretty heavy. Who wants their milk to double as the refrigerator light? (Cows in the fallout zone of Chernobyl... you get it.) Leaky storage drums in Nevada and Tibet continue to poison water supplies. No one could promise the problems would stop. So we turned to other alternatives to experiment with - solar, wind, those funky wave-motion-capturing turbines offshore, etc. - but mostly just stuck with coal, natural gas, and oil. Existing nuclear plants have been kept online, but no new ones have been built in the US for decades and expired ones (they do expire) are decommissioned and dismantled in a lengthy process.

It seems, however, that we the public are getting more upset about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change due to burning fossil fuels. Storms, heat waves, and droughts are becoming common enough to merit at least a bit of attention to our plight on this tiny ball we call home. So the Big Decision makers are getting ramped up to sell nuclear energy as the cleaner, "greener" option for meeting our energy needs in the future.

Here's my concern: nothing has changed. The laws of physics still dictate the properties of fission and radioactive waste. We still haven't found a better way to deal with nuclear waste than to bury it really deep in the ground. We still can't guarantee anything, and certainly not reactors that won't melt down or crack in an earthquake or discharge radioactive water as a byproduct of the fission process. People are still people, with plenty of room for human error in all that we undertake.

If anything, I feel that it's a more dangerous time than ever to undertake the rebirth of nuclear power. For one thing, the competition is tighter and there are more of us than ever converting more energy and stuff than ever before. Some people estimate that China may build up to 40 new nuclear reactors in the next two decades. I'll love to meet anyone besides a nuclear energy company CEO or energy-strapped Chinese bureaucrat who will sleep better with that information. I mean, it's not like modern Chinese economic development as led them to cut corners to get ahead in the capitalist game, has it? I'm sure they wouldn't cut any corners in rushing to get new sources of electricity for their booming economy. (I managed to bring a little sarcasm with me to Canada - I hid it in a secret compartment of my suitcase.)

It's not just about building reactors in the developing world, though. Building dozens of new reactors around the world simply increases the chances of a meltdown or failure anywhere in the world. The fuel is hazardous to mine, transport, use, and discard. Just like all our activities in God's ant farm, we'll be doing things faster than ever before in a political, sociological, and climatic environment that we don't come close to fully understanding. More of everything at a faster pace means more possibilities for the unknown to happen.

Why am I worrying about the unknown possibilities in the future? Why am I being "anti-technology" and dredging up spook stories? It's all about those babies I see smiling back from my friends' photos. If you build the reactors, use the uranium, and bury it in the ground (or worse yet have another disaster), you can't go back. Let's ease off on the throttle and talk about the precautionary principle a bit. If in doubt, don't do it. Proceed slowly, especially when we can threaten our own existence.

Let's get the MTBE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBE) out of the water and dioxin out of the breast milk (two other legacies we could do without but can't get away from) and then talk about introducing other novel compounds into our lives. Let's give the plywood a chance to finish off-gassing and the paints a chance to disperse their VOCs. Let's talk about conservation (someone go get that peanut farmer Carter and bring him back) and reducing our footprints. Let's talk about cutting back our own population numbers significantly so we won't have such a huge demand for electricity that we split atoms to get it. Let's talk about per capita use, the have's and the have-not's, and who's using our current energy supplies for what purposes. (Some folks in Canada want to build a group of nuclear reactors simple to process the oil sands in Alberta to get crude oil out.)

As always, let's talk about the future we want and whether or not our current actions are getting us there. I want to see us collectively chill out until we get to a place where we can tell our children that we're finally erring on the side of caution.

This blog dedicated to Taryn - you can see she's either concerned about nuclear power or she's just thinking about breast feeding. It's hard to tell. Either way, I want her future to be safe.