“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
FEB 2, 2024
The remains of the flawed engineered and constructed Russian/Ukrainian Nuclear Chernobyl Power Plant
LLAW’s THOUGHTS & COMMENTS:
Continuing on with the Introduction, presented daily beginning with yesterday’s Post for continuity of the short Prologue leading up to “El Nuclear Diablo”, a novel I will be serializing here on ‘All Things Nuclear’ on a weekly basis . . .
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El Nuclear Diablo
“Let the Bastards Freeze to Death in the Dark” ~ a common Nuclear Industry Quote and rallying cry after the 3-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, directed at concerned Scientists, environmentalists, worried citizens, and public protesters
By Lloyd Albert Williams-Pendergraft
Spring, 2028 (See yesterday’s Post #528 for 1st Part of this Introduction)
# Before the Beginning of the End
Our small party of seven women (including two teen-aged daughters) and five men (one a late-teen son) left California from Carmel Bay bound for Juneau, Alaska, on a rainy Friday morning five days after the “accident” that began at Pacific Gas and Electric’s El Diablo Cañón nuclear power plant on a sunny Monday morning, disrupting the entire United States electrical power grid system in a single day before becoming a global disaster by Thursday afternoon. We all knew what had happened and we knew it was not an accident like the MSM was reporting to all of us around the globe until by Thursday morning there was no reporting at all.
What our little group did not know was who and what was responsible, but we all had our own suspicions. No one wanted to discuss them, because at this point it didn’t really matter anyway. The irrevocable damage was done. We also knew the rain was not a good thing now, nor would it be in the long run as time goes by. But, laughably enough, one of us who had the foresight to bring along a Geiger counter reported excitedly, a wide grin on his face, “Hey, it’s okay for now.” No one smiled back. We had a long way to go and we were no more than a mere one hundred and fifty miles north of the remains of the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility releasing massive doses of nuclear radiation from every ruptured reactor cell it had, both internally and from its own filthy poisonous airborne waste.
# Back in the Day
More than fifty years have passed since I first learned that nuclear power plants and weapons of mass destruction were fueled by uranium, an element my well-worn dog-eared Webster’s 1940-something dictionary defined essentially as a “worthless low-level radioactive mineral found in the ground.” The reason I remember this definition is because of a letter I received in early January of 1969 from a mining company in central Wyoming’s “Gas Hills”, oddly named Lucky Mc (pronounced “Lucky Mac”) Mine, inviting me to an employment interview at the mine site and to please call to set up a date and time for the meeting. I had that old broke-spine 1940s Webster’s dictionary on my bookshelf in our small trailer house, so I looked up the definition. What the hell had changed? What were nuclear power plants’ and nuclear bombs’ ingredients if not refined uranium? Of course I was pretty sure I knew the answer. Old timer Webster was ‘dead’ wrong.
The mine, I was told in the letter, was owned by a company known as Utah Construction and Mining Company, which was then best known for building the Hoover Dam, but was now a major player in mining, primarily of coal, iron, and uranium. Intrigued, I found a pay phone at the General Store in Elk Mountain, Wyoming, and made the telephone call.
The interview took place a couple of weeks later in mid-January, and I was offered a job as a senior accountant, which I immediately accepted, ending my old job as a field office manager for a highway construction company that had recently transferred me from Grand Junction, Colorado, to a new project between Laramie and Rawlins in southern Wyoming. So I had set up shop in an office trailer halfway between the two towns, preparing for road construction to begin in early spring.
But having a growing family with two young pre-school children and an infant daughter, I was thankful for the opportunity to settle into a new life in a more permanent location than highway construction offered, so I was pleased to accept the job offer.
As I learned my new job, I soon became the chief accountant and then the administrative manager at the mine, directly overseeing more than one hundred employees white collar employees, accountants, IBM computer operators, warehousemen, and other bean counters. The company grew rapidly in its uranium branch to include a new mine known as the “Shirley Basin Mine,” blossoming Utah Construction and Mining Company into a new and more sophisticated reformed Utah International Inc, and a few years later, a major subsidiary of General Electric Company, which, among other well-known products, manufactured not-so well-known nuclear reactors. Eventually, the uranium mining division was spun off as Pathfinder Mines Corp. to avoid potential conflicts of interest. During those early days, I learned a lot about the mining and milling operations, including security, health and safety, as well as how the fuel production, the multi-step enriching process, governmental regulation, our far-flung nuclear power plant customers, and how the marketing and selling of uranium was accomplished. In the beginning the only customer the company, as well as the entire uranium industry, had was the United States’ Atomic Energy Commission, and we were the major producer and provider of relatively stable basic enriched uranium (U308), which would be refined into U235, the usual active isotope to fuel nuclear reactors, to the government (including the TVA) until deregulation allowed us to sell mill refined U3O8 uranium to ‘under construction’ or operating l nuclear power plants as well as plants under construction and in development. Our customers were in Germany, France, Canada, and the United States.
One of these new nuclear power stations was Pacific Gas and Electric’s under construction facility, known as the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, in San Luis Obispo County, California, near Avila Beach. The original facility, Unit 1 of course, began construction in 1968 followed by Unit 2 in 1970. During the following decade Utah Construction & Mining Company, by then known as Utah International Inc, profited immensely from our sale of uranium to American, Canadian, French, German, and other nuclear power facilities around the world. Doing business with PG&E was one of my first clues that rules and regulations were meant to be manipulated and broken by aggressive dollar-worshiping utility companies. But that’s another story, part of which I will relate later in the book.
What happened at Diablo Canyon between early 2024 and its planned decommission in late[ 2025, which was politically extended for five more years financed by the taxpayers in California and across the USA, ultimately causing the horrid global devastation that followed just two short years after its original closure date, is what this story is all about, and it shames me every day of my life that I was once a willing contributor to the shape of the macabre issues to come within the nuclear power industry. There are few of us left alive who know the factually complete and chronological entirety of this doomsday tale, but I am thankful and even proud to be one of the few because I have the knowledge and the motivation to relate this horrific tale. I have an absolute moral and ethical obligation to pass my knowledge of this world-class man-made armageddon (spelled here with a small but still doomsday-deadly “a”) event along to those few who will come after the rest of us, hoping to go a different way whether it be for better or for worse. Your choices and your chances are extremely limited, and I wish you, as well as all of “us”, all the best.
At an overly ripe sixty-five years old, as I write this dystopian-like tale, my mind is clear and fixed on the events that led to this catastrophe that with proper regulatory enforcement and diligent responsibility of the American government and industry corporate officials, engineers, and employees might never have happened. A common failure of mankind is to brazenly think of ourselves as collectively invincible, making us just delusional enough to fool ourselves into believing that we are smarter, more imaginative, and more resourceful than Mother Nature. We have proven ourselves wrong about that countless times concerning thousands of vital issues, but through the ages we have made and continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Who was the wise man who said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”?
Just the relatively minor accidents at nuclear facilities (most of them politically covered up or not commonly known) over the years including the more well-known Hanford (Richland), Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—along with the common political knowledge that several nations—not all of whom were American allies — had and still have the ability to cyber-attack our nuclear power plants and our electrical distribution grid systems, ought to have been enough to give us fair warning that — contrary to pseudo-science, corporate greed, political propaganda and public opinion — nuclear power was never safe, but in reality was and is the single most dangerous and destructive power generating concept ever developed for all kinds of reprehensible reasons. When something goes nuclear wrong, it goes irreparably wrong, most likely impossible to control or recover from the impending disaster that will last for several hundreds to a few thousands of years, although the half-life of bismuth radiation has been measured at twenty billion billion (yes, twenty billion-billion), years so we in this lonely corner of the universe might consider ourselves lucky. In 2022 there were four hundred and fifty nuclear power plants operating world-wide and sixty more were under construction. Today, of course, there are none.
Despite Meriam-Webster’s innocent grandfatherly definition of uranium, this same earthly tragedy (but on a much smaller scale) has apparently happened on our planet at least once before — more likely twice — though much hypothetical theory (including Biblical references, quiet speculation, and outright loud conspiracy theories) have been written about the evidence of the possibility, few of us seem to understand or have ever cared that a similar nuclear world with massive devastation actually occurred, at least once, thousands of years ago, nor that the archeological and anthropological scientific community has not investigated, researched, endorsed or even acknowledged the historical evidence. This does not surprise me, but today what scientists and historians believed is immaterial, right or wrong, because now what is left of our world is all that we have to worry and care about — events of the past, rightly so, mean nothing today. We are long past the life-saving threshold of learning from our mistakes, including acknowledging our willful ignorance.
We humans, them or us or mixed together, seem to have been running a rigged three-legged race against one another to rend asunder the entire planet against the natural environmental care and protections of Gaia, the Goddess of Nature and her Mother. In a blind and greedy rush to subconsciously exterminate ourselves and fatally poison our only home — planet Earth and all her abundant bounty — we have, through American style financing of international environmental degradation, hawkish threats of nuclear war, or the patriarchally personalized political, bureaucratic and corporate industrial pandemic earth-cancer super-spreaders that I call those humans who would allow humanity to “freeze to death in the dark.”
I personally heard this same man say this same phrase, with their — often profane — variants, more than just once or twice. The phrase was coined by the President and CEO of a major mining company I was involved with, echoing his indignant objections to public protests over Three Mile Island in beginning in late 1979. Note that all of these doomsday contestants during their race toward human extinction —indeed, by natural extension, including all life — had their in-common triple arsenal of the half-life of airborne nuclear radioactive emissions teamed up with ground and waste water airborne radiation, not to mention fossil fuel CO2 and other greenhouse gases, their three legs at the end entirely unbound, allowing them to overrun the basins and ranges without restrictions, making all of them self-proclaimed “winners” of their race into the likes of Dante’s, or someone’s, infernal Inferno.
(To be continued tomorrow)
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories (including a bonus category at the end for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity that also play an important role in humanity’s lives) as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links to the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
- All Things Nuclear
- Nuclear Power
- Nuclear War
- Nuclear Power Emergencies
- Nuclear War Threats
- Yellowstone Caldera (There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (per above). If a category heading does not appear, it means there was no news reported from this category today. There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available at the end of this Post.
(A reminder, just in case: When linked, the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will never happen.)
TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (02/02/2024):
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Nuclear War? Climate Collapse? No Worries. WEF Says Disinformation is Humanity’s Most …
Counterpunch
So of course, they regard speech, that is, free speech, as the main threat to their luxurious creature comforts. After all, someone might say …
North Korea is ramping up missile tests as Kim Jung Un weighs war with South Korea
WUNC
… nuclear expert who visited North Korea seven times. … Mary Louise Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR’s award-winning afternoon …
North Korea is ramping up missile tests as Kim Jung Un weighs war with South Korea
Northern Public Radio
Mary Louise Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR’s award-winning afternoon newsmagazine. See stories by Mary Louise Kelly · Fatma Tanis.
Nuclear Power
NEWS
Iran begins construction of four new nuclear plants | The Times of Israel
The Times of Israel
TEHRAN, Iran — Iran began construction on four more nuclear power plants in the country’s south, with expected total capacity of 5,000 megawatts, …
Iran Begins Building 4 More Nuclear Power Plants – VOA News
VOA News
Iran begins construction on four more nuclear power plants in the country’s south, with expected total capacity of 5000 megawatts, official IRNA …
Vibrations in cooling system mean new Georgia nuclear reactor will again be delayed
WesternSlopeNow.com
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia Power Co. said Thursday that vibrations found in a cooling system of its second new nuclear reactor will delay when the …
Nuclear War
NEWS
Putin Ally Suggests Moving to Nuclear War – Newsweek
Newsweek
The idea that a nuclear war could break out amid the conflict in Ukraine has been floated by numerous Russian officials.
Artificial intelligence and why human control of nuclear weapons is necessary
Washington Times
… nuclear war. During the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet militaries believed they had the ability to detect missile launches less than 20 minutes …
Russia has no plans to deploy nuclear arms beyond Belarus, says deputy minister | Reuters
Reuters
… nuclear free” European countries in NATO nuclear missions. He did not … war‘ list. 16 hours ago. Opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) …
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
Caltrans declares emergency for landslide that suspended San Diego-to-Orange County trains
Del Mar Times
… nuclear power and more. He was the night city editor for the North County Times for about five years until it was purchased by The San Diego Union …
Emergency Management Specialist (Preparedness) – FEMA – Chicago, IL – Dice
Dice
Serving as the primary point of contact (Site Specialist) for the assigned nuclear power plant. Supporting development, coordination, and …
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
Beyond Midnight: Navigating the Unsettling Landscape of Global Threats – Kroc Institute
Kroc Institute – University of Notre Dame
This representation encompasses a spectrum of dangers, from nuclear explosions to climate change, biological threats, and disruptive technologies like …
Map reveals best places to live in the US if nuclear war breaks out – MSN
MSN
Russia escalated nuclear threats in the midst of its war on Ukraine. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has also been growing. Last week, were elevated …
Nuclear War? Climate Collapse? No Worries. WEF Says Disinformation is Humanity’s Most …
Counterpunch
Or did they mouth vague platitudes about extreme weather? Yes, bromides were their plat du jour. The most immediate threat to humanity, according to …
