2001-11-1 04:17:00
I hope everyone had a good Halloween. I enjoy giving candy to little kids all dressed up in their costumes. The parents seem to enjoy it as much as their children.
I feel sorry for children whose parents will not let them participate because of black and white religious convictions.
Instead of looking at the end result of our traditions, many interpret evil by association with an obscure and distant past. If we define evil in these terms then we are all evil because all of our ancestors are guilty of wrong-doing by someone's standards, but this does not make some evil rub off on us.
There is enough evil, harmfulness and separatism without conjuring up more from harmless traditions.
Tonight is a good time to meditate and say the Great Invocation, since it is a full moon. I hear this is the first full moon on Halloween in decades.
I was considering the paranoia that many have toward nuclear waste and it finally occurred to me how to present the situation in a way that the average reader can identify.
We have an objective which is simply to take the nuclear waste and dispose of it in a manner so we have relative assurance it will not be a major hazard in our lives or that of future generations.
Why do I say "relative assurance"?
Because absolute assurance (which the activists demand) is an impossibility in any aspect of life.
Let us compare a goal of going to the grocery store with a similar paranoia of activist mentality to make a point using similar probabilities that they seek to impose upon humanity.
The Goal: Go to the store, buy a pound of hamburger and return safely.
The first step is to open the door and walk out to your car.
But wait! This is a 'fatally flawed" plan from the beginning. There are many dangers even in this first step.
There is about one in a trillion chance that a meteorite will fall from the sky and rip a hole through your body. Before you even go outside we must spend several million on a study of meteorite probability and if we are in a high meteorite zone then perhaps you should not leave the house at all.
Then there is the dog problem. Every day throughout the world many people are bitten by dogs as they are leaving their homes.
We need to spend additional millions studying the probability of being bitten by a dog in the area and possible remedies if this dreaded event would happen.
There is also a chance that an angry neighbor may accost you and do you harm before you even get to your car. We must therefore do psychological profiling on all the neighbors to determine risk and if the risk factor is more than .001% over a hundred year period then the trip should be cancelled.
If you are foolhardy enough to venture out to the car you will then have bigger problems. There is a chance that when you attempt to start your car that the electrical system could short circuit and your engine could catch fire. This happens every day to dozens of people.
What's even scarier is that when you do start your car there will occur thousands of explosions going off in the core of your engine reaching temperatures of thousands of degrees. If by some freak of nature, the core of your engine is exposed, your fuel could explode and you could wind up burning down your whole neighborhood or even city.
And how secure is your fuel tank? Some silly kid could prey off the lid with a screwdriver and throw a match in the gasoline.
Obviously, you need to do many studies before you even start your car.
Once you start up your car and have nerve enough to ride just a few feet from the terrible exploding forces at the engine's core you then have even greater problems.
Now there is a danger you may crash into another vehicle driven by exploding fire even more fierce than your own. You could be killed or maimed just as thousand of others are each year.
The frightening thing is that most accidents occur within two miles from your home - so please avoid driving near the house or neighborhood.
Now that you arrive at the store do you realize that the hamburger there may be contaminated - maybe even have e-coli? Before you buy any meat you must find where it came from and have a statistical analysis run on the purity of meat sold there over the last ten years.
If you are careless enough to buy a pound of hamburger you must now retrace your steps and return home through many perils...
These remote fears sound silly, don't they? Yet many of the fears around nuclear energy are even more remote. Keep in mind that not one person has been killed by the radiation from a reactor for the generation of electricity in the western hemisphere ever, yet people have been struck by meteorites, had their cars explode and have died of e-coli.
The fact is that if we allow ourselves to be alarmed and controlled by fear of remote dangers then life will come to a standstill and deteriorate.
This is what has happened to us concerning this choice source of power in the United States. Because of baseless fears raised by activists and a scared public we have not built a nuclear reactor in over 20 years. We have become paralyzed in this area because of possibilities as remote as getting struck by lightening on a sunny day.
We have had the term "fear based" thrown about on this list when no fear was involved, but if anything deserves this title it is those who are anti-nuclear energy because of some fear of harm.
A thousand years from now this fear of nuclear energy will be viewed with more disdain than will the people of the dark ages who feared sailing off the edge of the world because it was flat.
-- End Of Part Three --
Go To:
Part Four
Ten Deceptions of Nuclear & Alternative Energy (Article Index)
Global Warming Enlightenment (Article Index)
Copyright 2001 by J.J. Dewey, All Rights Reserved