Lurking Danger

The article below appeared in the Indian Express dt. 14.03.2011

‘N – energy is not green; it’s blood red’                                        by  K.Raja Rajan

 

The massive Earthquake in Japan and the risk of nuclear power plant melt down – once again brings to focus the debate on desirability of nuclear power generation.

 

Nuclear energy is not green as is being portrayed. It is blood red.

 

The nuclear power plant is a veritable time bomb, that too a nuclear one, only a few million times more powerful than ‘little boy’ – bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

Even when an N power plant does not explode, the ‘supposed to be permissible level of radiation’ itself is dangerously high. The number of people killed and maimed by the radiation from the nuclear power plants and near the test sites in the US alone, for instance, is reported to be more than the number killed and maimed by the two bombs ever used.

 

The environmental impact of nuclear power plants is much worse than that of the coal/oil fired thermal power plants or even chemicals and pesticides plant like Bhopal Carbide plant.  

 

Earthquakes or terrorist triggered nuclear plant blast are waiting to happen anytime with the potential to wipe out major part of humanity, animal kingdom and even vegetation.

 

The only solution is to stop building new N plants and decommission existing ones at once. Humanity has to ‘learn to live with nature and not on nature’ to barrow Gandhiji’s words.

 

We have to learn to live with less material, power and comforts there from.

 

Not just N power, modern scientific and technological developments are all turning against mankind fanned by commercial greed.

 

Cell phones for instance are just pocket microwave ovens baking the tissues and causing cancer even when you don’t use one, like passive smoking, threatening to wipe out a major part of humanity and biodiversity.

 

The impact of plastics is well chronicled and needs no repetition here.

 

‘Computer and Internet technology has driven the world to the brink. The indiscriminate dissemination of knowledge due to computer and internet has led to the danger of the possibility of a fugitive sitting in some remote cave in Afghan or elsewhere triggering the release of umpteen ballistic missiles, with nuclear war heads stored underground below meters thick concrete, to break out and drop back on earth causing a near total annihilation of bio matter’. [This prophecy was made by me a few years before Twin tower air raid by Osama Bin Laden]   

 

There is ‘Dead end ahead – Take a U turn to proceed’.

(The author is a technologist by qualification, a farmer by option and a Gandhian by conviction)