by Guy McPherson
Transition Voice
March 25, 2013
Image by Topato via Flickr
According to legend, Ernest Hemingway bet his 1920s-era colleagues he could write a complete story in just six words. Hemingway is said to have considered the resulting piece his best work: “For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”
Making no attempt to keep up with Hemingway, this article provides an overview of the dire climate-change situation in fewer than 300 words. Perhaps even Twitter users will find time for the entire essay.
Addition by subtraction
Until relatively recently, economic collapse was the only hope to prevent runaway greenhouse. Now that we’ve triggered ten self-reinforcing feedback loops, it’s too late to dodge the missile launched by industrial civilization.
Economic collapse is under way. I see no way to prevent its completion in time to safely decommission the world’s hundreds of nuclear power plants.
At least one decade is required to decommission a single nuclear facility. We need to
- Decommission the power plants very quickly.
- Develop and implement a plan for tons of radioactive waste.
- Reverse the irreversible climate-change feedback loops.
I’m not optimistic.
Resistance is fertile
Lest the reader conclude I’m promoting surrender, let me be clear: resistance is fertile, and it’s a moral imperative.
I do not desire near-term human extinction. But the evidence has overwhelmed me, while others are deep in denial or busily bargaining. Invoking the absence of authorities who agree with me, rather than the authoritative evidence I cite, many people conclude I’m surely mistaken. I’m hoping they’re correct.
I know few ways to explain we’re headed for near-term human extinction. There are more than seven billion responses to the increasingly dire information. I choose to dive into the abyss with eyes wide open, playing court jester along the way. Your mileage may vary.
All articles on Transition Voice are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Into Eternity: A Film for the Future
bogdan bobolea·May 11, 2014
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http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/
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Into Eternity: A Film for the Future
Into Eternity is a feature documentary film directed by Danish director Michael Madsen,[1] released in 2010.[2] It follows the construction of the Onkalo waste repository at the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant on the island of Olkiluoto, Finland. Director Michael Madsen questions Onkalo’s intended eternal existence, addressing an audience in the remote future.
Into Eternity raises the question of the authorities’ responsibility of ensuring compliance with relatively new safety criteria legislation and the principles at the core of nuclear waste management.[3]
When shown on the British More4 digital television channel on 26 April 2011, the name Nuclear Eternity was used.[4]
[…]
see
Greg Palast: The Lies and Fraud Behind Nuclear Plants
The High Cost of Freedom from Fossil Fuels by Walter Brasch
Dr. Helen Caldicott: Nuclear Energy and Global Warming (2008; must-see)
Nuclear Madness – Interview with Dr. Helen Caldicott (must see video)
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This about burying the bodies.
It is sheer madness to even try to contemplate the meaning and implication of storing waste for 100K years. We are humans, not time machines. We cannot even comprehend 100 years of human activity in its totality.
There is something utterly grim (and Wagnerian) about the geomantic subterranean logic of this profoundly disturbing Finnish mega-project.
A mind-boggling scenario indeed. A sarcophagus of gnomic doom.
Whatever the cost and the minimal risk, my own instinct is to get this stuff off-planet. If we need to conserve our present 250K tonnes of radioactive waste, maybe it should be stored on the dark side of the Moon. Small vitrified packets over time could do the job, once we have designed a reliable shuttle method.
I’m sure Goldman-Sachs could afford it.
The Russian solution, so far as I am aware, when their military faced the disposal problem of nuclear piles from submarines, was to dump them in the Baltic…pure genius.
As for speculation about potential resource wars, this is lunacy on steroids. Fighting for the means to be able to fight over means, is an inverse exponential recursive loop. That is bonkers bankers’ speak.
The first thing that needs to happen is to shut all nuclear reactors down. Don’t make any more of the radioactive waste material.
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And what to do with the atomic waste will be the one problem staying with us for many generations to come. I have often thought of loading space rockets and shooting them into the sun as a means of disposal.
Vera that was precisely the solution Bucky Fuller recommended…!
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