An excellent article written by a professor at Buffalo State College, detailing the destructive technologies sure to follow fracking. I say “sure to follow,” because on the current trajectory – with an apathetic, undereducated electorate and dysfunctional, thoroughly corrupt political system – the worst is inevitable.
Excerpt:
In a few short years the term “fracking” went from obscurity, mostly mistaken for an obscenity, to a household word, now often associated with flammable tap water. The technology is not new, but the market conditions that make such reckless forays deep into the earth’s crust profitable, are new. Welcome to the post peak oil energy economy. What’s online to follow fracking is even scarier.
…Let’s look at the Fukushima disaster, one year later. Most folks think this is over, last year’s news, cleaned up, the scientists took care of it, nuclear power ain’t that dangerous after all. But, while we amuse ourselves discussing the season opener of MadMen, the meltdown is continuing in all three General Electric-built Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors, apparently unabated, as we don’t seem to have the technology to contain it—only the technology to temporarily distract ourselves from it while we license the construction of new Fukushimas and relicense aging old plants such as Vermont’s 40 year old Yankee reactor. Public relations industry texts often outline the importance of making bad stories go away, citing the tactic of convincing journalists “that bad news is old news and has already been covered.” The hope is that journalists, according to the text I just cited, “lose interest.” That certainly has been the case here.
Conditions, however, have recently gotten so bad at the plant, that the environment inside is too hot for even robots to operate in. With the growing possibility of a comprehensive containment breach at the Fukushima plant threatening to breathe new life, or more accurately, death, into this “old: story,” CBS News reported last week that damage to the #2 reactor is so severe that “the plant operator will have to develop special equipment and technology to tolerate the harsh environment and decommission the plant, a process expected to last decades.”
Get it? We don’t have the knowhow to deal with this, a year after the catastrophe began, yet we are relicensing identical plants, and building new plants. And, according to CBS, the other two Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors “could be in even worse shape,” but no one has been able to find out as our current technology limits our ability to easily see into a melting nuclear core.