Up and at 'em... Atom Ani!

[bcholmes]

I'm a bad environmentalist. I'm not rabidly anti-nuclear power. (What am I missing?)

So while I really like Ani's tune, "The Atom", I don't know that I agree with its premise. That's weird for me.

Comments

[suitablyemoname.livejournal.com]

The thing about nuclear power is twofold.

1) Pickering is a hotbed of all sorts of wild and wonderful forms of cancer.
2) We really don't know what to do with the waste. Even if we have the extraction and processing of nuclear materials down to a safe science, our current strategy for dealing with the useless waste consists of "Bury it really really deep and hope it doesn't infect anything and nobody digs it up and it doesn't fall into the wrong hands and maybe in a few bajillion years it will become inert but we don't know for sure."

[d269330400.livejournal.com]

Yup, I told you.

I'm easily led by people I admire and trust. I tried. I really did. Listened over and over again, but I'm just plain unconvinced. This is new for me, and I'm proud that I came to this contradictory conclusion myself without peer influence and the internets.

I do really like the following lines though.

and i bet there were no windows
and no women in the room
when they applied themselves
to the pure science of
boom

And the energy behind this part:

we've got ourselves a serious situation
down here

The easiest hole in her argument, for me, is the bit about electricity being blasphemous. Luddite.

yes, messing with the atom
is the highest form of blasphemy
whether you are making weapons
or simple electricity

The following, also on this album, irks me. After countless driving songs, I find this bit about not idling in drive-thrus sanctimonious.

i am many things,
made of everything,
but i will not be your bank roll
i won't idle in your drive-thru,
i won't watch your electric sideshow
i got way
better places to go

Ahh... but yet I love the following from the same song.

i will maintain the truth
i knew naturally as a child
i won't forfeit my creativity,
to a world that's all laid out for me
i will look at everything around me
and i will vow to bear in mind
that all of this was just someone's idea
it could just as well be mine

Oh, Ani.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

*nod* You were right.

[cigfran-lwyd.livejournal.com]

the electricity/blasphemy line, if not merely convenient rhyming, might be a reference to prometheus.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I'm not 100% against nuclear power either. I think the U.S. Navy's experiences under Admiral Rickover are pretty good proof that the thing can be done safely and intelligently.

However, I trust neither most governments nor most public utilities to put in the kind of care, protection, and ongoing maintenance needed. When I was a teenager, they were building a nuclear plant in my part of the world and there was a scandal about the pouring of the concrete. I said then and still say that concrete pouring is a solved problem: I don't want anyone who can't be trusted to do it, or can't be trusted to put a nuclear power plant on a fault line (see Diablo Canyon, not too far from where I live now) to have any ability at all to build the damned things ... and that's who builds them, most of the time.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Huh. I guess I have an opposite reaction: I fundamentally don't trust private corporations to build or operate nuclear power plants. I'm given to understand that Canadian CANDU reactors are well-regarded for their safety features and safety records.

The difference in perspective, here, is pretty interesting.

[kat-chan.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the "public utilities" mentioned above are largely private corporations serving a public trust. FirstEnergy, the folks responsible for the 2003 Blackout, are considered a "public utility", but are a private corporation. And prior to the whole mess with the Blackout they'd been in trouble with the NRC over boric acid corrosion at one of their reactors at their nuclear plant near Toledo. They'd also been involved with some messy crap involving the Fermi plant between Toledo and Detroit.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

One problem that I have with the maintenance and reliability aspect of the debate is that I feel that some of the people pointing to current questions about maintenance and reliability of nuclear plants are playing both sides of the fence against the opposition in that they both damn the nuclear operating utilities for questionable maintenance records while also having largely caused those questionable maintanance records by making funding nuclear energy politically unpopular.