The Wrong Reality. PartVII Realisation - 48 Peaceable Action - continued
The case in favour of nuclear energy is an automatic argument based on the continuing existence of the Machine. This argument maintains that nuclear fission is the only viable source of energy to replace our fast-dwindling supplies of coal, oil and gas; that the alternative sources of wind, tide and gravity are insufficient, and the large amount of energy coming to us from the sun presents too many problems of collection and storage, not to mention the political difficulties of distribution from the equator towards the poles, of crossing national borders, and the problems of money-payment.
The argument goes on to point out that nuclear fission is the one available, proven workable technique for producing ample energy which, if handled properly, could meet our needs for many tens of thousands of years. If we do not develop nuclear power sufficiently, so that when fossil fuels run out we have nothing adequate to take their place, the international struggle for energy will be catastrophic. These arguments are limited but true as far as they go, and weigh heavily with automated realists, even though plans to build further nuclear power stations in USA, UK and elsewhere have recently been abandoned in face of public hostility.
It is predictable that the authoritative establishment should be in favour of nuclear fission because, apart from its military significance, the mathematical origin and the scientifically and technologically advanced complexity of nuclear development make it a logical forward step in autoprogression. To harness the sun, wind, or tide appears, by contrast, as a backward step in its renewed sympathy with the natural scale of things.
There is another argument in favour of nuclear energy which relates to values of the money economy, assuming that nuclear electricity will become cheaper than at present. The present high cost of energy makes it unecomic, in money terms, to smelt metals excepting from high-grade ores, and deposits of high-grade ores are running out. Eventually, and especially if we run short of energy, a shortage of metals will bring another crisis. Ample supplies of energy will avert this crisis by enabling us to extract metals from our huge resources of low-grade ores. Even if nuclear electricity does not prove cheap in money terms, it is argued that it will be better to have high-cost metals in plenty than no metals at any cost.
The proponents of nuclear energy maintain that it is relatively safe - that if kept under control, as it can be in theory, nuclear fission presents no unacceptable risk to life. For example :
The proponents of nuclear energy feel that their case is well supported by scientific and economic factual logic, and that the anti-nuclear protest derives from unstable emotion and rests on ignorance.
The basis of protest is no doubt that the horror and dismay which practically everybody has felt, and to a lesser extent still feels at the prospect of nuclear war has carried over into deeply concerned opposition to nuclear energy. It is reasonable to suspect that automated governments who are prepared to risk nuclear war would not balk at the radiation risks of peacetime nuclear reactors. The difficulty is to know how far nuclear protest reasonably fits factual truth and probability. There is no question of the insanity of nuclear armament, the arguments in favour of which comes from our present mad reality, not from our humanity. It is necessary to know the truth about nuclear power because it is imaginable that even a humantrue world could be faced with an energy crisis and be put under great strain. Very few individuals are fully conversant with all the known facts about the complex nuclear fission process, and pretty well all these specialist experts are members of the establishment. So protestors disbelieve them, if for no other reason than a justifiable distrust of authority, for it is normally the same authority which promotes nuclear power that maintains nuclear weapons. Those whom protestors prefer to believe are scientists from their own opposition ranks, but these may not have access to all information. nor the means to verify all the statistics which are made available to them. Even so, it is the protestors' argument that has eventually prevailed in the UK and USA.
It is to be expected, in a competitive reality which includes secrecy, espionage and diplomatic deceit that authorities, in their anxiety to press on with nuclear energy and especially when facing a fuel crisis, should wish to obscure information detrimental to their plans. They adopt the position that there are no serious grounds for opposition, so the onus is on protestors to prove otherwise. The serious fundamental concern of protestors is that nuclear fission presents dangers to ourselves and all present and future life on Earth, some of which dangers are known and some unknown. Protestors may adopt the position that this process is already proven too dangerous and should be abandoned, or that too much about its possible danger is yet undiscovered, and its utilisation should be postponed until proved acceptably safe, or otherwise.
A major problem which we were not thought to be facing honestly in 1988 is that the normal life of a reactor is likely to be about 30 years. At the end of its life each one has to be decommissioned. The money-cost of making each safe is likely to be 40% of the cost of a new plant. Spent fuel is more radioactive than the original uranium, and remains radioactive for about 3 million years. It has been estimated that a country like the UK would eventually need 100 nuclear power stations. This would mean that in 1000 years there would be 3300 fenced-off radioactive sites in Britain, the defunct reactors entombed in concrete which their 3m year radioactive life will long outlast, or dismantled and buried deep underground. If the whole world were to 'go nuclear' on the same scale, in time there would be a total of 10,000 power stations in operation. It is not likely that all these nuclear plants will always be maintained to the same, in any case sometimes unsatisfactory safety standards as are presently applied to the comparatively very few existing plants, under close public scrutiny. The risk of accident can be assessed when it is considered that, nevertheless, we have already experienced three major nuclear power plant disasters, or near-disasters, at Sellafield, 3-Mile Island, and Chernobyl. By the year 3000 there would be 330,000 highly radioactive defunct reactors throughout the world, their number increasing by 330 every year.
Protestors feel that nuclear fission is a deadly, insidious threat to life, especially to the unborn child, that this threat will grow and spread, and that it will increasingly affect the quality and freedom of life. The Irish Sea is already reputed to be the most radioactive sea in the world, due to Sellafield, and many people will not swim in it, go on the beaches, or eat the fish. Even if the general level of radiation is still not serious, can not radioactive materials concentrate in pockets? It is not thought that radioactive waste can or will be monitored safely, especially as it increases over time. It is thought that insufficient consideration has been given to the question of safety, or eventual cost - that if a large nuclear programme is carried out worldwide it is unlikely ever to stop, and will represent an intolerable legacy for the future.
It is felt that with authoritative interests having been anchored in fossil fuel electricity, then heavily invested in nuclear energy, too little serious effort has been put into finding alternative sources relevant to the whole world, although effort is increasing. If the same degree of dedication were devoted to harnessing the sun's power, for example, as was put into developing the atom bomb, or space exploration, nuclear fission might well already be proven quite unnecessary. As an example of neglect, I understand that the British have continued to ignore the apparent fact that there is potential pump storage capacity in Scotland enough to take care of peak-time demands for electricity for the whole of the UK for some time to come, without need to build any new power stations of any kind. Pump storage is the use of unwanted night-time electric capacity to elevate water which then flows downhill during the day, running turbines which return a proportion of that electricity at the time it is wanted.
It is true that protestors can labour under misapprehensions - for instance, in thinking that radiation must go on increasing as nuclear waste accumulates. The half-life of radioactive material refers to the rate at which the nuclei of its atoms decay, therefore indicating not only how long it remains radioactive but also proportionately how intense that radiation is. Strontium 90, with a half-life of 20 years, is much more intensely radioactive than Technetium 99 with a half-life of 200,000 years. If one kilo of Sr90 is added to the waste stockpile per year, the maximum radiation from it would be reached in a calculated 30 years, and thereafter this same level would be maintained, for decline and addition of radioactivity would then balance. In the case of Tc99 it would take a calculated 300,000 years to reach that optimum level. So a 300,000 year stockpile of Tc99 would produce the same amount of radioactivity as 30 kilos of Sr90. The former would actually be less harmful because the latter's radiation is more energetic. If stockpiling were abruptly to cease, radiation would begin decreasing, but if it took 100 years for the radiation from Sr90 to virtually cease, Tc99 might take 1,000,000 years to become relatively harmless. Of course, because their half-life is a period during which radioactive decay decreases by half, these materials will never become completely non-radioactive. (The information in this paragraph was extracted from Energy or Extinction by Fred Hoyle.)
In this automatic reality, people normally adopt one side or the other in an argumant, or conflict of interests, and then employ bias or prejudice to defend their own side and attack the other, and such polarised thinking has been one of the worst features of the nuclear debate. This applies to both sides in the argument, yet although the protest movement was originally largely emotional and often ill-informed, and has had the great weight of officialdom loaded against it, it has been very effective. In the USA, no nuclear power station has been built for eleven years to 1988; some cities have pronounced themselves nuclear-free, and even some countries have done so - New Zealand, Denmark and Wales. To me this implies that truths which lie behind the arguments, and which are obscured one way or another, nevertheless make themselves felt on the anti-nuclear side. For example, it is known that plutonium is carcinogenic, that it remains radioactive for a very long time, that it can pass through the human placenta into unborn embryos, and in this and other ways can be accumulated in the body. In Japan, deformed babies are still being born as a result of two nuclear bombs dropped over 50 years ago. Yet when plutonium was reported to have been found in dust on window cills in S.W. Scotland there was little concerned reaction. In a mind which seeks truth, these two isolated items of information give reason for suspecting the safety of nuclear energy, which official generalised assurances have not dispelled.
The crux of the nuclear argument is this. Even if the process of nuclear fission were proved to be potentially safe, the Machine is not safe for humanity. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that the Machine has developed nuclear power for war, the most dangerous application possible. The Machine cannot be trusted to develop and maintain nuclear energy processes safely, even if they are potentially safe. Humans harnessed to these processes cannot be trusted either, because they are bound by loyalties of employment and convinced by the money-economy's reasoning. This is borne out, for example, by the principle that necessary human travel could be almost entirely accident-free, but the present Machine consumer society imposes on us the maximum manufacture and sale of cars, and their optimum deployment on a vast network of roads, mostly at speed. Consequently, in the UK some 5000 deaths and many more crippling injuries occur every year. The Machine's irresponsibility in nuclear matters is demonstrated by a much-publicised attempt by Green Peace to close a pipe discharging slightly radioactive but voluminous effluent into the Irish Sea. This action resulted in a major improvement of waste-disposal methods at Sellafield - improvements which the authority there had not previously thought to be justified, or had not thought of at all, and which would not have been carried out otherwise.
I repeat, it will never be safe or satisfactory for humanity to cease from distrusting and opposing the Machine. Other, potentially dangerous developments continually come to light, for example genetic engineering in all its forms, in which the financial interests of the Machine and the motives of political authority are highly questionable. Our only safe course is to replace the Machine. Yet national decisions about nuclear energy have to be made now, in case of energy crises. But the Machine still exists and normally makes our big and small decisions for us. Therefore matters of human safety and well-being must be the subject of humantrue decision, reached freely and independently of the Machine. The making and carrying through of these vital decisions could be a vital function of humantrue reformist movements.
If the correct decision is to be reached it must be well-informed, and to conduct impartial research should also be a function of reformist movements. This should aim to determine both the safety of nuclear energy (for example many people, including myself are uncertain about the relationship between nuclear radiation, cell damage, and cancer), and the feasability of alternative sources, particularly the sun. If this research is to be humantruly realistic it must refer to the needs of a humantrue society - not only for heat and light, but also for smelting metals and other vital manufacturing processes. So if the eventual decision on these matters is to be right it cannot be entrusted to automated humans but must be made by supraconscious minds.
Research is presently entrusted to automatic institutions. It measures its findings in terms of money costs and according to the projected requirements of continuing autoprogression, ie in the interests of the Machine rather than humanity. Those who conduct this research are normally employed by the Machine. They appear to take the view that since we already rely on means of energy generation that are dangerous to life we should accept a degree of risk, presently claimed to be low, from nuclear energy. The Machine's view is bound to be much influenced by its demand for weapon-making plutonium, and is not yet affected by the fact that the cost of electricity must rise in the future to cover the de-commissioning of power stations and the storage of waste.
The supraconscious view of nuclear energy can not be separated from its dedication to a humantrue worldwide society. It must include the desire to remove all unnecessary dangers in order to reduce the tragedy of accidental death and deformity to the minimum. So its research shall be concerned not only with the question of nuclear safety but with all present unsafe industrial and other practices of all kinds: coal mining, coal and oil-burning power stations, toxic chemical manufacture, uranium mining. It shall also take account of the effect of having too much energy, on the effect on the countryside of mining huge quantities of low-grade ore, and of the growing number of sites for disposing of dangerous wastes of all kinds.
Remember that we, our nature and living state, are dominated by an automatic reality whose facts and concepts are not acceptable to true intellect. If this reality is to continue without fundamental change, then all protest is ultimately futile, for the Machine will achieve its targets, one way or another. Genuine reformist movements shall have humantrue society as their aim, to be achieved by finding true answers and solutions to all human questions and problems. Nuclear energy is just one area for research and intellation, and it is subject to the same humantrue principles as any other. Its use must be restricted to a level, if attainable, which is acceptable to world humanity, now and for the future. That must be binding, and we must adjust our mode of living accordingly. If the responsibly considered, wholly agreed decision of all humanity is to abandon nuclear energy altogether, then our society must be geared to that alternative level of energy consumption which could be produced safely. If this proves to be a significantly lower level than that necessary to the true fulfilment of all humanity, then we shall have to bend our minds and bodies to further developing known safe sources and to discovering new alternatives.
In the short space of time since originally writing the foregoing, money-investment in nuclear power has declined, not for moral reasons but, ironically, because it has proved to be prohibitively expensive in financial terms. This does not mean that the anti-nuclear argument can safely be forgotten, for nuclear power may yet be regarded as a viable option in countries with no other resources, either now or in the future. Nor does it mean that the arguments on this issue are no longer significant, for the fact has to be faced that if nuclear power had proved cheap in financial terms, no argument on safety grounds is likely to have pevailed against its widespread development.
The independent philosophy outlined in this book developed in an ordinary mind whose distinguishing mark was an early recognition that (1) this human reality was all wrong, and (2) that we belong in a better one - also a determination not to rest until I had discovered the whole truth, on these two counts and everything relative. This has little to do with the straightjacket of accepted academic Philosophy. It is passed on in the belief that other minds naturally, and either actually or potentially share it; therefore that it represents a perfectly reasonable human hope of attaining to a nature and state of being such as we have never approached in a united way, but can imagine because we know or sense its qualities of cooperation, stability, peace, contentment and deep fulfilment, and inwardly yearn for them.
We may well outwardly deny this and insist that there is no viable alternative to the here and now. This existing reality entitles us to that opinion, and affirms it. From this viewpoint, there can be no place for the ideal among the many and varied evident interests and activities of automatic institutions and people, the conflicts between them, and the contrived interplay between their endlessly varied apparent characters, against a world automated background which is confusing because it freely allows all contradictory enterprises to weave themselves, if they can, into its permitted, competitive money-economic fabric.
That our minds are ultimately private to ourselves gives us the freedom to choose what to believe - whether we strike out along the upward humantrue road, or keep to the familiar teeming streets of automatic reality. The Machine has so engulfed us with its thinking as to persuade nearly all of us to continue pushing and elbowing our way down its autoprogressive routes.
Those of us whose reason has not embraced humantrue awareness, because we have willedit not to, so that it contends that we cannot, should not, or do not wish to do so, thus believing it to be the wrong road to take, are seemingly free so to choose by closing that awareness from consciousness, in the same way that we may close this or any such book and put it away, unheeded.
But we are not reallyfree to make this choice, only enabled and persuaded by the Machine to place the centre of our self in consciousness of instinctive will, tied firmly to the basic concepts if not all the practices of automatic reality, such that this false self,masquerading as our true being, chooses the wrong way for us.
The inecsapable fact is that with our awareness utterly given to our postconscious mind, and our being centred in supraconsciousness, where it belongs, the humantrue way is the onlyway open to us. Through our humantrue mutation reaching mature completion we shall attain to our true nature and state, the right reality, quite unable to sustain the present wrong reality.
Pt.VII REALISATION
PREPARING THE WAY FOR CHANGE
Previous Chapters
45 Personal Orientation
46 New Attitude
47 Affirmation
Current Chapter
48 Peacable Action
Next Chapter
Pt.VIII FURTHER ILLUMINATION, Chapter 49. The Flaw in our Accepted, Philosophical Mode of Thought
See also article to be added to Humantruth - SupraC which approaches from a new angle the questions of how the brain provides mind and memory, spirituality, cosmic consciousness, the paranormal etc. The Holographic Dimension
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