Thoughts about Fukushima on Steroids

Ref http://blog.imva.info/world-affairs/fukushima-steroids "Fukushima on Steroids" article by Mark Sircus.

Having pondered this subject for ages, maybe I ought to chatter here a bit about those ponderings.

Out of the chaos a few things seem to me to sift out.

One of them is the puzzlement of why don't people cease their squabbles and mutual rip-offs, to get together to resolve emerging problems that will greatly affect them all if not resolved adequately in advance?

One of the obstacles is of course the ever declaration that each bunch is the true winner and are in the right, ego stuff that has brought them fame and fortune. Understandably a tempting lure.

But I think in the more recent decades, the almost fanatic need to stick to the precept that all business must be solely guided by that which brings the most profit, regardless of the effect on the customer base, so long as they can get away with it - and, if they first establish control of the territory, it is easy to get away with most anything, in business. This seems to be the more dominant of the two forces, that is preventing us from coping adequately with these kind of major problems.

In the example of Fukushima and its horde of associated things, would it not be far better for the world to offer Japan 100% help dealing with the problem? Instead, we just eek and grouch and worry, resting on the pseudo-righteousness that somebody can get sued for the disasters.

Surely the problems there would have solutions that could help worldwide nuclear problems, too. Another reason to team up to help.

But the teaming up to help needs be done re efficacy, not egos and pomposity, as so much is done now, including in other kinds of life-effecting subjects like health.

Some of my suggestions, now:

Japan had been building a nuclear recycling plant, but has shut it down, if I remember correctly. Why this was shut down, I don't know. But the thought of handling and dealing with spent nuclear power plant fuel rods seems a "hot potato" in more ways than one.

Nonetheless, how about getting a fresh perspective on the subject of a nuclear reprocessing facility that is fully adequate and functional? And, not done only if it will bring big profit to the business of doing it, but rather for responsibility to our world.

(I resist the urge to rant on here about how I proposed a way to resolve this over a dozen years ago, but the world just romped on as before, and seemingly deliberately made it near impossible for my proposed hoop access transportation structure up to thusly-enabled total recycling plants, to become implemented. One must start from where one is really at right now, instead of where one might have been at. Doing something halfways is better than not doing it all, usually, I think, especially when desperate. And it ought to be increasingly apparent to people that there is big trouble in River City.)

I don't know what kind of technology Japan was actually exploring re reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods, as to how feasible it could have been. So, this could just be barking up the wrong tree, re a worldwide cooperative effort, freely done, to make Japan's nuclear reprocessing plant fully operational and actively working on reprocessing Fukushima's spent fuel rods. And, can the reactor #4's especially worrisome fuel rods 30 meters up there in the blown-out building, actually be gotten to and toted over to the subject nuclear reprocessing plant, I wonder.

But the article "Fukushima on Steroids" points out the huge demand to deal with the world's growing pile of spent fuel rods. If Japan can achieve a viable reprocessing plant technology in the hypothetical worldwide cooperative effort, then most likely copies of it could be built in North America, Europe, Russia and Asia.

Look at our own (America's) efforts to clean up the nuclear waste stored at Hanford, since the building of the first a-bombs in the mid-1940's. Last responsible thing I read, was that we were pouring enormous funds into building facilities that no one knows will even work; but, pouring lots of money into it makes everyone feel we are dealing with the problem.

Science is wonderful, great of carefully assembling knowledge about the real world and how to affect it. But it tends to slip into the trap of becoming exclusively "left-brained" analytical cognitive mode, missing the lateral trails to explore, especially when research is funded by business which of necessity can afford only to explore paths that could lead to improving their profit more than their present course.

Thus it seems to me to be of essence, now that we all have fallen into the ditch together, to open both eyes and get a stereo view of the situation, get both sides of the brain into gear, and start making more progress with far fewer bad endings.

Analytical "left-brain-hemisphere" can't get there without begging help from the other halves of our brains - which often is busy doing something else, unfortunately, as it is a holistic linkage among minds far and wide and has been usurped for the exclusive betterment of a few folks, unseen by its unwitting hosts who were totally engrossed in left-brained analytical studies and tasks. Yet, each of us owns both a left and right hemisphere to our brains, and it seems prudent to find ways to get our full act together. It can be done.

Coping with Fukushima and the world's nuclear fuel rod disposition problem, needs to have our full attention (both sides of our brains in gear) to get the job done.

We might come up with such ideas as grinding up fuel rods and diluting their contents to natural ore radioactivity average intensity as mixed into concrete, and the resulting concrete be put back into the very same holes in the ground that were the mines where the uranium etc was dug out; and it all be sealed up, and so labeled. Maybe using the mine's tailings for some of the agregate in this concrete, too. Sure, it will remain somewhat nuclear-hot for eons, but the original ore that had been in the same spot, was that same level of intensity way there too.

Once we have both sides of our brains creatively coming up with lots of ideas for dealing with the nuclear waste problem, we also need to strongly establish a system for evaluating the resulting unusual ideas, by applying principles of honoring all peoples and our wonderful Mother Earth environment, among other things. That way we could trash ideas such as "dumping the ground up fuel rod stuff all over the land of our obnoxious neighbor's country" that could get proposed especially in the middle-eastern parts of the world, who sometimes seem bent on eradicating each other. Not that they are the only ones, of course. We need to get mature and honor all others - juvenile aggressive as some might be at the moment - during our search for viable solutions to this world crisis.

And hopefully our newly united two-sided cognition brains - our left-linear sequential serial processors shaking hands with our right-parallel pattern processors - will then wake up to our other big problems, like civilization's need for huge amounts of energy now and into the future. Right now those decisions seem mostly made by following the paths of easiest and greatest wealth such as oil and coal baron's business decisions. They have provided us with our wonderful energy-using ways of life; they deserve our thanks for that. Yet, getting stuck in that rut is increasingly obviously unsustainable and is crudding up our worldly nest, and our physical bodies, in multiple ways.

Can we do this? I believe we can, theoretically. Will we do this? Experience multiply says no we won't do this.

But I can burble in this apparently unseen blog about it all.