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Durga’s fury

By Melody Kemp - posted Monday, 1 October 2007


This also ups the ante in terms of the supplier calling the shots. I have written that Burma is also processing and selling yellow cake via intermediaries in Russia and possibly China. The issue may not be so much how we solve global warming, as how do we stop global nuclear irrationality?

But it appears that rather than greet with news with horror and knee-tightening concern, the applause from the bull pens in the stock markets has been deafening. India looks and feels like a stallion out of control, neither swerving or swaying from its tail streaming path.

Dump and run

India has no coherent plan for waste disposal. “You can see that at the moment we just dump it in the ponds at Jaduguda”, Sreedhar told me.

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“The Pollution Control Board is badly understaffed so there is now way to keep an eye on what happens to waste even if we wanted to. They have been inefficient for 60 years. It is not likely that now the crush is on there are going to suddenly reform. India has this reputation for ineffective bureaucracy that is well deserved”, he laughed.

“Personally I think that nuclear power is hopelessly inefficient. It costs too much to build reactors and more to run them. We need to be looking at alternatives and conservation now. But India is fixated on nuclear and is determined to go ahead.”

All of the above issues are of concern in all neighbouring nations wanting to go nuclear.

“We have ten or 12 local sources such as in Andhra Pradesh where uranium has been found, but the population density of that area is 900 per square kilometre so it is not advisable. We have to buy the stuff to avoid social conflict. We can reassure the people that their land won’t be taken and the cost of keeping social peace is buying in uranium.”

Lies, damned lies and nuclear salesmen

In recent times the US and India have agreed again to work collaboratively and openly on nuclear programs ending, some say, years of hypocrisy. But the truth of what is known, or agreed to, is one of the most fungible and secretive areas of foreign and defence policy - the usual repositories of born liars. The US recently reclassified newly unclassified documents which referred to the deployment and number of nuclear missiles during the Cold War. It is highly unlikely that a nation that is so cute with the truth of many years past, would come clean about exactly what it holds and where now. Which makes the Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty look as viable as a Lands Rights claim in Australia.
 
In early September this year, the US admitted to flying nuclear weapons across the country, under the wings of a B-52, despite supposedly infallible command and control systems. Anyone who had seen the chillingly serious Fail Safe with G. Clooney as a doomed pilot aiming to drop a nuke on Moscow, may now conclude that the script might not be at all fanciful.

Dr Abdul Kalam, the gentle philanthropist who drove India’s detonation in Pokhran on the edge of Rajasthan in 1998, was known to have whooped “I have heard the earth thundering below our feet and rising ahead of us in terror. It was a beautiful sight.” This was the second explosion in Pokhran. The first, shrouded in secrecy, was given the nod by Mrs Gandhi in defiance of her namesake and the will of the people. She was, like Tagore predicted, moved to ensuring India’s nuclear capability by China’s own weapons build up.

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Sreedhar said that the Indian-Pakistani stand off in the 1970s and 1990s could easily have turned to war. But it’s happening all over again according to Sreedhar who concludes that the government is ready to go if provoked. They are just fine tuning the computer simulations, to fine tune the event.

The Big Bang: bang bangs

Those living comfortable middle class lives in the western world, who console themselves that mining or uranium shares will solve global poverty or warming problems are worthy of drugs for delusions. The reality is the poor suffer for the imperial intentions of the rich. Years ago I suggested to asbestos activists frustrated by inaction that they monitor the airborne asbestos levels outside the expensive private schools. It worked. But how to bring the outcome of all this uranium profligacy to the rich? The best idea will be awarded a Geiger counter, and a trip to a distant sinking Pacific island.

Uranium sources are finite. Some experts argue that they may last at present rates of consumption for another 30 years. Asia is approaching nuclear power like bowls of noodles, to be gulped down. To have a nuke is like having ones own national airline: a symbol of modernity and muscle-flexing nationalism.

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About the Author

Melody Kemp is a freelance writer in Asia who worked in labour and development for many years and is a member of the Society for Environmental Journalism (US). She now lives in South-East Asia. You can contact Melody by email at musi@ecoasia.biz.

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