It’s
been 2.5 years since I started this blog and it just had its 50,000th.
individual page-view. That’s rather small-time compared to high profile blogs
and Ciley Myrus videos, but it’s four orders of magnitude more than the number of
people who read my book on bilingual education in Canada (available on Amazon,
in case anyone wants to be the first person to actually pay for it!). Aside
from the satisfaction of having had readers from all over the world, I made
many new friends and had a brief moment of fame when I was interviewed on Nuclear Hotseat in August, 2013
(episode 120, aired on October 1st).
Recently,
I’ve run out of steam for writing new blog posts, perhaps because I’ve covered just
about every aspect of the nuclear era. It has become difficult to think of any
original angle on recent topics that are all being well covered elsewhere.
This
week I decided to do a retrospective of my 176 blog posts. I put labels on each
post, and these are now visible on the right side of the main page. On this
post, I have created a partial table of contents in 8 sections (A-H), listing
30 of the articles that I found the most interesting to write.
Others
can judge the quality of the writing and the originality of reports, but at
this point I will humbly say that I may have created a fairly good educational
resource about the nuclear era. If the writing itself is not the important
thing, you might agree with a good friend who told me, “I like it for the links.”
So there
you have it: a skillfully arranged collection of hyperlinks.
A. WWII and the Manhattan Project
1.
The Air Conditioned Nightmare Part I, The Air Conditioned Nightmare Part
II. In the early
1940s, Henry Miller wrote The Air
Conditioned Nightmare. He probably didn’t know anything about the Manhattan
Project underway at the time, but this travelogue is strangely prescient about
the dreadful age that was coming into view. And the title was apt in ways that
he couldn’t have imagined. Air conditioning technology was essential for
uranium enrichment. No chill, no bomb.
2.
American heroes of the atomic age. What’s the connection between
General Leslie Groves, mastermind of the Manhattan Project, and Lance
Armstrong? Both were bold gamblers who knew you had to lie, deceive manipulate
others to a goal in war or sport. Groves gave the world plutonium, which is
known to hide out in human gonads and cause the kind of cancer through which
Armstrong “livestronged.”
3.
4.
The
atomic cities that grew up near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are still rated by some sources as
“one of the best places to raise children” in the USA. It is also a favorite
place for the Christian Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses to hold their
annual convention. Yet this is also arguably the most polluted place on earth.
What accounts for these divergent views?
5.
We might
take this as a metaphor for Japan’s dogged determination to restart its nuclear
reactors. In 1944-45, the Japanese government threw the last of its resources
into a doomed effort to build the Matsuhiro Imperial General
Headquarters, a
massive underground bunker built to preserve the Emperor and the functions of
government during the coming Allied invasion.
B. Fast breeder reactors and Next
Generation Nuclear Technology
6.
The
cautionary tale of France’s experiment with fast breeder technology. Follow the
links to Superphenix Parts 1, 2 and 3.
7.
People
who promote advanced nuclear technology are actually anti-nuclear because, in
order to promote the new technology, they have to admit the old technology is
horribly unsafe. They are the anti-nuke pro-nukers.
C. Weapons
8.
The new laser technology for uranium
enrichment is a
double-edged sword. It is far more energy efficient than the old methods, but
the low energy footprint of it will make it hard to detect when it is used to
make fuel for nuclear weapons.
9.
10.
The
nations that possess nuclear weapons are bound by the non-proliferation treaty
to move the world toward nuclear disarmament. But instead they are spending billions on
modernizing their arsenals.
11.
The possible reasons for Japan’s
plutonium stockpile.
Does Japan harbor a secret ambition to stockpile plutonium in order to quickly
assemble a nuclear weapon when or if it can no longer rely on the US nuclear
umbrella?
12.
D. The Cold War
13.
14.
Review of Full Body Burden,
and background about the history of the Rocky Flats plutonium pit factory.
15.
A visit
the a museum on Tokyo’s Dream Island, and a review of The Day the Sun Rose in the West, the story of the Japanese fishermen who were caught
in the fallout of the Bravo test in 1954.
16.
Nora Ephron and Silkwood.
Why was Nora Ephron remembered for her romantic comedies and not for the one
film that came close to being a serious film about something more important?
17.
Review of The Plutonium Files,
the account of the shocking research done on American citizens who were
deliberately injected, without consent, with radioactive elements.
18.
19.
An
overview of the amazing work done by the independent
researcher Mark Purdy.
He found connections between common neurological diseases and nuclear and
non-nuclear military waste.
E. Fukushima
20.
Lies that lying liars tell. First they found children getting
thyroid cancer within two years of Chernobyl. After Fukushima, when children
started showing up with thyroid cancer within two years, they said the latency
period after Chernobyl was four years.
21.
The response to a nuclear emergency
is done right only in fiction.
Read about how a president responded to a nuclear emergency. How it happened on
the TV drama The West Wing was
totally different from how it goes down in reality.
22.
23.
Who knew
there was a billion-dollar nuclear
decontamination project underway just east of Toronto? One of Canada’s best kept secrets
in Port Hope, Ontario.
24.
About a
radio show in the CBC archives. Interviews with Three Mile Island
activist Jane Lee, among others.
25.
26.
Shakespeare speaks to the nuclear
age. A selection of
Shakespeare quotes repurposed to describe our dangerous age. Extraordinary
events require extraordinary language.
F. Chernobyl
27.
Review of the book Chernobyl: Crime without Punishment. This is essential reading for
anyone who might be tempted to think the Soviets did everything right after
Chernobyl in contrast to the Japanese doing everything wrong after Fukushima.
G. Nuclear energy and Public Health Studies
28.
The
medical and industrial uses of radiation haven’t kept up with the need to track
everyone’s lifetime dose.
29.
The nuclear industry as a case study
in institutional self-deception.
A long, comprehensive review of many of the topics I covered in my blog over
two years (also published in India by Dianuke.org).
H. Space
30.
The love
of space exploration cuts across ideological divides. We all love it, but it
comes at a cost. The future of space exploration
depends on the continuation of the nuclear industry. As Barry McGuire sang, "You may leave here for four days in space.
But when you return, it's the same old
place."
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